Quoniam mox is a short Latin letter in which John XXIII congratulates Cardinal Benjamin de Arriba y Castro, Archbishop of Tarragona, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his episcopal consecration. The text politely recalls his supposed fidelity to the “See of Peter,” praises his concern for priestly sanctity and pastoral care for emigrant workers, exhorts him to perseverance, grants him the faculty to impart a blessing with plenary indulgence on a chosen day, and concludes with an “Apostolic Blessing” dated April 5, 1960. In its apparent harmlessness and ceremonial tone, this document perfectly encapsulates the spiritual emptiness and usurped authority of the conciliar revolution’s early phase.
Celebratory Formalism Serving an Usurped Magisterium
The very existence of this letter, issued over the signature of John XXIII and preserved as “magisterial” on the official platform of the conciliar establishment, must be read not as a benign courtesy, but as a symptom of a deeper and systemic devastation. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, several essential points emerge immediately:
– John XXIII is presented as the Roman Pontiff, exercising the authority of Peter in conferring blessings and indulgences.
– Benjamin de Arriba y Castro is treated as a legitimate shepherd, bound by a “tight bond” to the Apostolic See.
– The entire vocabulary presupposes the continuity and normality of ecclesial life at a moment when the preparatory machinery for the revolutionary council (Vatican II) was already in motion.
Thus, even a seemingly innocuous congratulatory letter must be unmasked as part of the paramasonic structure’s self-legitimizing narrative: an usurped authority, distributing spiritual favors and honors while preparing the doctrinal and liturgical mutilation condemned in advance by the pre-1958 Magisterium.
Pious Phrases Without the Cross: Factual and Doctrinal Emptiness
At the factual level, the document is almost entirely devoid of concrete supernatural substance. It consists of:
– A courteous acknowledgment of twenty-five years in the episcopate.
– Generic thanks to God for sustaining the recipient.
– Praise for:
– concern for priestly holiness,
– attention to emigrant workers.
– A wish for perseverance.
– The grant of the faculty to give a blessing with plenary indulgence on one chosen day.
Everything is formally “Catholic-sounding,” but a closer look exposes several grave problems:
1. The letter presupposes as an unquestioned fact that John XXIII validly occupies the Chair of Peter.
2. It presupposes that the recipient, as “Cardinal” and Archbishop, is a faithful collaborator in that same ecclesial structure.
3. It uses the classic language of Catholic piety while omitting:
– any reference to guarding the flock against modern errors;
– any warning against the already raging modernist infiltration that St. Pius X exposed as *“the synthesis of all heresies”* (Pascendi, confirmed by Lamentabili sane exitu);
– any call to defend the integrity of doctrine against liberalism, indifferentism, naturalism, condemned by Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII.
Contrary to the pre-1958 Popes, who constantly warned against errors in even their most “pastoral” texts, this letter offers only soft, diplomatic encouragement. No mention of:
– the reign of Christ the King over nations as a concrete political duty (Pius XI, Quas primas);
– the condemnations of religious liberalism, separation of Church and State, and Masonic infiltration (Pius IX, Syllabus; Leo XIII; Pius X; Pius XI);
– the grave apostasy of the age, the errors of socialism, communism, laicism, or modernist exegesis.
The omission is not a neutral stylistic choice. It is an index of a different religion. The integral Catholic Magisterium understood that shepherds must condemn, distinguish, and guard. Here, the shepherd of the supposed “universal Church” merely flatters and distributes “favors,” while the wolves already tear through the vineyard.
Linguistic Cosmetics as a Mask for the Coming Revolution
The rhetoric of the letter is emblematic:
– Smoothly deferential: “Dilecte Fili Noster” (“Our beloved Son”).
– Triumphalistically institutional: praising “faithful obedience” and “close union” with “this See of Peter.”
– Vaguely spiritual without doctrinal sharpness: references to thanksgiving to God, pastoral diligence, priestly holiness, emigrants.
This style is not accidental. It is a calculated softening of the Church’s supernatural militancy into bureaucratic optimism. Several points must be emphasized:
1. The language of “faithful obedience” is emptied of its object.
– True obedience is owed to the *Catholic* Roman Pontiff, who teaches and enforces the unchanging doctrine.
