The document under review is an apostolic constitution of John XXIII, dated 9 March 1959, by which the existing Diocese of Orihuela in Spain is granted a concathedral in Alicante (St Nicholas) and its title expanded to Oriolensis-Lucentina. It outlines juridical provisions: extension of the diocesan name, elevation of St Nicholas to concathedral status with corresponding rights and duties, residence faculty for the bishop in Alicante, canonical functions for clergy there, and a standard curial clause declaring the act perpetually binding and nullifying all contrary dispositions.
Canonical Cosmetics in the Service of an Emerging Counter-Church
From Honouring Catholic Cities to Instrumentalising Structures
At first glance, this text appears as a minor administrative measure: a recognition of the Catholic heritage of Alicante and a practical rebalancing of diocesan life between Orihuela and a major urban centre. Yet precisely here its gravity lies: beneath the courteous curial Latin and conventional phrases about *maior Dei gloria* (“the greater glory of God”), the act is a paradigmatic specimen of how the nascent conciliar revolution proceeds—through apparently harmless, “pastoral” restructuring that silently subordinates ecclesiastical order to political, national, and eventually globalist designs.
Several central elements expose this trajectory:
– The constitutive motivation is not doctrinal, sacramental, or missionary, but sociological and honorific: the city “distinguished for a long time” in religious initiatives is “worthy” of juridical enhancement. The logic is horizontal and political, not supernatural.
– The whole act is bound explicitly to the Concordat of 27 August 1953 with Spain, invoking secular treaty frameworks as a decisive reference point in a matter that touches the very configuration of the episcopal see.
– The exaggerated, almost absolutist self-assertion of John XXIII’s personal will and punitive threats is juxtaposed with the purely ceremonial and bureaucratic content, revealing a legal voluntarism detached from the integral Catholic end: defense of the true faith and salvation of souls.
What looks like a simple concathedral decree becomes a small but eloquent sign of a paramasonic, statist, and anthropocentric mentality already operative in 1959, preparing the later conciliar sect that would enthrone religious liberty, ecumenism, and the cult of man against the teachings of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
Factual Reordering: Juridical Precision Without Supernatural Finality
On the factual level, the constitution decrees:
– The diocesan title changes to Oriolensis-Lucentina; bishop and diocese will bear both names.
– The cathedral dignity of Orihuela is preserved; the church of St Nicholas in Alicante is raised to concathedral rank “with the rights and honors, burdens and obligations proper to such sacred edifices.”
– The Bishop of Orihuela is granted the right to reside in Alicante whenever he wishes.
– Canons and beneficiaries serving in Alicante are authorized to exercise their canonical functions in the concathedral.
– Delegation and execution details are entrusted to the Apostolic Nuncio in Spain; the usual clauses of authenticity, derogation of contrary norms, and threat of canonical penalties close the act.
In itself, the Church has always possessed the authority to erect, divide, and reconfigure dioceses. That power is not in question. What is devastating is the complete absence of any explicit supernatural criterion governing this exercise—no mention of:
– the needs of the *salus animarum* (salvation of souls),
– the strengthening of the preaching of the integral faith,
– the defense against heresy, liberalism, socialism, or Freemasonry (though Pius IX had unmasked these as the “synagogue of Satan” assaulting the Church),
– the promotion of the Most Holy Sacrifice and sacramental life according to timeless doctrine.
Instead, the decisive motives are:
“urbes… quae ob civium praesertim religiosa incepta longo iam tempore nitent, dignae sane sunt quae celebrentur, iustis tributis honoribus, privilegiis et iuribus factis”
(“those cities of the Catholic Church which, especially by reason of the religious initiatives of their citizens, have long been distinguished, are indeed worthy to be honored, by just tributes of honors, privileges and rights”).
This phrasing relocates the axis: ecclesiastical decisions are presented as rewards, civil “distinctions” for cities and their initiatives. The Church appears as distributor of symbolic decorations. There is no reminder that every honor within the Church exists to proclaim the Kingship of Christ and the unicity of the Catholic religion, as Pius XI thunders in Quas Primas: genuine peace and order flow only when individuals and states acknowledge Christ’s social reign and submit public life to His law.
