“Abeunte tibi”: John XXIII’s Glorification of Political Martyrdom and the Eclipse of the Catholic Church
The letter “Abeunte tibi” (14 June 1959) of John XXIII, addressed to Aloysius Stepinac on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal consecration, is a short laudatory note praising his piety, constancy, social initiatives, and sufferings under communist persecution, culminating in congratulations for his elevation to the “Sacred Purple” by Pius XII and an Apostolic Blessing for him and the Zagreb archdiocese. It presents Stepinac as an edifying figure whose trials and social works are serenely integrated into the emerging ethos of the new regime in Rome.
Substituting Integral Faith with Political Symbolism
Already in this seemingly benign text, the essence of the conciliar revolution is present in embryo: the reduction of episcopal identity to dignitas victimarum politici (the dignity of a political victim), the displacement of supernatural categories by sentimental humanism, and the quiet hijacking of authentic Catholic resistance to communism into the service of the nascent conciliar sect.
John XXIII addresses Stepinac as “Dilecte Fili Noster” and exalts:
“in Deum pietatem, vigilis catholici sensus conscientiam, invicti pectoris firmam constantiam”
(“your piety towards God, your vigilant Catholic sense of conscience, the firm constancy of your unconquered heart”).
On the surface, this aligns with traditional Catholic praise for a confessor under persecution. But the letter systematically avoids:
– any explicit confession of the unique, exclusive truth of the Catholic Church;
– any doctrinal denunciation of communism as intrinsically anti-Christian and anti-theistic in the precise terms found, for example, in Pius XI’s Divini Redemptoris;
– any warning against the modernist infiltration condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi and Lamentabili sane exitu;
– any insistence on the social reign of Christ the King, as proclaimed with divine urgency by Pius XI in Quas Primas, as the sole true solution to political and social persecution.
Instead, Stepinac is framed as a moral symbol whose suffering and “charity” can be seamlessly integrated into the new narrative that John XXIII was about to inaugurate: a Church reconciled with the world, with revolutionary regimes, with religious pluralism, and with doctrinal evolution. The letter uses a traditional vocabulary emptied of its traditional teleology.
This is the core perversion: what appears as filial praise functions as the appropriation of a suffering bishop into an ecclesiological project that directly subverts the very Catholicism for which he had suffered.
Linguistic Cosmetics: Piety Without Dogma, Heroism Without Confession
The rhetorical register is revealing. John XXIII selects “safe,” sentimental, and deliberately vague notes:
– personal virtues (piety, constancy),
– pastoral industriousness (more parishes, Catholic Action, works of mercy),
– dignified endurance of injustice,
– a spiritualized interpretation of suffering.
He writes that Stepinac’s forced isolation and separation from the faithful is to be borne with the thought that:
“virtus, non culpa te afflixit; et in tristitia austerum concipe gaudium: nam melius est subire quam inferre iniustitias”
(“virtue, not guilt, has afflicted you; and in sadness conceive austere joy: for it is better to undergo than to inflict injustices”).
All true as a moral maxim—but observe the omissions:
– No explicit proclamation that communist persecution is a war against Christ the King and His one true Church.
– No invocation of the duty of States to recognize and submit to the reign of Christ, as reaffirmed by Pius XI in Quas Primas, where peace is bound strictly to the public reign of Christ, not to vague moral decency.
– No reaffirmation of the condemnations of socialism, communism, and anti-clerical secret societies as restated with terrifying clarity by Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum, where these forces are unmasked as the *synagoga Satanae* (the synagogue of Satan) warring against the Church.
– No reference to the solemn anti-modernist stand of Pius X (Lamentabili, Pascendi) that denounced exactly the tendencies that John XXIII would soon promote.
The language is irenic, carefully non-doctrinal, non-combative in the precise arena where the Magisterium before 1958 spoke with militant lucidity. This is not accidental style; it is ideological program. It replaces lex credendi (the law of belief) with lex affectus (a law of feelings).
Where traditional papal letters wove praise into dogma—using individual examples to reiterate universal, objective truths—John XXIII evacuates doctrinal concreteness and leaves an emotionally edifying, politically exportable symbol. Stepinac is made usable: a martyr-image compatible with the coming “opening to the world,” “dialogue,” and eventual betrayal of the confessional Catholic State.
From Confessor of the Faith to Ornament of the Conciliar Sect
John XXIII underscores that Pius XII raised Stepinac to the cardinalate so that:
“praeclara merita in conspectu eminerent”
(“his distinguished merits might stand out in view”).
But in the mouth of John XXIII, this praise becomes double-edged. The same Stepinac who resisted a regime hostile to the Church is, in this letter, symbolically integrated into the line of “heroic suffering” that the conciliar sect loves to exhibit while simultaneously dismantling the very doctrinal and social order for which such men suffered.
Measured against pre-1958 doctrine:
– Pius IX in the Syllabus condemns the separation of Church and State (prop. 55), indifferentism (15–18), and the exaltation of religious pluralism.
