The motu proprio “Ad Suburbicarias Dioeceses” of 10 March 1961, issued by John XXIII, suppresses the canonical ius optionis of cardinal-bishops for suburbicarian sees (CIC 1917, can. 236 §3), and reserves to himself and his successors the free nomination of the cardinal-bishops to those historic dioceses surrounding Rome, under the pretext of “changed conditions,” demographic growth, and pastoral needs; it cloaks a cold juridical centralization in pious rhetoric about solicitude for these dioceses.
Suburbicarian Sees Reengineered: Centralization as Prelude to Revolution
From Sacred Order to Managerial Control of the Roman Periphery
John XXIII’s text is short but theologically pregnant. Its core is this assertion, translated:
“We declare abrogated the prescription of can. 236 § 3, which establishes the ius optionis, and we will that the nomination of cardinal-bishops to the suburbicarian sees pertain solely and freely to Ourselves and Our Successors.”
Original:
«…motu proprio ac Nostra Apostolica auctoritate abrogatum declaramus praescriptum eiusdem can. 236 § 3, quo ius optionis sancitur; atque nominationem Cardinalium Episcoporum ad Suburbicarias Sedes unice ad Nos et ad Successores Nostros libere pertinere volumus.»
Behind the decorous curial Latin stands a decisive act of self-concentration of power by the inaugurator of the conciliar revolution: a restructuring of the Roman episcopal circle which historically expressed the ordered, collegial, and traditional hierarchy of the Church around the See of Peter. What for centuries grew organically from canon law and immemorial custom is here swept aside “motu proprio,” under vague references to “mutatis rerum condicionibus” and “pastoralia onera.”
Measured by integral Catholic doctrine and discipline prior to 1958, this is not a harmless technical tweak. It is a revealing step in the dismantling of the visible, juridical, and sacral constitution of the Church in favour of a papal-oligarchic, later democratized, conciliar apparatus serving a new religion.
Factual Level: What This Motu Proprio Actually Does
1. It suppresses the ius optionis of cardinal-bishops regarding suburbicarian sees, a right codified in the 1917 Code of Canon Law.
2. It transfers and absolutizes the power of appointment to these sees into the hands of John XXIII and his “successors” in the same line.
3. It presents this as a pastoral necessity caused by:
– “Changed circumstances” in those territories.
– “Greatly increased population.”
– Alleged difficulty in exercising pastoral governance.
The document:
– Provides no concrete demonstration that the ius optionis harms souls or obstructs episcopal governance.
– Offers no theological argumentation from Scripture, Fathers, or consistent magisterium.
– Simply asserts expediency and invokes curial consultation as sufficient basis.
This is pure positivistic voluntarism: lex est quod Pontifex vult (law is what the Pontiff wills) detached from transmitted ecclesial order. Before 1958, the papal office, though supreme, was morally and juridically bound to preserve the received constitution of the Church. Pius IX, in the Syllabus (error 55), rejects the separation of Church and state; he equally presupposes that Church authority is not a laboratory for arbitrary novelty. Pius XI in Quas primas recalls that Christ’s reign is exercised through the unchanging order He established, not through historicalist improvisations. It is this sense of continuity that the text silently discards.
Linguistic Level: Bureaucratic Euphemism Hiding Revolution
The rhetoric is emblematic of the conciliar mentality-to-come:
– Vague formula: “ob mutatas in territoriis illis rerum condiciones, ob auctumque valde incolarum numerum, … difficilior Pastoralium munerum exercitatio”.
– Not a theological argument, but sociological jargon.
– No mention of *salus animarum* as objective dogmatic criterion; only “difficulties” of administration.
– Appeal to consultation:
– John XXIII notes he consulted cardinals in the Curia.
– This “consultation” serves merely as cover for a decision already ideologically desired.
– It anticipates the later conciliar abuse: pseudo-synodality in the service of pre-decided rupture.
– Self-referential tone:
– Early in his anti-pontificate he stresses his “solicitude” for suburbicarian dioceses; yet the concrete fruit is not more sacramental life, doctrinal clarity, or discipline, but a procedural centralization.
All of this is symptomatic of a naturalistic, managerial lexicon, replacing supernatural categories. Silence reigns concerning:
– The divine origin of episcopal jurisdiction.
