Archbishop Viganò / Homily for Easter Sunday
In azymis sinceritatis. Homily for Easter Sunday
Fratres: Expurgate vetus fermentum
ut sitis nova conspersio, sicut estis azymi.
Etenim Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus.
Itaque epulemur: non in fermento veteri,
neque in fermento malitiæ, et nequitiæ:
sed in azymis sinceritatis et veritatis.
Brothers: Clear out the old yeast
so that you may be a new dough,
since you are unleavened.
For Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.
Therefore, let us feast: not with the old leaven,
nor with the ferment of malice and wickedness:
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I Cor 5: 7-8
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
The modern world is held hostage by lies. Everything that is theorized by the elite, affirmed by the Institutions, and propagandized by the media is a lie, a falsehood, and a deception.
The psychopandemic emergency is a lie, all on account of a virus created in a laboratory for the sake of a mass vaccination that is as ineffective as it is harmful to health. Gender theory is a lie, which denies the distinction of the sexes willed by the Creator, and which seeks to cancel the image and likeness of God in man. Climate change is a lie, based as it is on the false premise of man-made climate crisis and on the even more false chimera that the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in certain countries can even minimally change the earth’s temperature. The Ukrainian crisis is a lie, which was provoked in order to destroy the social and economic fabric of European nations through unreasonable sanctions against the Russian Federation. The Agenda 2030 is a lie, which is being imposed by a gang of subversives in order to enslave humanity. Woke ideology is a lie, which causes the cancellation of our identity, our History, and our Faith in order to impose the infernal religion of the New World Order and the barbarism of the Great Reset.
What is most disconcerting is that this fraud against the peoples – perpetuated by those in authority who ought instead to be protecting and defending them – has also infected the ecclesial body, where other no less serious falsehoods corrupt the purity of the Faith, offending the Divine Majesty and causing the damnation of many souls, whom the Lord has paid for dearly, redeeming them with his Most Precious Blood. Ecumenism is a lie, which abases the Living and True God to the level of the idols of the nations. The Synodal Way is a lie, which subverts the divine constitution of the Church intended by Christ under the false pretext of listening to the People of God. The liturgical reform is a lie, introduced with the excuse of making the Mass understandable to the faithful, with the sole intention of taking honor from God and pleasing the heretics. The feminine diaconate is a lie, which with the alibi of giving a role to women attacks the Mass and the Sacraments and tampers with the Holy Orders instituted by Our Lord. The possibility of divorced and cohabitating couples receiving Holy Communion is a lie, the blessing of homosexual unions is a lie, the entrance of transsexuals into the Seminary is a lie: Morality does not follow the fashions of the day, whatever Bergoglio may say. The acceptance of sodomy is a lie, which too often seems to want to legitimize the conduct of many Prelates and clergy rather than saving the souls of poor sinners.
These lies have the effrontery to manifest themselves as obvious falsehoods, deprived of any rational or credible arguments. They are not the lies with which one clumsily tries to hide something: they are the arrogant affirmation of falsification, of the subversion of logic, of the negation of the truth.
But why do so many people voluntarily choose to renounce their own critical judgment and accept blatant lies as rational and true? Because adherence to error is the price that the world asks of its adorers, of those who do not want to be marginalized, criminalized, and persecuted. And who is the prince of lies if not Satan, the father of lies, he who was a murderer from the very beginning? Satan, who tempted our first parents with a no less brazen lie: If you eat of this fruit, you will be like gods. This was a brazen falsehood, and by believing it Adam and Eve chose to abdicate reason and disobey God in order to follow a false promise made by a repugnant creature.
What Satan promises Our Lord when he tempted Him in the desert was also a lie: All this will be yours . . . for the sake of something of which Christ was not only already the master but also the Creator.
