Interview Arkady Mamontov for Rossyia 24 TV Channel with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMNbLnzCa_0

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In your opinion, who and what provoked the religious conflict in Ukraine?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: First of all, allow me to thank Arkady Mamontov, Dr. Dmitry Toropov, and the editorial staff of Rossiya for inviting me to do this interview. I send my greetings to you and to all of your viewers.

We know, from an analysis of events, that the Ukrainian crisis has been planned for years, since before the Euromaidan. Obviously, the American deep state was no stranger to this regime change operation, accomplished through the State Department and the CIA.

Those who moved with such ease in interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state considered the religious question as instrumental to the internal destabilization of Ukraine, and to obtain it they moved on this front well in advance. So how could religious conflict be achieved? Simple: by making the Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonically separate from the Russian Church and considered autocephalous.

We know that in 2018 the US State Department allocated 25 million dollars to the Patriarch of Constantinople as an incentive for the recognition of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church in schism from the Russian Church, which Bartholomew granted in January 2019. At the time, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – with interference in the internal affairs of the Orthodox Church – expressed US support for the Ukrainian Church.

Did the Patriarchate of Constantinople have the right to grant autocephaly to the unrecognized Orthodox Church of Ukraine despite the fact that there was already an Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine that gave pastoral care to the vast majority of Orthodox citizens of this country?

Archbishop Viganò: The question, in my opinion, is not whether the Patriarchate had the right  to grant autocephaly, but why it did so. If I may draw a parallel with the Catholic Church, it seems to me that a similar operation was carried out by Jorge Mario Bergoglio with regard to the German Dioceses on the occasion of the recent Synod on Synodality. And he has created the premises of a schism by allowing the Dioceses an autonomy in doctrinal and moral matters that they do not and cannot have, and the Bishops of those Dioceses have approved the blessing of homosexual unions, the conferral of ministerial roles on women, and the legitimization of LGBTQ and gender ideology. And now that some few Bishops are rising up against these deviations, the Holy See is silent, because this was exactly what it set out to do. We are witnessing a subversive plan, carried out by the one whom Christ has made Head of the Church in order to confirm his brothers in the Faith, not in order to spread heresy and vice. Does he have the right to do so? No. Do the German Bishops have this right? No. Because the authority of the Pope and the Bishops is bound to the Truth taught by Christ, and it is nothing as soon as it deviates from it. I believe that the Patriarch of Constantinople acted in the same way, with the same purposes and inspired by the same powers.

It’s no secret that all decisions in Kiev are made after consultations with the United States. Today we are witnessing how monks are being expelled from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra – don’t you think that this violates the principles of religious rights and freedoms that nations themselves defend?

Archbishop Viganò: The persecution of monks and clergy, as well as the faithful of the Russian Church by the Kiev government, shows that the operation is political in nature. On the other hand, as you yourself acknowledge, Kiev’s decisions are always taken following the instructions of the American deep state. If the question had been exclusively religious, the State should have stayed out of it, as should be the case in nations which call themselves “secular” and consider State and Church independent and sovereign.

If the Kiev government considers the Russian Church in Ukraine as an emanation of the Russian government, it also reveals the conviction that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is itself a state church subservient to the government, and that for this reason it can play a role of control over the Ukrainian faithful. And this is what Beijing has done with the secret agreement with the Holy See, which appoints pro-government and communist bishops as head of the dioceses, continuing with impunity the persecution against the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church.

Criminal cases are being initiated against priests in Ukraine; some of them are being deprived of Ukrainian citizenship; parishes are being taken over by schismatics – what will this all lead us to?

Archbishop Viganò: These phenomena have always happened throughout history: when the civil power feels “threatened” by ecclesiastical power – I think, for example, of what happened during the French Revolution and again in 1848 in France and Italy, or in Stalin’s communist Russia, or in Mexico at the end of the twenties, or in Spain in the thirties – the persecution of the clergy is one of the first ways in which civil authority seeks to suppress dissent. On the other hand, Christians have always been persecuted by totalitarian regimes, because the Gospel is considered dangerous for those who want to replace the law of God with the law of men.

Could you name some church schisms that have occurred in the history of the Church, and what did they lead to?

