He is charged with denying the legitimacy of Pope Francis, breaking union with him, and rejecting the Second Vatican Council. The "extrajudicial penal trial" is likely to result in the archbishop's excommunication and dismissal from the priesthood. Viganò, who has been in hiding for the past several years (reportedly out of fear for his life), apparently did not show up for his trial on June 20. However, he has until June 28 to provide a written defense, or be judged in abscentia.

Archbishop Viganò posted the official decree from the Holy See's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) on his website Exurge Domine (Latin for "Arise, O Lord," from Psalm 10:12), along with his defiant 1,500-word response, in which he states, "I regard the accusations against me as an honor."

"I assume," he wrote, "that the sentence has already been prepared, given that it is an extrajudicial process." Refusing to recognize the current pontificate as legitimate, Viganò regularly refers to Pope Francis by his family surname, Bergoglio.

"It is no coincidence," says Viganò, "that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the rejection of Vatican II: the Council represents the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian 'synodal church' is the necessary metastasis."