Here, instead, the emerging style: decorative, horizontal, deferential to civic prestige—a proto-conciliar mentality.
Linguistic Symptoms: The Bureaucratic Mask of a New Ecclesiology
The rhetoric is revealing precisely in its omissions:
1. The text is saturated with canonical formalism: *decernimus et iubemus*; nullity clauses; exhaustive legal assurances of validity and enforceability.
2. The adjectives and motivations are moralistic and human-centered:
– “perillustri urbi” (most illustrious city),
– “dignae… quae celebrentur” (worthy to be celebrated),
– focus on “privilegia et iura” (privileges and rights).
3. Christ the King, the Cross, sin, grace, judgment, hell, doctrinal integrity—the living core of Catholic supernatural language—are conspicuously absent.
This is not an accidental silence. Language shapes theology. By 1959, under John XXIII, the curial idiom shifts toward:
– Administrative optimization rather than dogmatic guardianship.
– “Recognition” of communities and their “rights” rather than assertion of divine claims over nations.
– Harmonization with secular treaties rather than bold reaffirmation that civil power must submit to the Church in matters touching religion (Syllabus, propositions 19, 39, 55 rejected).
When an ecclesiastical act that redefines a diocesan structure speaks like a notarial adjustment between a religious NGO and a nation state, without confessing the Kingship of Christ and the unique salvific mandate of the Church, it is not neutral. It broadcasts an ecclesiology in which the Church is no longer the militantly triumphant and teaching society identified by Pius IX as a “true and perfect society, endowed with proper and perpetual rights,” but an institution negotiating prestige and presence in the framework of state concordats.
Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) has its juridical analogy: *lex ordinandi, lex credendi*. When the law books and constitutions are written in the grammar of human honors and civil compatibility, the faith they reflect is already compromised.
Theological Deconstruction: Ecclesiastical Power Emptied of Dogmatic Content
Measured against the integral Catholic doctrine prior to 1958, this constitution manifests several grave deficiencies, even if its material content is limited.
1. Subjection to Secular Agreements as Normative Reference
The text underscores that all has been done “rite servatis sollemnibus Conventionibus… inter Sanctam Sedem et Hispanicam Nationem initis” (duly observing the conventions concluded between the Holy See and the Spanish Nation).
Properly understood, concordats are tools, not sources of normativity over divine constitution. Yet here the prominence of the 1953 Concordat in a structural ecclesiastical act signals a reversed hierarchy: what should be a unilateral exercise of spiritual sovereignty is rhetorically chained to human accords.
Pius IX in the Syllabus (e.g., condemned propositions 39-42, 44-47, 55) vigorously rejects the idea that the state defines the rights of the Church, controls ecclesiastical acts, or imposes conditions on her governance. The authentic Magisterium asserts: the Church is free, independent, and superior in her own order; public law must conform to her, not she to it.
By internalizing concordatarian language as a quasi-condition of validity, this constitution is one more brick in the road toward the later enthronement of “religious freedom” in Dignitatis Humanae and the servile posture of the neo-church before Masonic states.
2. Erasure of the Supernatural End: Salus Animarum Silenced
The supreme law of the Church is *salus animarum suprema lex* (the salvation of souls is the supreme law). Pre-1958 popes constantly frame jurisdictional acts within this horizon:
– Pius XI in Quas Primas roots liturgical and juridical determinations in restoring Christ’s reign against laicism.
– St Pius X in Pascendi and the anti-modernist oath insists that every ecclesial decision must guard the deposit, reject evolutionism, and defend the faithful from doctrinal corruption.
In this 1959 act, the decisive note is civic “dignity” and honoring initiatives. Not once is the purpose stated as:
– safeguarding Catholic doctrine pure and integral,
– providing more effective preaching and catechesis against errors,
– defending the faithful of Alicante from liberal, socialist, or modernist contagion.