– Pius XI in Quas Primas declares that public denial of Christ’s rights is the source of modern calamities and that States must publicly recognize Christ’s Kingship.
– Pius X in Pascendi unmasks Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies,” condemning precisely the historicist, subjectivist, and evolutionary tendencies that undergird the later “aggiornamento.”
Yet John XXIII, only in the first year of his usurpation, already writes in a register remarkably compatible with the principles these popes solemnly rejected:
– Suffering is interiorized and psychologized;
– the persecuting State is not doctrinally indicted as rebelling against the Kingship of Christ;
– the heroic confessor is praised, but his stance is disengaged from a militant claim of the Church over society.
This instrumentalization is the forerunner of the conciliar pattern: persecutions and martyrs are used as an emotional platform to preach dialogue, coexistence, and the renunciation of confessional States—exactly what the integral Magisterium had anathematized.
Silence About Christ the King: A Deliberate Theological Mutilation
The most damning element in “Abeunte tibi” is its silence on the public reign of Christ the King.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, had explicitly diagnosed the core of modern disasters as the removal of Christ and His law from public life and affirmed:
“Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ”
as the sole remedy. He teaches that States and rulers are bound to honor Christ publicly, legislate according to His law, and submit to the rights of the Church.
Here, John XXIII writes to a bishop persecuted by a militantly atheistic, anti-Catholic regime. This would be the perfect—and obligatory—place to proclaim:
– the objective sin and illegitimacy of laws that persecute the Church;
– the nullity, in God’s eyes, of legislation against the liberty and rights of the Church (as Pius IX protested against anti-Catholic laws and declared them null because contrary to the divine constitution of the Church);
– the demand that rulers repent, submit to Christ, and restore justice.
Instead, we receive a spiritualized truism about injustices and the vague statement that God “permits evils that greater goods may come”:
“Deum… qui mala sinit esse, ut inde maiora bona exsistant”
(“God… who permits evils to exist, that greater goods may arise from them”).
This is true on the level of providence, but here it functions as a theological sedative. The integral Catholic teaching is amputated from its concrete implications:
– no assertion that the communist regime is morally illegitimate in its persecution;
– no call to the faithful to persevere in the full integral faith, rejecting any compromise;
– no explicit doctrinal framing of Stepinac’s endurance as testimony to the unique claims of the Catholic Church over all earthly powers.
This suppression is consistent with the program that would culminate in “religious liberty” as proclaimed by the conciliar sect: civil order severed from the obligation to worship the true God according to the one true Faith, in direct contradiction to the syllabus of Pius IX and to Quas Primas.
To omit the Kingship of Christ in such a context is not a neutral oversight; it is complicity in the dethronement of Christ.
Pastoral Activism as Surrogate for Supernatural Mission
The letter lists Stepinac’s works as Archbishop and coadjutor:
– increase in the number of parishes;
– development of Catholic Action;
– mercy towards the poor, the afflicted, and “those harassed by vexation”;
– “free and energetic protection of Catholic doctrine.”
On first reading, this is orthodox. But several points demand scrutiny from pre-1958 Catholic theology:
1. Catholic Action:
– Under Pius XI and Pius XII, Catholic Action was intended as an instrument subordinated to the hierarchy to apply Catholic principles to social life.
– However, it also became, in many contexts, the channel through which democratic, laicizing, and later proto-modernist tendencies penetrated ecclesial life.
– John XXIII’s selective praise of Catholic Action, without any doctrinal precision, anticipates the conciliar reconfiguration of the laity as an emancipated “people of God” whose activism begins to rival hierarchical authority and doctrinal clarity.
2. Social works:
– The traditional Magisterium never reduced the Church’s mission to philanthropy.
– Social works are ordered to the salvation of souls, to bring men into the one true Church, in the state of grace, under Christ the King.
– Here, they are praised in purely humanitarian terms, consonant with the post-1958 cult of “human dignity” detached from the true Faith.
3. “Catholic doctrine”:
– The letter vaguely mentions Stepinac’s “strenuous defense of Catholic doctrine” without reiterating what that doctrine is, especially in the face of ideologies condemned by previous popes.
– This vagueness is the mark of modernist tactica: retain the word “doctrine,” empty it of its sharp content, and slowly replace its substance under a hermeneutic of evolution.
In contrast, Pius X in Pascendi unmasks modernists for precisely this practice: verbal respect, real subversion. When John XXIII uses watered traditional language devoid of anti-liberal bite, he signals a continuity of words and a rupture of meaning.
Stepinac Between True Confession and Conciliar Appropriation
Aloysius Stepinac’s historical figure is complex, but from the standpoint of Catholic doctrine prior to 1958, what matters is:
– his publicly professed Catholic faith,
– his opposition to an avowedly anti-Christian regime,
– his attachment (at least externally) to the papal authority he recognized in Pius XII.
The tragedy is that John XXIII, rather than reaffirm Stepinac as a confessor of the integral Catholic order, transforms him into a flexible emblem of endurance acceptable to a future:
– ecumenism with schismatics and heretics,
– rapprochement with communist and socialist regimes under the guise of “dialogue,”
– capitulation to religious liberty as a supposed “right,” condemned explicitly in the Syllabus.