– Here “obedience” functionally means: submission to John XXIII’s authority, shortly to be exercised in convoking and directing the council that will open the floodgates to condemned errors (religious liberty, collegiality, false ecumenism, anthropocentrism).
– Thus, the term is used to sacralize adherence to a revolutionary program under the appearance of continuity.
2. The emphasis on “closeness to the See of Peter” is a rhetorical shield.
– Pre-1958 Popes consistently grounded such formulae in concrete dogmatic and disciplinary stances: rejection of liberalism, Masonry, modernism, indifferentism.
– In this letter, the same formula is invoked without a single doctrinal specification—only institutional loyalty to the person and apparatus of John XXIII.
– This is the essence of the conciliar sect’s *hermeneutics of sentimentality*: Catholic words, divorced from Catholic content.
3. The laudatory mention of care for emigrant workers is telling.
– The legitimate pre-conciliar concern for workers was always subordinated explicitly to the supernatural end: state of grace, avoidance of sin, sanctification through the sacraments and sound doctrine.
– Here, the social motif appears isolated, perfectly compatible with the naturalistic humanitarianism later enthroned by the Church of the New Advent.
– It anticipates the shift from *cura animarum* (care of souls) to sociological “accompaniment,” a shift already condemned in principle by Pius X, who warned against reducing Christianity to an immanent social experience.
The letter’s polite, polished Latin expresses a reality already infiltrated: a paramasonic structure clothing its mutation in traditional forms while draining them from their anti-liberal, anti-modernist, Christocentric substance.
False Exercise of Jurisdiction and the Abuse of Indulgences
The most theologically charged element of this text is the grant:
“id tibi facultatis facimus, ut, quo volueris die, adstantibus christifidelibus nomine Nostro Nostraque auctoritate benedicas, plenaria Indulgentia proposita”
(“We grant you this faculty, that, on whatever day you wish, in the presence of the faithful, you may impart a blessing in Our Name and by Our authority, with a plenary indulgence attached.”)
From integral Catholic principles:
– The power to bind and loose, to attach indulgences, belongs to the Church through the Roman Pontiff legitimately elected and professing the Catholic Faith.
– A manifest heretic or one who prepares and promulgates a program objectively opposed to prior magisterial condemnations cannot hold papal authority: *non potest esse caput qui desinit esse membrum* (“he who ceases to be a member cannot be the head”).
Writers such as St. Robert Bellarmine, and classical theologians (as summarized in the provided Defense of Sedevacantism file) affirm:
– A manifest heretic loses jurisdiction *ipso facto*.
– The Church cannot be headed by one who undermines her own dogmatic foundations.
While the full juridical evaluation of John XXIII’s status involves a broader doctrinal analysis, this letter sits precisely within the emerging pattern:
– elevation of figures and structures cooperating with the future council;
– consolidation of obedience to a magisterium that will soon contradict the Syllabus of Errors, Quas primas, and the anti-modernist encyclicals.
Thus, the “plenary indulgence” announced here functions as:
– a pseudo-ecclesial currency, used by an usurped authority to simulate continuity and spiritual legitimacy;
– a sacrilegious appropriation of the Church’s treasury of merits in the service of a program tending toward religious liberty, ecumenism with heretics, and the cult of man.
If authority is usurped, such grants are canonically and theologically void; if the usurper is consciously deploying traditional forms while planning to subvert doctrine, then this language is not only invalid, but morally perverse. Integral Catholic faith cannot recognize as authentic an indulgence attached by a pseudo-pontiff operating against the prior, infallibly safeguarded doctrine of the Church.
Silence on Modernism: The Loudest Confession of Guilt
The gravest element in this text is not what it says, but what it refuses to say.
At the time of this letter (1960):
– The warnings of Pius X against Modernism were fully in force. *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi* had unequivocally condemned:
– the evolution of dogmas,
– relativization of Scripture,
– subjection of doctrine to historical consciousness,
– democratization of the Church’s structure.
– Pius XI and Pius XII had vigorously restated:
– the necessity of the social reign of Christ,
– the incompatibility of Catholicism with religious indifferentism and laicism,
– the mortal danger of socialism and communism,
– the poisonous influence of secret societies.
A true successor of Peter, addressing a high-ranking prelate in Spain—a country torn between Catholic roots and the advancing liberal-secular tide—would naturally:
– Exhort him to uphold the full doctrine of Christ the King in the public order (Quas primas).