Archbishop Viganò: I would cite the emblematic case of the Anglican schism, which arose not so much from a theological question as from the desire of Henry VIII to escape the spiritual authority of the Roman Pontiff and divorce his legitimate wife Catherine of Aragon. With this act of oppression of temporal power over spiritual power, the English sovereign declared himself “supreme head on earth of the Church of England,” with the advantage of appropriating the goods and revenues hitherto due to the Holy See and of controlling the appointments of Bishops. A similar operation had taken place a few years earlier in Germany, where the German princes supported the heretic Martin Luther not so much because they shared his doctrinal errors, but because they saw in them a pretext to forfeit the goods of the Church. For both the Protestant pseudo-Reformation as well as for the Anglican schism, civil authority constituted itself as an ecclesiastical counterpart to the authority of the Pope and the Bishops, so as to weaken their power and strengthen their own.

Do secular authorities have the right to interfere in the affairs of the Church?

Archbishop Viganò: I answer with the words of Christ: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mt 22:21). This precept teaches us that civil and religious authority have two distinct and separate fields of action: on the one hand the good governance of the State for the harmony of citizens and on the other the government of the faithful for their sanctification. They are two distinct purposes – one temporal and one spiritual – but both authorities must still have Christ as their model: Christ the King for civil governments, and Christ the High Priest for the Church.

The Revolution – both that of Masonic liberalism as well as that of atheistic communism – has subverted this social order, and that is why for two centuries – and before that in Germany divided by Protestant heresy – secular authorities have interfered in Church affairs. This is due to having derived temporal power from the people, stealing it from Christ: on the one hand, deifying the individual (as liberal ideology wants) and on the other deifying the collective (as communist ideology wants).

Today we are witnessing the alliance between these two errors – which are theological, as well as philosophical and political – in the divinization of the synarchist elite of the New World Order, which combines liberal relativism and economic liberalism with socialist collectivism. And this infernal alliance – which in the West is destroying the social and religious fabric of nations – is necessarily anti-Christian and antichristic, because it denies Christ’s Lordship over individuals and societies. It is satanic, as President Vladmir Putin has recently pointed out.

Do US intelligence agencies try to control religious organizations?

Archbishop Viganò: I do not know the extent of the involvement of the Biden Administration and the secret service in Ukrainian religious affairs. We know instead, from John Podesta’s emails[1] published in recent years, that the American deep state played a decisive role in provoking a “colored revolution” within the Catholic Church, to the point of hoping for a change in doctrine and morals to be obtained through the replacement of Pope Benedict XVI with a progressive Pope. You will recall that, on the eve of Pope Ratzinger’s abdication, the global financial lobby had blocked the Vatican’s banking transactions, and that immediately after February 12, 2013, the SWIFT system was reactivated. The action of the deep state was aided by the deep church, which, as admitted by the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then-Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, organized Bergoglio’s election by means of the so-called St. Gallen Mafia.  Which, unlike Benedict XVI, is totally aligned with globalist ideology.

I would therefore not speak of an action of the United States, but of that corrupt and subversive part – which is called for brevity deep state – that has taken power in America and in almost all the nations belonging to NATO, the European Union, the WHO, and the World Economic Forum. And this same argument, in my view, also applies to Ukraine, whose corrupt regime – backed by clearly neo-Nazi extremist movements – has subjugated itself to the globalist elite for the sake of personal interests, while the Ukrainian people are being slaughtered on the front lines of a war that could have been avoided simply by enforcing the Minsk accords.

What guided Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in granting autocephaly to the new church in Ukraine? We have a feeling that he was following the orders of the U.S. State Department or the CIA…

Archbishop Viganò: Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is well known to be totally subservient to the design of the UN and the globalist elite: it is no coincidence that he is on excellent terms with Jorge Mario Bergoglio. We know well that the see of Constantinople has long been in the hands of Freemasonry: both Patriarch Athenagoras and his predecessor Meletios Metaxakis were awarded the 33rd degree of the Ancient Scottish and Accepted Masonic Rite, and in Masonic circles it has been repeatedly suggested that John XXIII was also affiliated with a Lodge when he was Apostolic Nuncio in Istanbul. It does not surprise me, therefore, that Bartholomew, obeying the orders of the deep state – which controls the U.S. State Department and the CIA – may have recognized the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church not for canonical reasons but for political ones: for exactly the same reason that in 1964 Paul VI suppressed the Latin Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had been erected in 1205, in an ecumenical tone.

I remember that on November 3, 2009, then-American President Barack Obama met with Patriarch Bartholomew I, to talk about “environmental protection” and to promote the reopening of the ecumenical theological school of Halki, Turkey, after the failed attempts in the 1990s by Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton.