In the Epistle of the Mass on this most holy day on which we celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, the Apostle exhorts us to eliminate the old leaven: expurgate vetus fermentum. Anyone who is familiar with the ancient methods of making bread knows that the mother dough is that portion of flour and water which, when left to ferment, becomes the leavening mass. It can be kept for decades, periodically re-kneaded with new flour and new water, so that today’s bread is substantially linked to all the preceding bread going back in time. But if the fermentum is vetus, if the leaven is old, this affects the new dough and the new bread. Purging the old leaven means starting over from the beginning, accomplishing a true “great reset” of each individual soul and of the social body, cancelling the ferment of malice and perversity, and starting afresh with unleavened bread, a figure of the Holy Eucharist and Blessed Sacrament of the new and eternal Covenant made by Christ with His Church, made new in Grace and not subject to the changes of time, fashion, and circumstances.
This is why Saint Paul speaks of the azymes, of the unleavened bread. A bread of austerity, the bread of those who do not have time to preserve the mother dough alive, the bread of those who prepare with their loins girt to eat the Lamb without blemish and the bitter herbs before abandoning the land of Egypt and crossing the Red Sea. The reset, the New Creation, the New Passover, is fulfilled in Christ, the unique, indispensable, eternal Truth, the Living and True Word of the Eternal Father. The true reset is returning to the Truth of Christ, of the One who said of Himself: I am the way, the truth, and the life. A Truth that is, while error in contrast has no existence. A Truth that demands sincerity on our part – in azymis sinceritatis – as a necessary response to light of Truth – et veritatis.
Satan, the ape of God, grotesquely mimics Creation, engaging in monstrosities that any sensible person recognizes as such. He mimics the Redemption even more gortesquely, promising men a good that is unknown to him and which he does not himself first possess, asking in exchange that men acknowledge him as their god. We ought to recognize this law of his for what it is; we ought to reject and fight against it.
If we fight for the Truth – for any truth, not just theological truth – we align ourselves on the side of Christ; on the side of the One who was not lying when he announced to His Apostles His own Death and Resurrection.
If instead we choose not to fight for the Truth, or even to allow error to be proclaimed or to spread it ourselves, we align ourselves on the side of Satan, the prince of lies, on the side of the one who makes promises and does not keep them, for the sole purpose of dragging us into that abyss of damnation into which he chose to sink when, committing the sin of pride, he believed he could put himself in the place of God and decide what is and what is not, that is, what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil, what is beautiful and what is ugly. And in fact, the infernal world we are rushing headlong into today is composed of lies, malice, and ugliness. Nor could it be otherwise.
It is not by chance that Satan is called the prince of this world: he is not king; his power is ephemeral and permitted by God only until the time comes to end the period of trial and the moment of Judgment comes. It is no different for Satan’s servants. Even if their power seems to overwhelm us, even if the means at their disposal seem unlimited and overwhelming, their end is inexorably approaching as Christ takes back His Universal Kingdom. Oportet illum regnare, it is necessary that this happens, it is in the order willed by God, and no one, not even all of Hell combined, can prolong the apparent triumph of evil by a single instant.
Only two days ago we were contemplating the Mysteries of the Passion and Death of the Lord, after the maneuvers of the Sanhedrin, the uproar of the crowd, and the tortures of the executioners. Along with Joseph of Arimathea and the Pious Women we accompanied the lifeless Body of Jesus towards the Sepulcher. We remained in prayer in the bare silence of our churches. But “Consummatum est” does not mean “Everything is lost,” but rather, “Everything has come to its fulfillment,” that is, “The work of the Redemption has been accomplished.”
Χριστὸς ἀνέστη is the Greek Easter greeting: Christ is Risen. To which the response is given: Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη –Truly He is Risen – Surrexit Dominus vere. That ἀληθῶς, that vere, contains the reality of the Resurrection of the Savior, the truth of that historical event in which the Mercy of the Man-God has repaired the sin of Adam caused by the lie of Satan, who continued to lie when he accused Christ with false witnesses, and who still lies today, trying to frustrate the fruits of the Redemption.
Today, after the solemn notes of the Exsultet have announced the glory of the Resurrection, let us celebrate the triumph of Christ over death and sin, His victory over Satan. Let us also celebrate the victory of the Church and Christian Civilization over earthly enemies, because the fate of the Mystical Body was decreed in the moment in which its Divine Head nailed the ancient serpent to the Cross. Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando: Dux vitæ mortuus, regnat vivus.
+Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
9 April 2023
Dominica Paschatis, in Resurrectione Domini
