Editor’s Note: In a new text released on the Feast of All Souls (Nov. 2, 2020), Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò takes up a theme from his recent Catholic Identity Conference speech — namely, “the eclipse of the true Church by an anti-church” — which he now says is composed “of heretics, corrupt men, and fornicators.” Notable among these malefactors, according to His Excellency, is one Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, whom Pope Francis appointed as Substitute (i.e., second-in-command) for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State in October 2018 (Peña Parra replaced Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was promoted to Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints but has recently resigned in disgrace).
In mid-2019, Archbishop Viganò told The Washington Post (in sections of the interview “the newspaper chose to omit,” he explains) that Pope Francis “essentially ignored” well-documented accusations of sexual misconduct on the part of Archbishop Peña Parra (see here for more details). In light of the recent removal of “Giovanni Angelo Becciu from his official posts” in the Vatican, His Excellency considers it an opportune time to detail “the curriculum vitae that led Msgr. Peña Parra to the Secretariat of State.”
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In my recent essay for the Catholic Identity Conference in Pittsburgh, I spoke of the eclipse that is obscuring the Church of Christ, superimposing over it an anti-church of heretics, corrupt men, and fornicators. Catholics know that the Church must retrace the footsteps of her Head, Jesus Christ, along the way of His Passion and Cross, and that the end times will be marked by a great apostasy that will strike the ecclesial Body even up to its highest levels. Thus, just as on Golgotha the Sanhedrin thought that it had defeated Our Lord by having him condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, today the Vatican Sanhedrin believes that it can overthrow the Church by delivering it into the hands of the globalist anti-Christian tyranny.
We must therefore evaluate what is happening today with a supernatural gaze, in light of the battle that the world’s élite are conducting against Christian civilization. The attack that was initially launched from the outside against the Catholic monolith has evolved, from the Second Vatican Council onwards, into an action of widespread infiltration by means of the deep state in civil society and the deep church in the religious sphere. The enemy has succeeded in penetrating the interior of both the State and the Church, in order to rise to the very top, building a network of complicity and connivance that binds all of its members by means of blackmail, having chosen them precisely because of their corruptibility. It is not by chance that honest officials are systematically hindered, marginalized, and made the object of attacks.
In the past few weeks, the press has reported the news of the umpteenth Vatican financial scandal, following which Jorge Mario Bergoglio removed Giovanni Angelo Becciu from his official posts and deprived him of the prerogatives of cardinals. Those who think that this removal will serve to counter the corruption of the Roman Curia will be disturbed to learn that the person who replaced him in his position as Substitute, Edgar Peña Parra, who ought to work to heal the disastrous mismanagement and intrigues of Becciu and others, is in fact even more blackmailable than his predecessor. This blackmailability is the indispensable requirement to be able to be manipulated by the one who, while presenting himself as a reformer of the Curia and the punisher of a vaguely defined clericalism, is in fact surrounded by corrupt and immoral people, promoting them and covering up investigations that concern them.
When he arrived in Rome in 2018, called by Bergoglio to fill the position of Substitute at the Secretariat of State in place of Angelo Becciu, the Venezuelan archbishop was already “being talked about.” A report about him indicated his immoral conduct: when I was Delegate for the Papal Representations, disturbing information had already come to me about Msgr. Peña Parra, and I promptly referred this information to then-Substitute Msgr. Leonardo Sandri. I spoke publicly about this in my May 2, 2019, interview with the Washington Post, but the newspaper chose to omit the sections about Peña Parra. Since the compromising dossiers seem destined not to be consulted in the Vatican, let’s try to better understand the curriculum vitae that led Msgr. Peña Parra to the Secretariat of State.
The young Edgar Peña Parra, on the eve of his priestly ordination, had already been reported as a notorious homosexual, to the point that in February 1985 Archbishop Roa Pérez told the Rector of the seminary, Leon Cardenas, that he had harbored doubts about the candidate for some time, and that he had just received reports of this nature, in addition to having learned that he had been expelled from San Tommaso d’Aquino Seminary in his third year of formation. According to the seminary spiritual director Father Leyre, the news of this expulsion had been hidden by another priest, Don Roberto Lückert Leon, who had falsified the report. In the meantime, Lückert Leon became the Archbishop of Coro (now emeritus) and the powerful President of the Commission for Social Communications of the Venezuelan Bishops’ Conference. The reports sent to Peña Parra’s superior did not prevent him from being ordained a priest on August 23, 1985, and subsequently sent to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, where future diplomats of the Holy See are trained.