If I have understood correctly the internal dynamics of Orthodoxy, the Russian Church constitutes, so to speak, the “traditionalist” part of the Orthodox structure, while that of Constantinople is “progressive,” infiltrated by Freemasonry, manipulated by the deep state and favorable to interreligious dialogue and even to environmentalist ideology: it seems to see the “Phanariot” version of Bergoglio’s Vatican.

I note that the ecumenical movement – aimed at preparing the advent of the Religion of Humanity desired by Freemasonry – began in the nineteenth century with the Protestants and as such was severely condemned by the Roman Pontiffs until the Second Vatican Council, and then expanded in the 1960s to the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, making use of Freemasons infiltrated at the top of the respective Hierarchies. And when we talk about Freemasonry, we are talking about globalist elites and the New World Order.

What is your attitude towards the Special Military Operation?

Archbishop Viganò: I believe that each of us is able to understand what has happened in Ukraine in recent years, simply on the basis of the facts. It is a fact that NATO had undertaken not to expand eastwards. It is a fact that the Euromaidan revolution was conducted with the support of the American deep state, especially Victoria Nuland and other accomplices. It is a fact that the Minsk Protocol has not been respected, and we have heard prominent leaders such as former Chancellor Angela Merkel or former French President François Hollande admit that the purpose of that agreement was to give Ukraine time to arm itself. It is a fact that on the eve of the special military operation the Russian Federation had asked to respect the independence of Lugansk and Donetsk, together with the autonomy of Donbass. If President Putin decided to defend Russian speakers from the repeated and continuous aggressions of the Kiev government, this did not happen suddenly. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that this was exactly what NATO wanted to achieve, after more than a decade of provocations.

Who, in your opinion, provoked the war in Ukraine?

Archbishop Viganò: The war in Ukraine has been planned since the “colored revolution” of 2014, to which even the self-styled philanthropist George Soros was no stranger, along with the entire globalist cabal. Those who wanted the war on the one hand had to replace the Russian Federation in the supply of energy to most European countries and then take over with an operation of scandalous speculation: the cost of gas, now supplied by the United States, is enormously higher than what it was sold for before February 2022.

But this was instrumental to two parallel objectives. The first was to prevent an alliance between the European nations and the Russian Federation, balkanizing it and trying to isolate it through regime change operations and through “colored springs,” as happened in Ukraine and as they tried to do in Georgia. This first objective has failed, as has the attempt to bring down President Putin. On the contrary, we are witnessing the establishment of a multipolar world, for example with the BRICS, in which de-dollarization is putting the United States in the corner. But this process should not, in my opinion, make the American people pay for the guilt of a subversive government subservient to the globalist elite.

The second objective had to be the destruction of the economic fabric of Europe – not only in an anti-Russian key – to allow the sanctions to backfire first of all against the countries of the European Union, weakening them and forcing them to the so-called green transition, based on climate change fraud. But to achieve this, after the dress rehearsal with the pandemic farce of the previous two years, there had to be a deep state puppet in the White House, and it was therefore necessary to oust President Donald Trump with electoral fraud. Among other things, Joe Biden, being blackmailed because of his and his son’s scandals, had every interest in hiding his involvement in Ukrainian biolaboratories and perhaps also in the horrors of child trafficking to feed the international lobby of pedophiles, organ predation and the lucrative surrogacy market.

This was possible thanks to a real global coup d’état, conducted with the cooperation of many governments, whose leaders are significant emissaries of the World Economic Forum and other supranational private entities, all managed by a clearly identifiable set of bosses made up of subversives without popular legitimacy, with the support of equally identifiable financial groups.

The Western peoples – with very rare exceptions – are hostages of rulers sold out to the globalist elite, which aims to establish a totalitarian synarchy that preludes the establishment of the reign of the Antichrist. From this we also understand hatred of God, of religion, of the family, and of life.

You previously served in the US. What is your impression of this country?