The entire supernatural dimension is assumed, never confessed. This “assumed but not confessed” method is precisely modernist: keep formulas externally intact when necessary, empty them of their dogmatic content in practice, and substitute sociological and psychological motives.
3. Monarchical Legalism Without Catholic Substance
The constitution concludes with the classical harshness of papal acts:
“Quapropter si quis… contra egerit ac Nos ediximus, id prorsus irritum atque inane haberi iubemus… si quis vel spreverit vel quoquo modo detrectaverit, sciat se poenas esse subiturum…”
(“Therefore, if anyone… acts against what we have decreed, we order that it be held as completely null and void… whoever would despise or in any way reject these decrees, let him know that he will incur the penalties established by law for those who do not obey the orders of Supreme Pontiffs.”)
Historically, such formulae defended serious matters: doctrinal definitions, major disciplinary norms, protection of ecclesiastical freedom. Here they weaponize juridical absolutism to shield a purely honorific administrative change.
Thus, the model of authority is inverted:
– When previous popes condemned liberalism, naturalism, modernism, Freemasonry—errors touching eternal salvation—the world, and tragically many clergy, treated those decrees as optional.
– When John XXIII adjusts a diocesan name and grants residential concessions, disobedience is threatened with canonical penalties as if opposing a dogmatic bull.
This reveals not true papal monarchy exercised for God’s glory, but an increasingly voluntaristic regime where the “pontiff” deploys supreme authority for superficial rearrangements while preparing to relativize in practice the solemn condemnations of his predecessors.
Such use of authority for secondary, political, and symbolic moves, while the gravest doctrinal dangers (already exposed by Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi) are not even mentioned, is itself a symptom of spiritual decay.
Silences That Accuse: No Word Against the Enemies Within
The most damning aspect of this constitution is what it does not say.
At the very moment when:
– Modernist theology (condemned as the “synthesis of all heresies” by St Pius X) is re-emerging in European faculties;
– Biblical criticism, liturgical experimentation, and ecumenical relativism advance;
– Masonic and socialist networks continue to undermine Catholic states;
this act:
– offers no warning against doctrinal subversion in Spain,
– says nothing about the integral Tridentine faith, the Most Holy Sacrifice, the need for confession and penance,
– does not recall that cities and dioceses are honored only when they publicly profess Christ’s Kingship and reject religious indifferentism.
Pius XI in Quas Primas interprets secularism as “public apostasy” and institutes the feast of Christ the King to condemn it and call states back to submission to Christ. Pius IX in the Syllabus unmasks liberal Catholicism and Masonic ideologies. St Pius X warns that those who oppose his anti-modernist magisterium incur excommunication and follow the path of heresy.
By contrast, this 1959 constitution manifests the early style of the “Church of the New Advent”: ceremonies, honorary titles, structural adaptation, diplomatic correctness—without militant confession of the unchanging truth. This calculated silence is not pastoral prudence; it is the quiet cancellation of the Church’s prophetic voice, soon to be fully expressed in the conciliar cult of “dialogue,” “human dignity,” and “religious liberty.”
Symptomatic Revelation: Incremental Construction of the Conciliar Sect
This apparently minor text is symptomatic in four key respects.
1. Territorial and Symbolic Preparation for a New Ecclesiology
Expanding titles and multiplying concathedrals mirrors a later pattern: inflation of episcopal conferences, councils, commissions, and supranational organisms that dilute the clear, monarchical, and sacrificial structure of the Church.
It accustoms clergy and laity to view ecclesial identity through:
– civic prominence,
– administrative centrality,
– shared titles and “recognitions,”
rather than through the unambiguous, divinely instituted bond of a bishop teaching the integral faith in unity with an orthodox Roman Pontiff.
2. Cozy Integration with the State
By emphasizing compliance with the 1953 Concordat in such a minor act, the document prefigures the later betrayal in which the post-1958 paramasonic structure will:
– accept the secular state’s religious neutrality,
– renounce claims to the exclusive truth of the Catholic religion in the public forum,
– seek security and influence through treaties instead of the supernatural authority of Christ the King.