On September 24, 1990, Peña Parra was accused of having seduced two minor seminarians from the parish of San Pablo, who were supposed to enter the Major Seminary of Maracaibo the same year. The event took place in the church of the Madonna del Rosario, where Rev. José Severeyn was the parish priest. Peña Parra was denounced to the police by the parents of the two young men and was examined by the Rector of the Major Seminary, Rev. Enrique Pérez, and by the spiritual director, Rev. Emilio Melchor. The Rev. Enrique Pérez, the former-rector of the Major Seminary, has confirmed this episode in writing.
In August 1992, when he was a student at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, Edgar Peña Parra was involved, along with the same José Severeyn, in the death of two people: a doctor and a certain Jairo Pérez, who were killed by an electric shock on San Carlos Island in Lake Maracaibo. The dossier adds the detail that the bodies were found naked, the victims of macabre homosexual practices. Severeyn was then removed from his parish by then-Archbishop Msgr. Roa Pérez and was appointed Chancellor of the Archdiocese, thereby finding himself in a position where he could destroy or falsify documents relating to these cases.
In January 2000, the Maracaibo journalist Gastón Guisandes López made grave accusations against several homosexual priests of the Diocese of Maracaibo, including Peña Parra. In 2001, Gastón Guisandes López twice requested to meet with the Apostolic Nuncio to Venezuela, Msgr. André Dupuy, but the Nuncio refused to receive him. The following year, however, he reported these scandalous episodes involving Edgar Peña Parra to the Secretariat of State.
The relevant documentation is thus found in the archives of the Nunciature in Venezuela where, starting from that date, the successive Nuncios have been Archbishops Giacinto Berloco (2005-2009), Pietro Parolin (2009-2013) and the present Nuncio, Aldo Giordano. These men had the documents related to these accusations against the future Substitute at their disposal, and likewise the Secretaries of State, Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone and Pietro Parolin, were familiar with them, and also the Substitutes Leonardo Sandri, Fernando Filoni and Giovanni Angelo Becciu.[1]
Despite the dossiers sent to the Secretariat of State, from 2003 to 2007 Peña Parra served as an official at the Nunciature in Tegucigalpa: this is the origin of his relationship with Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga and with Msgr. Juan José Pineda, who was consecrated as Bishop in 2005, when Peña Parra was in Honduras.
Maradiaga is known in the news for financial scandals, including defrauding Martha Alegria Reichmann, the widow of the former Ambassador of Honduras to the Holy See.[2] The Cardinal is one of Bergoglio’s principal advisers; he is a key figure on the Council of Cardinals entrusted with the reform of the Curia and the Church, and he has played a decisive role (along with McCarrick) in important nominations like that of Cardinal Blase Cupich to Chicago and of the new Substitute to the Secretariat of State, Archbishop Peña Parra. I further recall that in April 2015, George Soros’ “Open Society Foundations” gave $650,000 to two progressive Catholic organizations, PICO and FPL, in order “to influence individual bishops to have public voices in support of messages of economic and racial justice for the purpose of beginning to create a critical mass of bishops aligned with the Pope.” Cardinal Maradiaga, in his relations with PICO, was no stranger to this sort of interference by the aforementioned self-styled philanthropist in American politics, with the complicity of the pro-Bergoglian part of the episcopate.
The two organizations receiving these payments were chosen – as the documents explain – because they are involved in long-term projects that have the purpose of changing “the priorities of the Catholic Church in the United States.” The great opportunity was given by the Pope’s visit to the United States [in 2015] and the Soros foundation explicitly aimed to use the good relationship between PICO and Honduran Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, one of Pope Francis’s closest advisers, to “engage” the Pontiff on themes of social justice and also to have the possibility of sending a delegation to the Vatican prior to the September 2015 visit in order to make the voices of the poorest Catholics in America be heard directly by the Pope.
As for Pineda, he has been accused of illicit financial dealings and sexual harassment and abuse, as well as cultivating a network of relationships with homosexuals (including prostitutes) in Honduras and abroad, to whom he also allegedly gave apartments, cars, motorcycles and trips, using diocesan funds. He is also accused of defending and covering up other cases of abuse committed by clerics. On May 28, 2017, a group of 48 seminarians denounced a widespread and deeply-rooted model of homosexual practice, complaining about Pineda’s assaults. Needless to say, Cardinal Maradiaga did not want to give any weight to the accusations, despite the suicide of a seminarian from Santa Rosa de Copán which occurred after he discovered that his lover in the seminary had begun another relationship. And not only this: it should also be recalled that in December 2017 Maradiaga entrusted the governance of the Archdiocese to Pineda during his prolonged absence from the diocese, and furthermore that the majority of his Auxiliary Bishop’s sexual encounters took place at Villa Iris, the cardinal’s residence.