Archbishop Viganò: America is a relatively young nation, if we compare her with the millennia of history of other nations. This implies both a positive and a negative aspect. The positive aspect is that there is a certain simplicity in the conscience of the people, which is and remains essentially anchored to traditional “values” – I would not call them “principles” – Family, Faith, and Patriotism. The negative aspect is that the absence of solid spiritual and cultural inheritance is a void that is often filled with a non-identitarian thought that is often inclined to allow itself to be contaminated by the liberal and Masonic ideology that dominates the ruling classes and in particular the Democrat Left. Furthermore, there is a sort of persuasion that America is somehow the “world’s sheriff,” an idea that clashes with the legitimate sovereignty of other nations. The present economic and political crisis provoked by the coup of the deep state could help Americans become aware of the need for profound internal reform. This reform will certainly be possible if President Donald Trump is re-elected and is able to liberate this great nation by bringing it into the multipolar alliance of peoples. Once again, it is authority that must go back to being in service to the community for the sake of the common good, not a tool for centralizing a subversive power that no one has elected and no one wants.

What is the main ethical principle of the United States?

Archbishop Viganò: This is a question that is both simple and complex at the same time. I would say that the main ethical principle of the United States is strongly affected by the Protestant mentality, which established itself in America from her very founding, thanks, as I was saying, to the excessive power of Freemasonry. American Catholics – and I imagine also the Eastern Orthodox – have become accustomed to living with this idea, which translates into a primacy of action and entrepreneurial success with respect to philosophical thought and culture that is “non-monetizable.”

In the Protestant mentality, economic success is a sign of predestination, and as such ends up legitimizing – as has effectively happened – even the oppression of the weak, who are considered “losers,” and thus not predestined by God for salvation. It is not an accident that wealth is concentrated in the hands of “WASPs” – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – and that many immigrants, for example the Irish or the Italians, have historically always had a marginal role. This trend experienced a turnaround in the 1950s, when under the glorious Pontificate of Pius XII American Catholicism underwent a significant revival and conversions to the Church of Rome markedly increased. Unfortunately, this parenthesis ended with the Second Vatican Council, which in a certain way represented at least a partial Protestantization of Catholics and gave rise to that nefarious alliance between the American deep state and the deep church, among whose exponents we can count political personalities like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry as well as ecclesiastical personalities like the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whose heirs are still deeply entrenched in the in ecclesiastical institutions.

It must be recognized that the apostasy of the Bergoglian church has opened the eyes of many of the faithful: we are witnessing the reawakening of many American Catholics who recognize themselves in the traditional Faith, significantly just at the moment when they have been made the object of a joint persecution from both the deep church and the deep state, to the point that the FBI is keeping them under surveillance as “domestic terrorists.” The situation of the Russian Church in Ukraine is in some ways – but much more serious – the mirror image of what I have just described.

And what drives the American politicians who unleash wars around the world – Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine…?

Archbishop Viganò: As I have said, these are political personalities who belong to the deep state, who have infiltrated into all the State institutions and the media. They hold enormous power and also enormous wealth, because they are financed by very powerful investment groups like BlackRock and Vanguard, which are in the hands of a very small number of Ashkenazi families – just a Zelensky is also an Ashkenazi. Their goal is power, since they already create and possess money. It is a power that must become global, and which in order to establish the New World Order necessarily requires the destruction of Christianity, including Protestant Christianity, as we see happening today.

There is also an alliance between ideological and economic power, that is, between those who want to dominate the world in order to establish synarchic tyranny and those whose only goal is to make a profit. For this reason, the wars promoted by the United States and NATO during the 20th and 21st centuries have been planned in view of the one world government and the cancellation of national sovereignty, but supported by those who have seen and still see these conflicts as huge opportunities to enrich themselves and weaken other nations. Complaints by Ukrainian lawmakers about the corruption of the Kiev government and the personal enrichment of its members – who continue to receive exorbitant sums from arms trafficking and other illicit activities – demonstrate that those who hold positions of power in Western nations are not protecting their citizens but instead have grave conflicts of interest.

Is the United States an Empire of Good?

Archbishop Viganò: I do not think there are any nations that can claim this title today, and certainly not the United States as long as it remains hostage to the subversive elements of the deep state, woke ideology, LGBTQ theory, and all the aberrations we are aware of. Of course, every nation can be used by the Providence of God for His plans, since every nation is composed of individual people who have the potential to be good and to orient their lives toward the good. Even the Roman Empire, which also persecuted Christians, created by its conquests the pre-conditions for the spread of the Gospel in the world. But this task is not the exclusive prerogative of a single nation. The Russian Federation, for example, is presently positioning itself as a barrier against the Great Reset, at least in opposing the perversion of customs and the corruption of peoples that is being carried forward by globalist ideology.

