Moving fast when it wants to, the Vatican's courts went ahead and excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the dissident traditionalist critic who said the pope was not legitimate and who blasted the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

According to the Washington Post:

Much as a lot of us Catholics like the guy for his willingness to stand up to Pope Francis and the crazed leftists who encircle him, it's hard to argue that any of the charges were false, or that they didn't merit the penalty that Viganò got.

Practically speaking, no organization is going to be able to function when some of the lesser members are out denouncing the big guy as 'a servant of Satan,' or saying he's fake.

That he was doing this seemed to be so ... immature, so off the deep end.

After all, popes can be lousy, they can be wrong, they can be wicked, the only time one must pay attention to them is when they speak ex cathedra (from the chair of St. Peter, which is rare) and history shows it. But they are still the popes. For believing Catholics, the smart thing to do is accept that God permits this since we can see that such things have already happened through Church history. The best thing to do is just wait on the subway platform of time for a better pope to come along, which is also what has happened in the past or recall that the Church has sometimes sanctioned saints to silence (as they did to St. Padre Pio) or other punishment, including excommunication, before coming to its senses. 

It's hard to justify just what the archbishop did. When he started tweeting sede vacante (meaning, the papal chair is empty) claims, I stopped paying attention to him. It was Martin Luther stuff.

All the same, we know that this pope can be petty, sanctioning other critics by taking away their pensions or Vatican apartment privileges, such as was done to some others who didn't say he was illegitimate.

According to the Post:

A major Francis critic, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Tex., was stripped of his diocese, while another longtime critic, American Cardinal Raymond Burke, lost his pension and Rome apartment.

That stuff, in addition to the repression of the Latin mass, was pretty outrageous, as those bishops did nothing wrong.

Worse still, really disgusting "Catholics," such as Joe Biden, who's busy suing the Little Sisters of the Poor for not providing abortion services, bankrolling and pushing abortion abroad, and calling for a national law to enshrine abortion up until the day of birth as his campaign issue, do not so much as get a hint of Church sanction, not even denial of Holy Communion.

Nor do pervert clerics such as Marko Rupnik, nor Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (whose perversions were exposed by Viganó) get much punishment at all. Worse still, liberation theology promoters who embrace Marxism as Catholicism are gushed about as wonderful, not booted as heretics. Meanwhile, Pope Francis's close associate for promoting the docrine of the faith, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, certainly has written repellent books about sex fantasies with Jesus among teenagers to disgust the faithful. Who thinks like that, other than a total pervert? If the Church wants to go housecleaning on Viganò, they need to clean out the whole house.

It's sad because a lot of us liked the guy. We liked his fearless adherence to Church doctrine and teaching, his willingness to expose Vatican coverups, which needed to be done and his record of exposing bad clerics such as McCarrick, who molested boys and seminarians, and otherwise would have gotten away with it. We liked his statements for traditional values, and denunciations of Pope Francis's ill-considered excesses and confusing edicts.

It makes for a sad picture, given that the double standard here is so obvious. It shouldn't be too much to ask that they clean out their own house first.

Image: Alex Proimos, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0