– The symbolic and historical role of suburbicarian sees as visible extension of the Roman See.
– The necessity that canonical changes serve and express immutable doctrine.
This silence is not neutral; silentium de supernaturalibus (silence about supernatural matters) is the language of apostasy.
Theological Level: Abuse of Papal Power Against the Organic Constitution
Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur (the first See is judged by no one) never meant that the holder of the Roman See could reshape the constitution of the Church at will. As classical theology (e.g., St. Robert Bellarmine, Suarez) and canonical tradition teach, papal authority is supreme but *ministerial* relative to divine constitution and tradition. When someone styling himself “John XXIII” uses that authority:
– To introduce a rupture without necessity.
– To erode a traditional structure that symbolized stability around Rome.
– To inaugurate a pattern of manipulative governance soon to culminate in the devastation of the Most Holy Sacrifice and sacraments.
—he reveals himself acting not as servus servorum Dei (servant of the servants of God), but as architect of a new regime.
Key theological points:
1. The suburbicarian dioceses, historically entrusted to cardinal-bishops, are not random administrative districts. They manifest:
– The close bond of neighboring episcopates with Rome.
– A fixed, venerable order, expressing the visible unity and hierarchy of the Church.
2. The 1917 Code (Pius X, Benedict XV) does not present the ius optionis as a capricious privilege, but as part of an ordered canonical tradition. To abrogate it “motu proprio” on flimsy grounds inculcates the principle that all ecclesial structures are plastic, available for social-engineering.
3. This mentality is precisely that condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi:
– The idea that the Church’s constitution is subject to historical evolution.
– That disciplines embodying dogmatic realities can be remodeled according to subjective criteria of “modern needs.”
By 1961, such acts are not isolated; they prepare the ground for the conciliar sect’s comprehensive reconfiguration of episcopacy, liturgy, and doctrine. The motu proprio is a microcosm of the larger betrayal.
Symptomatic Level: An Antecedent of the Conciliar Sect’s Program
This document must be read as an early specimen of the paramasonic, post-1958 strategy:
– Step 1: Assert “pastoral difficulties” and sociological changes.
– Step 2: Use them to override standing canonical norms rooted in tradition.
– Step 3: Centralize control in the anti-pontiff and his clique.
– Step 4: Later, deploy that centralized structure to impose revolutionary liturgical and doctrinal novelties.
Here:
– The suppression of ius optionis:
– Strips cardinal-bishops of a stable juridical expectation.
– Makes their link to suburbicarian sees dependent on personal favour and political calculation.
– Facilitates the later emptying of these sees into mere honorary titles, severed from true territorial oversight.
This is not mere housekeeping. It is the gradual destruction of the visible, juridically concrete Roman primacy as understood by the pre-1958 Magisterium, replaced by the absolutist and, paradoxically, soon-to-be relativist structure of the neo-church.
Pius IX warned against states claiming to be “origin of all rights” (Syllabus, prop. 39). Here, analogously, John XXIII behaves as if the conciliar “pontiff” were the origin of all ecclesial rights, rather than guardian of a received order. This is the same spirit: naturalistic sovereignty without subordination to divine and traditional law.
Reduction of Sacred Offices to Political Instruments
By claiming exclusive, free appointment of cardinal-bishops to suburbicarian sees, John XXIII:
– Places these crucial offices under direct personal patronage.
– Opens the way for selecting men ideologically aligned with the conciliar agenda.
– Undermines the organic link between Roman clergy and the Roman Church.
Historically:
– The cardinal-bishops of suburbicarian sees were not decorative. They:
– Expressed the senior episcopate surrounding Rome.
– Participated in papal elections with a deeply rooted local and sacramental bond.
Transforming them into positions assigned purely at papal discretion is:
– A politicization of the highest clerical rank.
– A preparation for the later flood of “cardinals” chosen for their loyalty to ecumenism, religious liberty, and the cult of man.
