(LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has thrown his full support behind Donald Trump as the next president of the U.S. and called upon American Catholics to vote for Trump on November 5 as a moral imperative.

In an open letter addressed to Catholics in America, Viganò, the former apostolic nuncio to the United States, urged the faithful to vote for Trump as the “only possible choice” for president to oppose the “deep state” and protect “future generations,” echoing his previous claims that only Trump stands in the way of a “globalist coup.” The archbishop suggested that “voting for Kamala Harris,” on the other hand, “is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin,” adding that to abstain from voting would not be “morally possible,” since “in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy.”

Viganò, who is a long-time supporter of Trump’s political candidacy, argued in his Tuesday letter that a vote for Trump “means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human vision of society” while at the same time noting “serious problems” with the former president’s declared positions on both abortion and “assisted procreation [IVF],” which he said “a Catholic cannot agree with.”

Indeed, Trump has stated that he would oppose a federal ban on abortion and would mandate insurance coverage for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), both of which practices violate natural law and the explicit doctrine of the Catholic Church.

Viganò wrote that Trump, whom he said “is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state” in refence to recent assassination attempts, represents “the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.” The prelate added that if Catholics were to assist in placing Trump back in the White House, it must become for him “the premise for a more incisive commitment to the defense of life from conception to natural death, the traditional family, the right of parents to educate their children, and to the defense of the Christian faith and the cultural identity of the nation.”

In contrast, the archbishop stated that Kamala Harris, whose party supports abortion through all nine months and aggressively pushes the LGBT agenda, is “an infernal monster who obeys Satan” and argued that a potential Harris presidency would usher in an era of “slavery” which would promote “everything that directly opposes the faith and morals of the Catholic Church.” Describing such a scenario as “the most ferocious dictatorship,” Viganò said America under Harris would suffer “moral, social, and economic destruction.”

Harris recently declined to show at the annual Al Smith Memorial dinner, a Catholic fundraising event which typically sees the Republican and Democrat presidential candidates put aside partisanship to attend the charitable event. Critics roundly condemned Harris as “anti-Catholic” for the no-show and criticized her pre-recorded speech as “purposely” offensive.

During his speech at the dinner, Trump blasted Harris’ snub as “very disrespectful” to Catholics and used the opportunity to call upon Catholics to vote for him this election cycle. Trump also told Raymond Arroyo ahead of the event that he likes the Catholic Church “a lot.”

In concluding his Tuesday letter, Viganò emphasized that “Our Lord must return to reign, and the first way to make Him reign is by obeying His holy law and living in His grace.”

“Let Christ reign in your hearts, in your families, in your communities, and throughout the entire United States of America: this is the only way to peace, harmony, and prosperity for your nation,” the prelate added.

American Cardinal Raymond Burke also weighed in on the upcoming election, publishing advice to the faithful to “pray and fast” ahead of casting their vote.

Offering counsel on “how to vote in good conscience” this November 5, Burke said – alongside prioritizing prayer and fasting that America “will once again serve the good of all its citizens” – Catholics should “study carefully the agenda of each candidate” to see whether they “will limit” evils, “even though he or she espouses morally objectionable programs and policies.”

While lamenting the “desperate situation” of U.S. politics, owing to “the agenda of both major political parties” being “so fundamentally objectionable”, Burke said that Catholics should vote where they find “even the smallest ray of hope” that their vote could positively impact the common good.

“[If] there is even the smallest ray of hope to effect some change in view of effecting ever greater change for the common good, it is not right for us to fail in responding to the ray of hope,” the cardinal wrote, stressing that abstaining from voting is only justified “if no candidate provides any ray of hope of serving, at least in some part, the common good, especially in what pertains to human life, marriage and the family, and the practice of religion.”

Unlike Viganò, Burke made no direct indication of which candidate Catholic voters ought to choose on election day.

Editor’s note: The following text is not an endorsement from LifeSiteNews of any political candidate for office.

Open Letter to American Catholics

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. […]
Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.  

— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

Dear faithful American Catholics,

I am addressing all of you, a few days before the presidential election that will call millions of American citizens to the polls.

Even in conditions of relative normality, the exercise of the vote is your moral duty, through which you cooperate in the first person in choosing the person who will lead the nation for the next four years.

But in this coming electoral round – just as in 2020 and indeed much more so – you are not simply called to choose between two candidates who happen to be on different political sides but who both nevertheless have the common good at heart in compliance with the Constitution and the law. No; in this election you must choose between two radically opposed ways of conceiving the government of your nation: you are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery.

READ: Bishop Strickland: Catholics are called to vote in accord with ‘the truth and values’ of our faith

On one side we have candidate Donald J. Trump, who, despite serious problems in his positions – especially in the matter of abortion and assisted procreation – has as his objective the common good and the protection of the fundamental freedoms of citizens. In Donald Trump’s America, every Catholic can practice their faith and educate their children in it without interference from the state.

On the other side we have a candidate and a party that promotes everything that directly opposes the faith and morals of the Catholic Church. In Kamala Harris’ America, Catholics – but also Protestants – are considered fundamentalists to be marginalized and eliminated, and their children are considered the property of the state, which arrogates to itself the right to lead them astray from an early age in both body and soul. Trump’s America can become great and prosperous again. Harris’ America is destined for invasion and for moral, social, and economic destruction: the most ferocious dictatorship.

Look at your country! Your cities have become dumps filled with derelicts and criminals, drug dealers and addicts, prostitutes and robbers. Your schools are dens of indoctrination and corruption from kindergarten onwards. In your courts, criminals are acquitted and innocents are imprisoned: new ideological crimes are prosecuted, while illegality is tolerated and encouraged. In your hospitals, multinational corporations rule, and you are their guinea pigs to be exterminated or made chronically ill so that you will be their perpetual clients.

Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen are persecuted and forced to fail, while the land is grabbed by unscrupulous corporations who transform it into endless photovoltaic systems and wind turbines to power their data centers and server farms where they collect all your data, your movements, your purchases, and your political preferences. They have gone so far as to tamper with the climate by means of sophisticated geoengineering operations and devastating arson in order to make the global warming fraud credible and impose the green transition, the increase in the cost of energy, and electric cars and scooters. And all this is done based on evidence that consists of lies without any scientific proof, but which are propagated through the servile collaboration of the regime media, ever ready to label any dissenters as conspiracy theorists.

But what until yesterday was dismissed as the result of conspiracy theories is now admitted by the government itself. They take away your sunlight; they poison you by seeding the clouds; they overwhelm your villages and your fields with deadly hurricanes; they kill your livestock and dry up your crops with induced droughts and devastating fires. They aim to control the entire food sector, to force you to eat only what they make available to you. This is what the Agenda 2030 calls for, which has been imposed without any vote by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

READ: This is THE most important issue of the 2024 election

In these four disastrous years of the Biden-Harris administration, we have had a puppet in the White House and a corrupt and incompetent vice president who has never stopped lying and deceiving voters about her past and her future. Power is managed by the criminal deep state – whose names and faces we now know – that is responsible for the destruction of your great nation. And to ensure that the crisis is endless, new war scenarios are continually opening up, in conflicts that no one actually wants, except for those who make enormous profits from them, sacrificing human lives and compromising international stability.

You have seen what the Democrats, that is, the woke far Left, have been capable of in four years. Imagine what they will be able to do if, instead of Biden’s numerous stand-ins, his vice president is elected – in the most scandalous and unimaginable fraud – with her entourage of LGBTQ+ ministers, rigorously woke, sold out to China or the World Economic Forum, sponsored by George Soros or Bill Gates, manipulated by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At that point, dear American Catholics, you will not only have to go to a different rally – as Kamala would like – in order to say “Christ is the Lord”, because saying that will be considered hate speech, and praying in front of an abortion clinic an act of terrorism.

Do not think that these are remote hypotheses: wherever the woke Left takes power, it establishes the most vicious, anti-human, and anti-Christian dictatorship that humanity has ever known. And we know that every time the Left has come to power, it has never left through democratic means.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: we are not talking about two visions that are a bit different but still part of the normal political back-and-forth. No; we are talking about two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable worlds, in which Trump fights against the deep state and is committed to freeing America from its tentacled grip, while on the opposite side we have a corrupt and blackmailed candidate, an organic part of the deep state, who acts as a puppet in the hands of warmongers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, of self-proclaimed “philanthropists” like the criminals George Soros and Klaus Schwab, or of characters like Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs. Their program is that of the global Left, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and ultimately the program of Vanguard, BlackRock, and StateStreet. Their agenda is dictated by the financial oligarchy that controls humanity to the detriment of the people: an elite that operates not only in the United States but also in Canada, Australia, Europe, and wherever politics is held hostage by their investment funds and their pseudo-humanitarian organizations dedicated to the obliteration of Western Civilization.

Behind these people – by now we should know this – are people devoted to evil, united by the satanic hatred against Our Lord Jesus Christ and those who believe in Him, mainly against the Catholic faithful. We want Christ to reign, and we proclaim it with pride: Christ is King! They want the Antichrist to reign, whose tyranny is made of chaos, war, disease, famine, and death. And the more emergencies and crises planned and created by the globalist elite increase, the more that elite has a pretext to impose new limitations, new restrictions of fundamental rights, and new social controls.

Joe Biden, the current “president,” is a servant of this subversive elite and widely blackmailable for the scandals and crimes committed by himself personally and also by his family, beginning with his son Hunter. His “vice president,” Kamala Harris, is equally subservient to the same deep state. And the Democratic Party, to which they both belong, is the expression of the woke ideology that plagues all the parties of the global Left.

Candidate Donald J. Trump, while certainly taking some serious critical positions that a Catholic cannot agree with, represents for us, dear American faithful, in this specific historical moment, the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.

Voting for Donald Trump means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-human vision of society. It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell. And it also means – do not forget – giving him our vote of confidence, so that President Trump knows that the massive vote of Catholics and Christians that brought him back to the White House must become the premise for a more incisive commitment to the defense of life from conception to natural death, the traditional family, the right of parents to educate their children, and to the defense of the Christian Faith and the cultural identity of the nation.

I repeat: the choice is between a conservative president, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan. For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy.

READ: Professor Roberto de Mattei: Catholics can vote for Trump as lesser of two evils

People around the world are beginning to understand the threat that looms over them and their children’s future, and you Americans have understood it too. But even if this time it will be more difficult for the deep state to repeat the fraud of 2020, you must not think that it will resign itself to defeat so easily.

Let us therefore prepare to prevent possible attacks and civil war scenarios from being used to impose martial law and new restrictions, after the attempts on his life from which President Trump providentially escaped.

But let us not forget, dear faithful, that human energies alone are powerless in the face of this infernal display of forces. We proclaim that Christ is King – this means that Our Lord must return to reign, and the first way to make Him reign is by obeying His holy law and living in His grace. Let Christ reign in your hearts, in your families, in your communities, and throughout the entire United States of America: this is the only way to peace, harmony, and prosperity for your nation.

Think of how many of you Catholics there are in the United States! Vote without hesitation, and pray that Our Lord will enlighten American citizens in making their choice and grant victory to those who, at least, have no problem proclaiming that Christ is Lord.

May God bless you all, and may the Virgin of Guadalupe, she who is the patroness of the United States and all the Americas, and Saint Michael the Archangel, protect you.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,
former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

October 22, 2024