The letter thus performs a dual betrayal:
1. Of Christ the King and the pre-1958 Magisterium, by refusing to restate their doctrinal judgments at exactly the point where they are most necessary.
2. Of Stepinac himself, by subtly detaching his suffering from a precise confessional meaning and fitting it into a sentimental narrative useful to the conciliar sect.
The conciliar structures later canonize or extol such figures, but always as a way to legitimize their own doctrinal treason: “See, we too honor martyrs of communism,” while they enthrone principles condemned by those very martyrs’ forefathers in the faith.
Conciliar Symptom: Personalism, Naturalism, and the Preparation for Religious Liberty
Read integrally, “Abeunte tibi” exhibits the early symptoms of the systemic apostasy that would soon manifest openly:
– Personalism without dogmatic clarity:
The emphasis on personality, sincerity, and moral qualities with minimal doctrinal content prepares the ground for later human-centered rhetoric, characteristic of the Church of the New Advent.
– Naturalistic consolation:
Suffering is treated almost as a moral-aesthetic category, rather than as participation in Christ’s victorious combat of truth against error, Church against anti-Church.
– Absence of missionary exclusivity:
There is no reminder that only within the Catholic Church is salvation and that all regimes and ideologies opposed to her are objectively rebelling against God. This silence harmonizes with the trajectory toward ecumenism and religious liberty.
– Subtle desacralization of authority:
By reducing papal speech to sentimental congratulations and vague spiritual platitudes, John XXIII undermines the very concept of the papal office as the infallible and vigilant guardian of dogma, as presented by Vatican I and defended fiercely by Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
St. Pius X’s Lamentabili condemned the thesis that the Magisterium cannot determine the definitive sense of Scripture or must submit to “scientific” or “historical” developments. The new tone of John XXIII, precisely through its refusal to speak with doctrinal sharpness in front of an atheistic tyranny, prepares the mentality that will later accept doctrinal dilutions as “pastoral.”
The Inversion of Justice: Praising Confessors, Protecting Modernists
One of the most striking paradoxes is that the same John XXIII who gently consoles a persecuted bishop under communism is the one who inaugurates an epoch in which:
– the enemies of the faith (Modernists) are no longer pursued and condemned,
– the anti-modernist oath (of Pius X) is quickly sidelined,
– theologians subverting dogma are flattered under the pretext of “renewal,”
– the clear line drawn by the pre-1958 Magisterium against masonry, liberalism, indifferentism, and socialism is progressively effaced.
Where Pius IX, Pius X, and Pius XI saw and named in these forces the organized revolt against God—“the synagogue of Satan,” the masonic sects, the architects of social apostasy—John XXIII’s style anticipates the post-conciliar surrender: from condemnation to conversation, from anathema to applause.
Thus the praise of Stepinac, detached from doctrinal militancy, becomes a mask: the conciliar sect decorates itself with victims of regimes whose ideological foundations it will later tacitly accommodate through its doctrines of religious liberty, ecumenical parity, and dialogue with atheists.
Theological Verdict from Integral Catholic Doctrine
Measured exclusively by the immutable Catholic teaching prior to 1958, several points emerge with crystalline clarity:
– Defect of confessional clarity:
The letter omits the affirmation that the Catholic Church is the only ark of salvation and that States are bound to recognize her. This omission in a context of persecution is a grave doctrinal and pastoral failure, contradicting the spirit and letter of the Syllabus and Quas Primas.
– Refusal to publicly confront communism and its ideology as intrinsically anti-Christian:
While Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris speaks with supernatural precision, John XXIII reduces the conflict to generic injustice. This is a capitulation of the teaching office.
– Use of orthodox vocabulary to cloak a new orientation:
The praise of virtue, patience, “merits,” and “Divine Providence” is employed in a way compatible with a Church in coexistence with error, rather than a Church militantly at war with it.
– Instrumentalization of a suffering prelate:
Stepinac is not held up as a sign that the Church must resist, condemn, and overcome anti-Christian regimes in the name of Christ the King, but as a devout sufferer whose example can be integrated into a conciliatory, depoliticized Christianity.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this document is not an innocent, pious courtesy; it is a symptom and instrument of the shift from the Ecclesia militans to the conciliar pseudo-church of accommodation. It is a micro-manifesto of that mentality which Pius X had foreseen and condemned: the modernist who, while still using Catholic words, empties them of the militant, exclusive, supernatural substance.
The greatest scandal is not what is said, but what is carefully unsaid: no ringing affirmation of the Kingship of Christ, no reiteration of the anathemas against the ideologies shedding Catholic blood, no demand for public conversion of the persecutors. In this silence, the betrayal begins.
Source:
– Ad Aloisium S. R. E. Card. Stepinac, Archiepiscopum Zagrabiensem, quintum et vicesimum annum a suscepto Episcopatu implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025