Abp. Viganò‘s End-of-Year Meditation

You are not signed in as a Premium user; you are viewing the free version of this program. Premium users have access to full-length programs with limited commercials and receive a 10% discount in the store! Sign up for only one day for the low cost of $1.99. Click the button below.

See All Plans

Dear friends of Duc in altum, as Christmas approaches, I asked Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò for a meditation on the months we have lived and what awaits us. The archbishop kindly sent it to me and I gladly propose it to you all.

Be Not Afraid.

Meditation while waiting for the birth of the Most Holy Redeemer

Sleep, O Celestial: the peoples

Who was born they do not know;

But the day will come that noble

Yours will be;

That in that humble rest,

That in the hidden dust,

They will know the King.

[Alessandro] Manzoni, "Christmas"

In less than two weeks, by the grace of God, this 2020 — marked by terrible events and great social upheavals — will end. Allow me to offer a brief reflection, with which to turn a supernatural gaze both to the recent past and to the imminent future.

The months that we leave behind represent one of the darkest moments in the history of humanity: For the first time, since the birth of the Savior, the holy keys were used to close the churches and limit the celebration of the Mass and the sacraments, almost anticipating the abolition of the daily Sacrifice prophesied by Daniel, which will take place during the reign of the Antichrist. 

For the first time, many of us were forced on Easter Sunday to attend services via the internet, depriving us of Communion. For the first time, we became aware, with pain and dismay, of the desertion of our bishops and our parish priests, barricaded in their palaces and in their rectory for fear of a malady that has claimed almost the same number of victims as the seasonal flu in recent years.

Spiritual Abandonment

We have seen — so to speak — the generals and officers abandon their army, and in some cases join the enemy side, imposing an unconditional surrender to the absurd reasons for the pseudo-pandemic. Never, over the centuries, has so much pusillanimity, so much cowardice, so much desire to indulge our persecutors found fertile ground in those who should be guides and leaders for us. 

And what most scandalized many of us was the observation that this betrayal involved the leaders of the hierarchy much more than priests and simple faithful. Precisely from the highest throne, from which we should have expected an authoritative and firm intervention in defense of the rights of God, the freedoms of the Church and the salvation of souls, we have received invitations to obey unjust laws, illegitimate rules and irrational orders. 

And in the words that the media promptly spread from Santa Marta, we recognized many — too many — nods to the initiatory language of the globalist elite: fraternity, universal income, new world order, build back better, Great Reset, nothing will ever be the same again, resilience. All words of newspeak, which testify to the same feeling of those who pronounce them and those who listen to them.

It was a real intimidation, a not too veiled threat, with which our pastors ratified the pandemic alarm, sowed terror among the simple, abandoned the dying and the needy to themselves. In the height of a cynical legalism, priests were prohibited from hearing confessions and administering the last sacraments to those abandoned in intensive care, providing our dead a religious burial and administering the Blessed Sacrament to so many souls.

Tyranny of the Non-Expert Class

And if on the religious side we have seen ourselves treated as strangers and barred access to our churches as the Saracens [Arab Muslims] in the past, while the implacable invasion of irregular immigrants continued to replenish the coffers of self-styled humanitarian associations; on the civil and political side we have discovered the vocation to tyranny of our rulers, which a rhetoric now disavowed by reality would have us considered as representatives of the sovereign people. From the heads of state to the prime ministers, from the governors of the regions to the mayors, the rigors of the law have been imposed on us as to rebellious subjects, to suspects to be guarded from the privacy of the home, to criminals to be chased in the solitude of the seashore. We have seen people forcibly dragged by soldiers in riot gear.

We have heard with bewilderment dozens and dozens of self-styled experts — most of them lacking any scientific authority and largely in serious conflict of interest due to their ties with pharmaceutical companies or with supranational organizations — pontificating in television programs and on the pages of newspapers about infections, vaccines, immunity, testing positive, the obligation to wear masks, risks for the elderly, contagiousness of the asymptomatic, the danger of being with family. They thundered with arcane words such as "social distancing" and "gatherings" in an endless series of grotesque contradictions, absurd alarms, apocalyptic threats, social precepts and health ceremonies that have replaced religious rites.