– Warn against tolerating liberal Catholicism and clandestine modernist circles.
– Strengthen him in resisting Masonic, socialist, and laicist penetration.
– Recall the obligation to preach the Four Last Things, sin, grace, and the uniqueness of salvation in the Catholic Church.
Instead, this letter gives us:
– zero mention of Modernism;
– zero mention of the Syllabus or the anti-liberal encyclicals;
– zero mention of the exclusivity of the Catholic Church as the Ark of Salvation;
– zero concrete doctrinal exhortation corresponding to the gravity of the times.
This deliberate silence reveals a program: to detach episcopal “fidelity” from militant doctrinal guardianship, redefining it as sentimental alignment with the person and policies of John XXIII. Silence on the enemies denounced by Pius IX and Pius X, in such a context, is not neutrality; it is complicity.
Subtle Preparation for the Conciliar Subversion
Several symptomatic elements tie this letter directly into the broader conciliar overturning of pre-1958 Catholicism:
1. The cult of uncritical obedience.
By praising the Cardinal’s “close bond” with the “See of Peter” without specifying orthodoxy as criterion, the letter habituates bishops to:
– accept the authority of John XXIII as self-evident;
– understand loyalty as institutional, not doctrinal.
This paved the way for the episcopal complicity in Vatican II and its aftermath, where most bishops betrayed Quas primas, the Syllabus, and Pascendi by embracing religious freedom, false ecumenism, and the cult of human dignity detached from Christ.
2. The horizontal emphasis.
The mention of pastoral care for emigrant workers, while legitimate in itself, becomes suspicious when abstracted from:
– explicit concern for their perseverance in the one true Faith;
– condemnation of occasions of sin;
– insistence on sacramental life oriented to salvation from eternal punishment.
This anticipates the neo-church’s humanitarian moralism, in which socio-political themes eclipse the supernatural drama of salvation and damnation.
3. The mechanical concession of indulgences.
An indulgence is a powerful act of the Church’s authority over the treasury of merits of Christ and the saints. Placing this act in a context of:
– usurped papal office,
– absence of doctrinal reinforcement,
– glorification of a hierarchy that was about to participate in the conciliar betrayal,
transforms it into a simulacrum: a traditional form serving an anti-traditional agenda.
The effect: the faithful are conditioned to see in the conciliar hierarchy the same Church, same graces, same indulgences—while the underlying doctrine is being inverted.
Contradiction with the Pre-1958 Magisterium: The Hidden Rift
When measured against the uncompromising teaching of the true Popes, the ethos of Quoniam mox stands condemned.
1. Pius IX (Syllabus of Errors) rejects:
– religious indifferentism;
– the separation of Church and State as an ideal;
– the enthronement of “modern civilization” above the rights of Christ and His Church;
– the claim that the Church must reconcile herself with liberalism and progressivism.
John XXIII, by his broader policies and “pastoral” style (already visible here), moves in the opposite direction: conciliatory toward the modern world, reticent in condemning errors, preparing to convoke a council whose very documents (e.g. on religious liberty) will directly contradict the Syllabus.
2. Pius X (Lamentabili and Pascendi) commands:
– energetic exposure and expulsion of modernists;
– strict doctrinal clarity;
– condemnation of the idea that dogma evolves according to history.
Yet, under John XXIII, many who had been censured or suspected as modernists re-emerged as experts and influencers. A true heir of Pius X would have used every occasion—even a jubilee letter—to recall the anti-modernist oath and the uncompromising line. The silence of this letter aligns not with Pius X but with those he anathematized.
3. Pius XI (Quas primas) teaches:
– no true peace or social order outside the public recognition of the Kingship of Christ;
– states and rulers must obey Christ’s law;
– secularism is a plague to be opposed.
Quoniam mox is fully compatible with a Church that ceases to insist on the concrete social reign of Christ and instead drifts toward “dialogue” with pluralistic, secular democracies. The conceptual bridge from this polite epistolary tone to the later conciliar cult of “religious liberty” is evident.
4. Pius XII still defended:
– objective Catholic doctrine;
– the unique salvific role of the Church;
– the gravity of deviations in liturgy and theology.
The early 1960s were already witnessing theological rebellion. To avoid recalling any of these doctrines and condemnations in a letter to a senior prelate is a dereliction inconsistent with the previous papal ethos; it signals a shift.
