Italian archbishop says facing Vatican trial over pope criticism

The 83-year-old ultra-conservative, who was the Vatican's US ambassador from 2011-2016, said the powerful department of doctrine had summoned him Thursday to hear the charges.

In a blog posting he publicised in several languages on X, Vigano said the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith set out accusations "of having committed the crime of schism" -- that is, splitting the Catholic Church.

He was also charged with "having denied the legitimacy of 'Pope Francis', of having broken communion 'with Him', and of having rejected the Second Vatican Council" in the 1960s which set the Church on a modernising path, Vigano wrote.

The retired Italian archbishop said he was facing an "extrajudicial penal trial", an accelerated process.

"I regard the accusations against me as an honour," he said before launching into a lengthy criticism of the pope.

He railed against Francis's welcome for undocumented migrants, his "delirious encyclicals" about climate change and his authorisation of blessings for same-sex couples, and accused him of promoting his allies.

"I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power," he wrote, using the Argentine pope's given name.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, the pope's number two, told Italian media Vigano has "adopted certain attitudes to which he must answer", and the Vatican was giving him "the opportunity to defend himself".

"I am very sorry. I have always appreciated him as a great worker, very faithful to the Holy See. What happened I do not know", Parolin added.

Vigano, backed by an ultra-conservative US church faction, in 2018 called for Pope Francis to resign.

He accused him notably of having ignored sexual assault allegations against a then top US cardinal, Theodore McCarrick -- who was the following year defrocked by Francis.

Vigano had previously been a former governor of the Vatican City state who complained in leaked letters to the pope that he was being hounded out for stamping out fraud.