Forced to disguise us as anonymous and faceless beings, they imposed a muzzle on us, absolutely useless to avoid contagion and harmful to health, but essential to make us feel submissive and approved. They prevented us from being treated with known and valid therapies, promising us a vaccine that they now want to make mandatory even before knowing its effectiveness, after having tested it in an incomplete way; and in order not to jeopardize the enormous profits of the pharmaceutical companies they granted immunity for the damage that their vaccines could cause to the population. A free vaccine, we were told, but it will be paid for with taxpayers' money even if the producers do not guarantee that it will protect against contagion.

In this scenario that reflects the disastrous effects of a war, the economies of our countries are prostrate, while online commerce companies, home delivery companies, and the multinational pornography industry continue to amass wealth. The shops are closed but the shopping centers and supermarkets remain — monuments to consumerism in which anyone, even with COVID, continues to fill their cart with foreign products: German mozzarella, oranges from Morocco, Canadian flour, mobile phones and televisions made in China.

The world is preparing for the Great Reset, they tell us obsessively. Nothing will ever be the same again. We will have to get used to "living with the virus," subjected to a perpetual pandemic that feeds the pharmaceutical Moloch and legitimizes more and more hateful limitations of fundamental freedoms. Those who from childhood have catechized us in the cult of freedom, democracy and popular sovereignty today govern us by depriving us of freedom in the name of health, imposing dictatorship, arrogating to themselves a power that no one has ever given them, neither from above nor from below. And that temporal power that Freemasonry and the liberals have fiercely contested against the Roman pontiffs is today claimed by them in reverse in an attempt to subject the Universal Church of Christ to the power of the State, with the approval and collaboration of the same leaders of the hierarchy.

Perversion of Authority

From all this humanly discouraging picture an unavoidable fact emerges: There is a split between who holds authority and who is subject to it, between rulers and citizens, between hierarchy and faithful. An institutional monstrum exists in which civil and religious power are almost entirely in the hands of unscrupulous characters, named because of their absolute ineptitude and widely blackmailed.

Their role is not to administer the institution but to demolish it; not to respect its laws but to break them; not to protect its members but to disperse and remove them. In short, we are faced with the perversion of authority, not due to chance or inexperience but pursued with determination and following a pre-established plan, a single script under a single direction.

We thus have:

• Rulers who persecute citizens and treat them as enemies while welcoming and financing the invasion of criminals and illegal immigrants
• Police forces and magistrates who arrest and fine those who break social distancing while ostentatiously ignoring criminals, rapists, murderers and traitorous politicians
• Teachers who do not transmit culture and the love of knowledge while indoctrinating students to gender and globalism
• Doctors who refuse to treat the sick but impose a genetically modified vaccine whose efficacy and side effects they ignore
• Bishops and priests who deny the sacraments to the faithful but who do not miss an opportunity to advertise their unconditional adherence to the globalist agenda in the name of the Masonic Brotherhood

Those who oppose this overturning of every principle of civilized life find themselves abandoned, alone, without a guide that allows them to join forces. Loneliness, in fact, allows our common enemies — as they have widely proved themselves — to instill fear, despair, the feeling of not being able to stand together to resist the assaults we are subjected to. Only the citizens are faced with the abuses of civil power, only the faithful are faced with the arrogance of the heretical and vicious prelates, only those in the institutions would like to disagree, raise their voices, protest.

Loneliness and fear increase when we give them consistency, while they vanish if we think that each of us deserved that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was incarnated in the most pure womb of the Virgin Mary: qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis. And here we come to the mysteries that we are preparing to contemplate in these days — the Immaculate Conception and the Most Holy Christmas. From them, dear brothers, we can draw a renewed hope with which to face the events that await us.

The Faithful: Never Alone

First of all, we must remember that none of us are ever really alone: ​​We have the Lord at our side, who always wants our good and for this reason, he never makes us lack His help and His grace, if only we ask Him with faith. We have at our side the Blessed Virgin, loving Mother and our safe refuge. We have near the hosts of angels and the multitude of saints, who from the glory of Heaven intercede for us to the throne of the Divine Majesty.

Contemplation of this sublime community which is the Holy Church, the mystical Jerusalem of which we are citizens and living members, should persuade us that the last thing we must fear is to be alone, and that there is no reason to be afraid, no matter how hard the Devil tries to trick us. True loneliness is in Hell, where damned souls have no hope: That is the loneliness we must truly fear, and before it we must invoke final perseverance, that is, to merit a holy death by God's mercy — a death for which we must always be prepared by keeping ourselves in a state of grace, in friendship with the Lord.