The condemned proposition 80 of the Syllabus (“The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization”) becomes, de facto, the guiding praxis. Here, under a still-traditional facade, we see the Church’s machinery bending itself to the categories of state and prestige.
3. Personalist Voluntarism as a Prelude to Doctrinal Revolution
The emphatic assertion that all contrary provisions are void and disobedience punishable reveals an incipient attitude: supreme power as license to redesign secondary elements at will, without reference to the organic continuity of discipline ordered to dogma.
Once that voluntarist model is accepted, the step from “I decree a concathedral” to “I decree a new liturgy,” “I decree new ecumenical praxis,” “I decree religious liberty,” becomes methodologically natural.
Against this, the traditional popes teach *non nova, sed nove* (not new things, but in a new way), never evolution of dogma, never rupture with predecessors. St Pius X’s Lamentabili condemns the notion that dogmas are mutable expressions of religious experience. The emerging conciliar apparatus, prepared by acts like this, will soon behave as if precisely that condemned modernist proposition were true.
4. Replacement of Militant Catholicism with Harmless Ceremonialism
Orihuela and Alicante had real Catholic history: battles against Islam, defense of the faith, martyrs, missionaries. An integral Catholic pontiff would seize such a decree to:
– recall the city to reject secularism and socialism,
– command the clergy to preach against errors,
– explicitly submit civic life to the Social Kingship of Christ.
Instead, the document offers:
“iustis tributis honoribus, privilegiis et iuribus factis”
(“just tributes of honors, privileges and rights granted”)
— a language of decoration, not conversion; of prestige, not penance. This is the spirituality of the neo-church: solemn formulas emptied of spiritual combat, preparing the faithful to accept, without resistance, the later liturgical revolution and doctrinal apostasy.
Integral Catholic Response: Reclaiming Authority from the Neo-Church
From the perspective of the unchanging Catholic Magisterium before 1958, several firm conclusions follow:
– Ecclesiastical acts that align structurally and rhetorically with secular concordats, civic prestige, and purely human considerations, while muting the proclamation of Christ’s Kingship and the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church, are deeply disordered.
– The authority claimed in such documents is to be understood in light of the doctrine that a manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church or a member of it, as explained by St Robert Bellarmine and reflected in canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code. When the line of “popes” beginning with John XXIII progressively contradicts the Syllabus, Pascendi, Quas Primas, and the anti-modernist oath, they unmask themselves as external to the true hierarchy.
– Genuine bishops and priests are those who maintain fidelity to the pre-1958 faith, doctrine, and sacraments, independent of the paramasonic structures that have occupied the Vatican and transformed dioceses into administrative districts of a humanistic federation.
Therefore, measures such as the elevation of concathedrals or changes of diocesan titles, when enacted within a system already orienting itself towards modernist, ecumenical, and liberal ideology, cannot be naively received as neutral. They form part of the gradual substitution of the visible Catholic order with a counterfeit, in which the language of canonical exactitude veils the evaporation of supernatural mission.
The integral Catholic must:
– judge every such act by the immutable standard set by Pius IX, Leo XIII, St Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII;
– refuse to be impressed by decorative reforms that do not explicitly serve the reign of Christ the King and the defense of dogma;
– recognize that the same voluntaristic authority used here for trivial restructurings would soon be wielded to introduce rites and teachings that strike at the heart of the faith.
Contra factum non datur argumentum (against a fact there is no argument): when authority is expended to polish facades while remaining silent about modernism, Freemasonry, and secular apostasy, we are not witnessing the vigilant governance of the Bride of Christ, but the managerial activity of structures preparing the universal enthronement of error.
Source:
Oriolensis – Constitutio Apostolica in Oriolensi Dioecesi concathedralis aedes conditur, eidemque dioecesi « Lucentina » denominatio adiungitur, d. 9 m. Martii a. 1959, Ioannes PP. XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025