In the same year, 2017, Pineda was removed from office as Maradiaga’s Auxiliary Bishop, without giving any reason to the faithful of Tegucigalpa. The Apostolic Visitator Msgr. Alcides Casaretto gave Bergoglio a substantial report about him, along with the accusations of a group of Catholics who were scandalized by the silence of the Holy See.
From 1993 to 1997, Peña Parra was sent on diplomatic assignment to the Nunciature in Kenya. In 1995 he became a Monsignor, in 1999 he was sent to Geneva as a member of the Pontifical Representation to the United Nations. In 2002 he was appointed as a member of the Nunciature in Honduras, and in 2006 he was sent to the Nunciature in Mexico. In 2011 he received episcopal consecration and was appointed Nuncio to Pakistan, then in 2015 to Mozambique. On October 15, 2018, Bergoglio appointed him Substitute in the Secretariat of State, at the recommendation of Cardinal Maradiaga.
Emiliano Fittipaldi at Domani recalls that Peña Parra, according to the papers of the magistrates of the Holy See, allegedly played a key role from 2018 to 2019 in several financial decisions that caused the Vatican coffers to lose over 100 million euros. The magistrates also speak of secret negotiations undertaken by the Venezuelan Substitute. It would have been Peña Parra himself, one of the most powerful men in the Vatican and personally chosen by Bergoglio, who “opened the gate of the chicken coop to ravenous foxes” – to use an expression of Fittipaldi.
The behavior and responsibility of the Secretary of State Cardinal Parolin appears particularly disturbing and grave, who not only did not oppose Peña Parra’s appointment as Substitute – that is, to be his primary collaborator – but even before that did not oppose his appointment as Archbishop and Apostolic Nuncio in January 2011, when Parolin was Nuncio in Caracas. Prior to such an important appointment, a rigorous process of gathering information is carried out in order to verify a candidate’s suitability. But what is even more disturbing is the fact that Bergoglio chose a collaborator accused of such grave crimes for such an important role in the Church.
Bergoglio’s recent utterances about homosexual civil unions; the impressive number of homosexual prelates with whom he has surrounded himself even in his residence at Santa Marta, beginning with his personal secretary Msgr. Fabian Pedacchio, who was suddenly removed and vanished into thin air; and the scandals that emerge daily about the homosexual lobby in the Vatican: all of these elements suggest that the Argentine wants to legitimize LGBTQ ideology not only in order to support the globalist agenda and demolish the immutable principles of Catholic morality, but also in order to decriminalize the crimes and abuses of his collaborators, protecting the magic circle that involves Maradiaga, Pineda, Peña Parra, Zanchetta, and the entire Vatican lavender mafia.
I wonder if Bergoglio himself, who was unknown to many people until March 13, 2013, is not being blackmailed by those who benefit with such impunity from his clemency. This would explain the motive that leads the one who sits on the Throne to rage with so much ruthlessness against the Church of Christ, while showing the greatest respect for people who are notoriously corrupt, perverted, and almost always implicated in sexual and financial scandals. The alternative – the plausibility of which is supported by disturbing elements that continue to be gathered with each passing day – is that Bergoglio’s choice to surround himself with people given over to vice, who are therefore blackmailable, is a deliberate one, and that the ultimate goal that he pursues consists in the demolition of the Catholic Church, replacing it with a sort of philanthropic and ecumenical NGO that is subservient to the globalist élite. Faced with this betrayal by the one who holds the Papacy, any effort at transparency and clarity, if it is to be effective, cannot exclude the one who for over seven years has proclaimed by his words that he wants to clean up the Vatican and the Church.
+ Carlo Maria Vigano, Archbishop
November 2, 2020
In Commemoratione Omnium Fidelium Defunctorum
Official translation
[1] Note that Sandri was created cardinal in 2007, Filoni in 2012, and Becciu in 2018.
[2] https://lanuovabq.it/it/maradiaga-i-soldi-e-lamico-abusatore-coperto