In my opinion it would be desirable that this common opposition to the New World Order be undertaken not by centralizing power and reducing one’s allies to vassals or colonies, as NATO does, but rather by rediscovering the importance of the sovereignty of individual nations, of our common Christian inheritance, of our common patrimony of culture and civilization that for two thousand years has been promoted and made fruitful by Faith in Jesus Christ.

If the peoples recognize Jesus Christ as their King; if the laws of Nations are conformed to the Commandments of God and the natural law inscribed in the heart of every man, they do not need to overwhelm themselves, nor to assert their power over others. The Christian order, regardless of the system of government that citizens choose, is the only order that protects the common good of all peoples, bringing them the light of the true God. On the other hand, the supposedly “secular state” has been demonstrated to be a fraud with which Christianity is marginalized from society in order to replace it with the globalist religion of ecologism, cancel culture, ethnic substitution, and the health dictatorship.

I believe this is the “multipolar” approach to which President Putin often refers: respecting the identity and freedom of the peoples, united by their common Christian heritage.

It seems that no one tries to avoid sin anymore. Is sin becoming a part of the norm in the world today? Can you give any examples?

Archbishop Viganò: Avoiding sin implies recognizing a transcendent moral norm and thus a Divine Lawgiver. In essence, it means conducting one’s private and public life within the supernatural order that God has established. For two centuries now nations have refused to publicly recognize the Lordship of Jesus Christ over societies.

The Christian West has had to deal with a process of secularization that has involved and indeed been instigated by the deep church which has infiltrated up to the highest levels of the Catholic Church, and which with Vatican II has substantially cancelled the doctrine of the Social Kingship of Our Lord, reducing the practice of the Faith to a private question, as already happened four centuries earlier with the Protestant heresy. This secularization had as its purpose the loss of the social order that had assisted individual faithful and citizens to live according to the Commandments, thereby favoring the spread of immorality, sin, and corruption. Because where the State does not protect public Morals, and indeed promotes everything that is contrary to the Law of God as well as natural law, it is extremely difficult to remain faithful to religious practice. And this is a further demonstration that the secularization of society did not have a purpose of guaranteeing liberty to non-Christian religions but rather of undermining the social order and cancelling every aspect of Christian heritage, not only in laws but also in daily life.

Any split in the church leads to people turning away from God. The LGBT agenda and the legitimization of everything that was previously considered a sin has a harmful effect.

Archbishop Viganò: There is no doubt that divisions are the work of the devil, who is the prince of the revolution and of chaos. The Holy Church, as we know and believe, is one – that is, she is the only Church – just as there was only one Ark that Christ placed on earth for the salvation of men. If the ecclesial body suffers the wounds of division and schism, this happens because the Enemy of the human race – Satan – wants to drag as many souls as possible to eternal damnation.

Separating oneself from the Holy Church means abandoning the supernatural family in which we were conceived to Grace, believing that we can defend ourselves with human means against the furious assault of the Enemy. It means believing that we can renounce the truth of the Eternal Father incarnate in the Divine Son and enlivened by the Holy Spirit. But this is a grave sin of pride that makes us even weaker in resisting evil.

In Germany there was a slogan – Germany above all. In Ukraine – Ukraine is above everything. Don’t you think there are a lot of similarities? Why does the West support Ukrainian nationalists?

Archbishop Viganò: “Deutschland über alles” was a patriotic phrase from the hymn of the Habsburg Empire, which the Nazi party then made its own in an ultra-nationalist key, in accordance with the Protestant inheritance I mentioned earlier which places the State above everything. But while the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite being Catholic, recognized freedom to the peoples and cultures that composed it – according to the Christian principles of good government – Nazi totalitarianism aimed at creating the ideological bases that would legitimize an ethnic supremacy – the supremacy of the Arian race – over all other people.

This vision, after decades of deploring the excesses of Nationalism, has today made a comeback in an even more destructive key, because it attributes a moral superiority to the “globalist religion,” to woke ideology, to cancel culture, ensuring that everything that is not conformed to the precepts of this totalitarian thought is considered heretical, and that those who do not conform to it are judged unworthy of being part of the civil consortium. It should come as no surprise that the principal theorizers of this ideology are culturally connected and in certain cases are even tied by kinship with the ideologues of Nazism. By way of example, Adolf Heusinger, the head of the 1940 Operationsabteilung that helped Hitler plan the invasions of Poland, Norway, Denmark, and France, was the chairman of the NATO Committee in Washington from 1961 to 1964. And what is even more disconcerting is that this revival of neo-Nazi principles is supported and financed by the Ashkenazi world, which includes many of the political leaders and prominent proponents of globalism, with the contribution of pro-Zionist neo-con movements that are present above all in the United States and tied to the American deep state.

