Viganò says Leo XIV's Élysée speech reversed Church teaching. What the address actually said

The Enlightenment appears in the official English text as one stage in a historical sequence that begins with Saint Irenaeus and the baptism of Clovis: “With the great thinkers of the Renaissance, and later of the Grand Siècle, succeeded by those of the Enlightenment, France was responsible for significant advances in our world, including the recognition of human rights grounded in the nature of the human person, particularly religious freedom.” Where the English has “significant advances”, the French text on vatican.va has véritables conquêtes (true conquests) and the Italian vere e proprie conquiste. Critics who say the Pope spoke of a “conquest”, as Viganò does, are working from that wording, not inventing it.

On the motto, the address says liberty, equality and fraternity are more than words on public buildings: they refer to “universal ethical imperatives” (French: exigences éthiques universelles) that also find in the Gospel message “an inexhaustible source of inspiration and fulfillment”. The speech returns to the three terms at its close, hoping that France's liberty will grow “in constant concern for the common good”, that its fraternity will “embrace the entire human family”, and that its equality will rest on “justice and charity — not by erasing the differences between people”.

The “milestone” that Viganò objects to is, as he notes, a quotation. The address cites John Paul II, who told the UN General Assembly in 1979 that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “must be considered a real milestone on the path of the moral progress of humanity” (§7).

The same three words also appear in a pre-conciliar encyclical. In Humanum Genus (1884, §34), Leo XIII hoped that the Third Order of St Francis would draw minds “to liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race”, and described a Christian equality that “does not take away all distinctions among men”. LifeSiteNews's S.D. Wright argues that the parallel does not hold, because Leo XIII spelled out the Christian meaning of each term and the Élysée speech did not.

The Enlightenment passage is a small part of the address. The same text says that “the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right”, and voices concern at trends that risk turning science and technology into profit-driven ventures “promoting genetic manipulation, surrogacy, the trade in human organs or the possibility of arranging one’s own death”. OSV News noted that French lawmakers had voted in July to legalise “assisted dying”; InfoVaticana and LifeSiteNews's own news report also read the passage as a warning against euthanasia and surrogacy.

On laïcité, the address says that a Christian in public life guided by a conscience illumined by faith “cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation”. It adds that an authentic secularity (juste laïcité in the French text) “consists not in excluding religion from the public sphere or from education”, but in dialogue and cooperation between the State and religious institutions for the common good. Catholic News Service, on the US bishops' website, reported the Paris leg of the visit, including this passage, as a case for faith in public life.

Viganò's statement does not mention the passages on life and bioethics. It refers to the secularism passage only to list “‘just’ secularism” among the features of what it calls the religion of globalism.

Viganò sets the limit himself: his phrase is the Magisterium “up to Pius XII”, and every document he cites was issued by a pope from Gregory XVI to Pius XI. His January 2026 letter to Leo XIV goes further, describing the post-conciliar magisterial corpus as “in evident rupture with the bimillennial Magisterium of the Church prior to Vatican II” (InfoVaticana's English translation). When the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared in July 2024 that he had incurred excommunication for schism, it listed among his well-known public positions his rejection of “the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council”.

The Church's own account of its teaching authority includes the Council. In his general audience of 12 January 1966, Paul VI recalled the conciliar declaration of 6 March 1964, repeated on 16 November 1964: because of its pastoral character, the Council avoided pronouncing dogmas endowed with infallibility in an extraordinary manner. But, he said, it endowed its teachings with the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium, which is to be accepted with docility and sincerity by all the faithful, according to the mind of the Council concerning the nature and aims of the individual documents. In the same audience he said it would not be true to think that the Council represents a break (una rottura) with the Church's traditional teaching (Italian text on vatican.va; an English translation is quoted by Where Peter Is). The 1964 declaration is printed with Lumen Gentium among the notifications given at the Council. It says that what the Council sets forth without solemn definition, as “the teaching of the Church's supreme magisterium”, is to be accepted by the faithful according to the Council's mind (Lumen Gentium).

Other traditionalist critics framed their objection in the same way. LifeSiteNews's news report set the speech against Pius IX's Quanta Cura and the Syllabus, which condemned the idea that each person is free to embrace and profess the religion that reason judges true. S.D. Wright's LifeSiteNews analysis of 3 October contrasts Leo XIV's conception of Church and State, which it calls “that of Vatican II”, with Pius XII's, which it calls “that of the traditional teaching”.