ROME – There’s never a dull moment on the Vatican beat in the Pope Francis era, and the past week has offered a classic illustration of that truth, featuring dramatic charges of schism against an archbishop, a startling revelation regarding church/state relations in Italy, and a controversial real estate deal that once again could land the Vatican in hot water.
Each story carries a special wrinkle, well worth unpacking.
Did Parolin clear the U.S. bishops on Viganò?
The week’s biggest headline was the breaking news that Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal envoy to the U.S. who’s gone on to become Pope Francis’s most vocal — and, frankly, most extreme — critic, has been formally charged with schism by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
A June 11 decree summoned Viganò to face the charges, or to designate an attorney acting on his behalf to do so, on June 20. He didn’t show up, and has just a few more days to respond before he’s found guilty and sentenced to some form of ecclesiastical sanction.
For his part, Viganò called the charge an “honor” and showed absolutely no sign of remorse.
One interesting footnote came in the reaction to all this of Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State and among Pope Francis’s closest allies.
“I always appreciated him as a great worker very faithful to the Holy See, in a certain sense also an example,” Parolin said of Viganò, referring to a…