What should politicians take into consideration when they are making decisions in our time? What should they base their decisions on?

Archbishop Viganò: The role of politicians, yesterday as today, is to commit themselves to good governance and to the defense of their fellow citizens from the globalist coup. All politicians of all nations are called to this without distinction, but in particular those who find themselves hostage to the subversive elite of the New World Order. They ought to ask themselves: What will I say to Christ when I find myself standing before Him to be judged?

It is necessary – I have been repeating this for some time – that an Anti-globalist Alliance be formed that unites all peoples with their leaders in an action of opposition and resistance against the establishment of the New World Order, the Great Reset, the Agenda 2030, and its programmatic points. This Alliance ought to have as its purpose the denunciation of the global coup and its architects, the reappropriation of national sovereignties (including monetary sovereignty) and the systematic boycott of everything that erodes individual freedoms by imposing destructive models and lifestyles.

It is indispensable to put an end to the folly of gender theory, the corruption of children, the dissolution of the family, the cancellation of Christian civilization, and the enslavement of individuals. It is also necessary that whoever governs the State is not blackmailed by financial lobbies or more or less hidden power groups, punishing conflicts of interest that make the betrayal of peoples possible with severe laws.

It seems to me that this Alliance would be an excellent premise for the re-establishment of peace between Nations, which today have been torn apart by conflicts caused by the globalist elite, and that in this battle for truth and freedom it could unite even political leaders from nations whose governments are declaring themselves to be enemies of the Russian Federation and its allies.

Why has the human race, throughout thousands year of history, not learned to live without wars?

Archbishop Viganò: Humanity could and would like to live without wars: the collapse of popular support for NATO’s warmongering leaders and the hundreds of demonstrations against the war in Ukraine (among others) that are being held in many European nations are the proof of this. But as long as war is considered not as a tool to re-establish justice or to defend oneself from attack (which in this case it would be legitimate), but rather to impose a dystopian model of tyrannical society in view of the New World Order to the detriment of citizens, none of us will be able to escape from it and we will all be victims.

I repeat: the elimination of the globalist subversive elite is essential if there is to be a peaceful coexistence between peoples. President Donald Trump also said this recently, and it seems to be that such a declaration makes him a privileged interlocutor of President Putin in order to open up peace talks that would have as their purpose the ouster of the emissaries of the deep state and the World Economic Forum from national governments and supranational organizations, which are dangerous emanation of the deep state.

Our program will be seen both in Russia and Ukraine, so what would you like to say in conclusion?

Archbishop Viganò: As a Bishop and Successor of the Apostles, I address the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the name of Jesus Christ the King and the All Holy Mother of God, Help of Christians. Pray with faith in this blessed tine in which we celebrate the Holy Mysteries of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the Savior, to implore peace; a peace that can only come from Christ, the Prince of Peace. Be aware that the threat hanging over the world comes from the abandonment of the Commandments of God, from rebellion against the eternal law willed by the Lord for our good and for our eternal salvation.

The Lord has said: Without me you can do nothing (Jn 15:5). Pray with faith, dear brothers in Christ: pray to the Queen of Peace, that she may intercede before the throne of God and implore for all of us true peace, pax Christi in regno Christi, the peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ. Pray that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, may stir up sentiments of truth and justice in the rulers of all nations, leading them to make a leap of dignity and loyalty towards their fellow citizens, inducing them to free themselves from subjection to powers that no one wants, powers whom no one has elected, and whose sole purpose is to cancel Christ from the world and damn the souls He has redeemed with his own Blood. Pray that the Lord may raise up among you honest and courageous leaders who have the common good at heart, not the interest of conspirators. But above all, dear Friends, start with yourselves: let the Lord reign above all in your hearts, your families, and your communities. Remain in the Grace of God, because no one can ever take friendship with the Lord away from you. He is the only Supreme Good, and in all adversities He will never let you lacking in his holy assistance. Jesus Christ has said: You are my friends, if you do what I command you (Jn 15:14). Behold: the secret to having peace reign in your hearts and in society is found in obedience to the Gospel. And may the Lord bless you all.

[1] John Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Podesta