“… if [Ouelette] the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops (and therefore one who has been involved in the appointments in recent years of some of the Church’s most controversial liberal prelates) thinks his letter is going to be enough to shut the door on Viganò’s account, he is mistaken.”

“Ouellet …  never invokes a higher authority in support of his own claims … unlike Viganò, he does not say his conscience is compelling him in the sight of God and that he swears before God to the truth of what he is reporting. For Ouellet, it seems the guiding rule is: ‘Trust me. I’m an important person. I have access to the Pope….'”

“Truth has its claims on our human reason.”

“… unfortunately this letter by Ouellet is “over-the-top” sycophantic, even papolatrous. He undermines his credibility by speaking of the Holy Father as of a veritable Messiah ….”

“… nothing in Viganò’s letter suggests that he repudiates this Successor or would wish to sever communion with him. But do we have to crawl on our knees to lick the boots of the fisherman? ”

“… our eyebrows rise when Ouellet claims that his own ‘interpretation of Amoris Laetitia’—namely, an interpretation that favors access to holy communion for those living objectively in adultery, contrary to divine law—‘is grounded in this fidelity to the living tradition, which Francis has given us another example of by recently modifying the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the question of the death penalty.’”

“… no one on earth can excuse Catholics from the solemn duty they have before God to follow the settled and established tradition of the Church, not to mention Sacred Scripture and the ordinary universal Magisterium, all of which measure, delimit, and control the so-called “living” tradition—whether about divorce and “remarriage,” the legitimacy of the death penalty, or any number of issues.”

“Ouellet’s letter is strangely, one might say eerily, bereft of believably genuine acknowledgment of the sheer amount of damage done by McCarrick and others like him in the Church. ”

“… he is so intent on slamming Viganò that he forgets the gravity of the matters about which Viganò is indignant in the first place.

“No one reading this letter by Ouellet can believe that he cares about the extent of the moral corruption of homosexuality in the hierarchy, that he recognizes it and its fallout as a crisis, and that he and his Vatican associates intend to exterminate it. Rather, reading between the lines, one senses that the only man who is really in trouble is Viganò himself.”

“As Edward Pentin pointed out, not once in Ouellet’s letter is Viganò referred to as a bishop; and in one chilling moment, the prefect appeals to him to “return to communion”with the pope. This suggests that Viganò has already been stripped of his episcopal dignity and excommunicated, or that this will soon take place. Given that such severe penalties have been rarely administered even to bishops of monstrous moral corruption, the implicit message is that no crime whatsoever can compare with that of challenging the Dictator Pope.”