The motu proprio’s frigid line “unice ad Nos et ad Successores Nostros libere pertinere volumus” (“we wish it to pertain solely and freely to us…”) is not the language of Catholic tradition; it is the language of sovereign voluntarism—exactly the mentality Freemasonic and liberal theories applied to the state, condemned in the Syllabus and in Pius XI’s Quas primas. There, Pius XI insists that all authority, temporal and ecclesiastical, is bound under Christ the King and serves His law, not arbitrary “freedom” without reference to truth.
Silence on Christ the King and the Supernatural End
The most damning aspect is what the document does not say.
Nowhere:
– Christ the King.
– The salvation of souls as the supreme law in a doctrinal sense.
– The divine constitution of the episcopacy.
– The necessity to protect the Church from Modernism, condemned definitively by St. Pius X.
– The reality of heresy, apostasy, or Masonic subversion denounced by Pius IX and Leo XIII.
Instead:
– It speaks a sterile administrative dialect about territories, numbers, difficulties, new norms.
– It reframes a venerable ecclesial institution in terms indistinguishable from secular bureaucratic reforms.
This omission reflects the new religion’s operational creed:
– Replace supernatural combat against error with “pastoral” technique.
– Replace vigilance against Modernism with structures facilitating it.
– Replace Christ’s concrete reign (as in Quas primas: public, juridical, exclusive) with an anonymous governance machine ready to sign concordats with the world.
Where Pius XI thunders that peace is possible only in the Kingdom of Christ and that states must subject their laws to His law, John XXIII, in this act, behaves as a sovereign whose criteria are administrative convenience and political flexibility—preparing, not resisting, the future enthronement of man in the conciliar sect.
Continuity of the True Church Versus the Conciliar Structures
Measured by unchanging doctrine before 1958, several conclusions emerge:
– A true Roman Pontiff:
– Cannot legitimately employ his authority to erode the organic sacramental-hierarchical reality of the Church for reasons alien to faith.
– Is morally bound by previous solemn condemnations of Modernism, historicism, and the notion that Church discipline is infinitely malleable to time.
– When one sees:
– Systematic preference for sociological and bureaucratic pretexts.
– Absence of reference to doctrinal constraints.
– Progressive alteration of structures in a direction later exploited to introduce heretical liturgy and ecumenism.
then the principle articulated by classical theologians applies: a manifest destroyer of the Church’s faith and constitution cannot be its head. Non potest esse caput Ecclesiae qui hostile agit in corpus Ecclesiae (he who acts as an enemy against the body of the Church cannot be its head).
The motu proprio is a small but clear piece of evidence: John XXIII is already behaving as the founder of a new polity, not as guardian of the Catholic City.
Exposure of the Spiritual Bankruptcy Encapsulated Here
This apparently minor legal act typifies the spiritual void of the conciliar leadership:
– No confession of Christ’s absolute kingship.
– No appeal to the binding anti-modernist magisterium.
– No understanding that ecclesiastical law is an expression of dogma, not a toy of rulers.
– No fear of God’s judgment for tampering with the sacred order at the threshold of a revolutionary council.
Instead we see:
– Proceduralism without principle.
– Centralization without charity.
– Pastoral rhetoric without supernatural content.
The suburbicarian dioceses, once luminous signs of communion with the See of Peter, are here silently repurposed into instruments in the hands of an emerging conciliar oligarchy. This reveals the inner logic of post-1958 governance: destroy concrete, traditional mediations of authority so that the paramasonic structure can fabricate its own hierarchy, its own “college,” its own counterfeit magisterium—ready to abolish the Unbloody Sacrifice in practice, dissolve the confessional state, and preach indifferentism, all under the abused names of “pastoral care” and “aggiornamento.”
Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (the law of praying, the law of believing, the law of living): once the law of governance is detached from the pre-existing faith, a new belief and new worship follow. “Ad Suburbicarias Dioeceses” is a small but telling incision in that direction. It is not an isolated blemish; it is an early proof that the regime inaugurated by John XXIII lacks the supernatural consciousness, doctrinal obedience, and reverence for tradition that define the true Catholic Church.
The only Catholic response is:
– To measure such acts against the pre-1958 magisterium.
– To recognize their incompatibility with the Catholic notion of authority.
– To cleave to the bishops and priests who retain valid orders and the integral faith, refusing any complicity with the conciliar sect’s structures and its anti-church laws.
Source:
Ad Suburbicarias Dioeceses (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025