Of course, the trials we are facing right now are tremendous, because they give us the feeling that evil triumphs, that each of us is left to himself, that the wicked have managed to get the better of pusillus grex and the whole humanity. But was Our Lord not alone in Gethsemane, on the wood of the Cross, and in the Sepulcher? 

And to return to the mystery of Christmas now imminent: Perhaps the Madonna and St. Joseph were not alone when they found themselves forced to find refuge in a stable because non erat locus illis in diversorio? Imagine how the putative father of Jesus must have felt, seeing his Most Holy Bride close to giving birth in the cold night of Palestine; think of their worries in fleeing to Egypt, knowing that King Herod had unleashed his soldiers to kill the Child Jesus. Even in those terrible situations, the solitude of the Holy Family was only apparent, while God arranged everything according to His plans. He sent an angel to announce the birth of the Savior to the shepherds; He moved no less than a star to call from the East the Magi to adore the Messiah; He sent the choirs of His angels to sing at the grotto of Bethlehem; He warned St. Joseph to flee to escape the massacre of Herod.

To us, too, in the solitude of the lockdown that many of us are forcibly subjected to, in the abandonment of many in hospitals, in the silence of the deserted streets and of the churches closed to worship, the Lord comes to bring His company. To us, too, He sends His angel to inspire us with holy purposes, His Most Holy Mother to console us, the Paraclete to give us comfort, dulcis hospes animae.

We are not alone: ​​We never are. And it is this, after all, that the authors of the Great Reset fear most — that we become aware of this supernatural (but no less true) reality that causes the house of cards of their infernal deceptions to collapse.

'She Will Not Deny Us Holy Help'

If we think we have at our side she who crushes the head of the Serpent, or the archangel who drew the sword to drive Lucifer into the abyss; if we remember that our guardian angel, our patron saint, our loved ones in Heaven and in Purgatory are with us, what should we be afraid of? Do we want to believe that the God of Hosts is somehow reluctant to conquer servants of the eternally defeated one?

She who in 630 saved Constantinople from siege, terrorizing the Avars and the Persians by appearing terrible in Heaven; who in 1091 in Scicli invoked as Our Lady of Armies showed herself on a shining cloud chasing away the Saracens; as Our Lady of Victory, who in 1571 in Lepanto and again in Vienna in 1683 granted victory to the Christian army against the Turkish; who during the anti-Catholic persecution of Mexico protected the Cristeros and rebuffed the army of Freemason Elias Calles, will not deny us holy help, will not leave us alone in the battle, will not abandon those who turn to her with trusting prayer when the conflict is decisive and the confrontation comes to a head.

We have had the grace to understand what this world could transform into if we deny the Lordship of God and replace it with the tyranny of Satan. This is the world of rebellion against Christ the King and Queen Mary, in which every day thousands of innocent lives are offered to Satan in the womb of their mothers. This is the world in which vice and sin want to erase every trace of good and virtue, every memory of the Christian religion, every law and vestige of our civilization, every trace of the order that the Creator has given to nature — a world in which churches burn, crosses are knocked down, statues of the Virgin are beheaded. This hatred, this satanic fury against Christ and the Mother of God is the mark of the Evil One and his servants. Faced with this total revolution, Pax Christi in Regno Christi.

Let us pray to the Immaculate Virgin, tabernacle of the Most High, so that in the meditation of the Holy Christmas of her divine Son who is now near, she will dispel our fear and solitude.

The Lord will give us the victory only when we bow to Him as our King. And if we cannot yet proclaim Him the King of our nations because of the impiety of those who govern us, we can nevertheless consecrate them ourselves, our families, our communities. And to those who dare to challenge Heaven in the name of "Nothing will be the same as before," we respond by invoking God with renewed fervor: "As it was in the beginning, and now and always, and forever and ever."

Let us pray to the Immaculate Virgin, tabernacle of the Most High, so that in the meditation of the Holy Christmas of her divine Son Who is now near, She will dispel our fear and solitude, gathering adoringly around the manger. In the poverty of the crib, in the silence of the Bethlehem grotto, the song of the angels resounds; the true and only Light of the World shines, adored by the shepherds and the Magi; creation bows, adorning the celestial vault with a shining comet. Veni, Emmanuel: captivum solve Israël. Come, Emmanuel: Free your captive people.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

13 December 2020

Dominica Gaudete, III Adventus

Originally published at Aldo Maria Valli's blog.

Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.

We rely on you to support our news reporting. Please donate today.