Thus, even if the letter does not state heresy explicitly, its omissions, tone, and context make it an organic element of a project that the previous Magisterium had already condemned in principle. The conciliar sect thrives on such “harmless” texts, which anesthetize resistance and cloak rupture in the language of continuity.
Instrumentalizing the Episcopate: From Guardians of Truth to Functionaries
Integral Catholic ecclesiology sees bishops as:
– successors of the Apostles;
– guardians and teachers of divine revelation;
– judges of doctrine under the Roman Pontiff.
In Quoniam mox, the bishop-cardinal is reduced to:
– a recipient of papal compliments;
– an administrator praised for organizational and pastoral diligence;
– a conduit for a papally delegated indulgence.
Missing:
– any affirmation of his duty to defend the flock from specific modern errors;
– any reminder of his responsibility to discipline wayward clergy, crush heterodoxy, and resist secular encroachment;
– any reference to his obligation to uphold pre-existing condemnations of liberalism and Modernism.
This is not accidental flattery. It is the beginning of the transformation of bishops into:
– managerial executors of policies emanating from the conciliar apparatus;
– participants in a globalized, collegial, “synodal” structure detached from dogmatic militancy;
– symbolic ornaments in a neo-church whose real doctrinal program is crafted by theologians and committees aligned with the spirit of the age.
By praising “faithful obedience” specifically as attachment to John XXIII, rather than as fidelity to the unchanging doctrine, the letter in effect binds the episcopate to a person and a revolutionary process rather than to the perennial Magisterium. This is a classic technique of every ideological revolution: reorganize the hierarchy’s affective loyalties, then reprogram doctrine.
Conciliar Sect Self-Certification: Why This Letter Matters
Some might object: “It is only a short congratulatory note. Why such a radical reading?” From the vantage of integral Catholic theology and the documented conciliar catastrophe, this objection collapses.
– The conciliar sect constantly appeals to a continuous, organic line from Pius XII through John XXIII, Paul VI, and the later usurpers up to Leo XIV.
– To make this plausible, it curates and republishes documents like Quoniam mox to project an image of serene normality in 1960.
– The underlying message is: “See, this is the same Catholic Church, gently pastoral, traditionally worded; nothing essential changed.”
But when weighed against:
– the anti-modernist encyclicals,
– the Syllabus,
– Quas primas,
– the constant pre-1958 insistence on doctrinal clarity and condemnation of error,
the bland, non-combative, sentimental courtesy of Quoniam mox is not neutral. It is a brick in the façade hiding the internal demolition. The revolution does not begin only with bombastic heretical formulas; it begins with:
– the abandonment of vigilance,
– the replacement of doctrinal precision with humanistic politeness,
– the redirection of ecclesial language from supernatural conflict to institutional compliment.
Here we see exactly that mechanism at work.
Conclusion: Unmasking the Harmless Mask
Quoniam mox, judged by its letter alone, seems orthodox in phrasing and free of direct doctrinal deviance. Yet when analyzed:
– in light of unchanging Catholic doctrine before 1958;
– in the context of John XXIII’s role as initiator of the conciliar upheaval;
– in its studied silence regarding Modernism, liberalism, and the reign of Christ the King;
– in its usage of indulgences and papal authority to consolidate an obedience oriented to a forthcoming revolution;
it stands revealed as an artifact of the conciliar sect’s method: preserve forms, evacuate content, use traditional language to secure submission to an anti-traditional project.
A truly Catholic letter to a bishop in 1960, faithful to Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, would have:
– recalled the binding condemnations of Modernism and liberalism;
– exhorted to militant defense of dogma and the social Kingship of Christ;
– warned against naturalistic reduction of pastoral work;
– subordinated all praise to the bishop’s visible fidelity to the perennial Magisterium.
Quoniam mox does none of this. Its gentle, worldly tone is precisely the problem. In an age of rising apostasy, silence is not innocence; silence is betrayal.
Therefore, from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this letter is not a harmless page of ecclesiastical courtesy, but a discreet emblem of the usurped authority and spiritual disarmament that prepared the abomination of desolation enthroned by the conciliar revolution.
Source:
Quoniam mox – Ad Cardinalem De Arriba et Castro, Archiepiscopum Tarraconensem, quintum et vicesimum annum a suscepto episcopato implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025