The Latin text published under the name of John XXIII and titled “Chihuahuensis” decrees the erection of a collegiate chapter of canons in the metropolitan cathedral of Chihuahua: it specifies the number of canons and prebendaries, outlines their dignities (Archdeacon, Theologian, Penitentiary, Administrator), regulates choir obligations and external insignia, permits accumulation of benefices due to clergy shortage, subjects details of endowment and administration to future constitutions of the “sacred prelate,” and suppresses diocesan consultors once the chapter is established, all under a solemn juridical and ceremonial form.
Behind this facade of canonical order and liturgical ornament stands the inaugural signature of the conciliar revolution in Mexico: a juridical act of an emerging neo-church, cloaked in preconciliar language, preparing the institutional carcass that would soon be filled with the spirit of apostasy.
Institutional Ornament as a Preludium to Revolt against the Kingship of Christ
At first glance, this constitution imitates the form of authentic pre-1958 pontifical acts: Latin diction, canonical precision, solemn threats against disobedience, and reference to long-standing discipline regarding cathedral chapters. However, forma without fides (form without faith) is the very hallmark of the conciliar subversion: a paramasonic structure assuming the visage of Tradition while internally reorienting the Church from the supernatural reign of Christ the King to a bureaucratic cult of institutional continuity.
The issue is not that collegiate chapters as such are evil: authentic chapters were for centuries instruments of solemn liturgical worship and support of episcopal governance. The issue is that in January 1959, the one who signs himself “Ioannes PP. XXIII” stands at the threshold of the aggiornamento that will soon canonize religious liberty, ecumenism, and the cult of man, in direct defiance of the constant Magisterium.
To expose the spiritual bankruptcy of this act, we must read it in light of:
– The unchanging doctrine proclaimed, for example, by Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum, which condemns religious indifferentism, liberalism, and separation of Church and State.
– Pius XI’s Quas primas, which commands the public and social Kingship of Christ over nations, not a neutral religiosity subjected to modern states.
– St. Pius X’s anti-modernist measures, including Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis, which anathematize the evolution of dogma, historicism, democratizing of the Magisterium, and the reduction of the Church to a sociological organism.
Measured against this doctrinal plumb line, “Chihuahuensis” reveals itself as an empty, theatrical gesture: canonical brocade enveloping a looming betrayal, an ecclesiastical architecture destined to house a different religion.
Factual Level: What the Text Does—and Carefully Does Not—Do
Factual content in the constitution is narrow and highly technical:
– It erects a chapter of:
– six canons and two prebendaries,
– with fixed dignities: Archdeacon, Theologian, Penitentiary, Administrator.
– It grants precise norms concerning:
– choir habit: violet and black ensemble, rochet with ruby-coloured trim, black biretta with violet tuft, mozetta, etc.
– extra-choral dress (the so-called Pian habit) within diocesan territory.
– It reserves the collation of the capitular dignity to the Apostolic See; the rest follow common law.
– Due to a shortage of clergy, it allows capitular or similar offices to be conferred also on priests already holding benefices, even with cure of souls.
– It prescribes community liturgical functions at major feasts (Nativity, Easter, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart, Assumption, Holy Cross).
– It stipulates that diocesan consultors automatically cease once the chapter is erected.
– It confers execution faculty primarily on Aloisius Raimondi as Apostolic Delegate.
On the surface, nothing explicitly heretical is stated. That is precisely the strategy.
The critical facts omitted are far more damning:
– No doctrinal confession of the social Kingship of Christ in explicitly anti-liberal, anti-modernist terms, despite Mexico’s long history of Masonic persecution, laicism, and the Cristero martyrdom.
– No mention of the supernatural end of a chapter: guarding orthodoxy, supporting the Most Holy Sacrifice of the altar solemnly, resisting heresy.
– No explicit affirmation of the immutability of doctrine against the already swelling tide of “renewal” and “opening to the world,” widely associated with John XXIII even before the formal convocation of Vatican II.
– No condemnation of Freemasonry and liberalism, despite the pre-1958 Magisterium’s severe warnings—especially poignant in a country so bloodied by Masonic regimes (see Pius IX and Leo XIII).
– Silence on sacramental integrity: no insistence that canons must be sound in doctrine, free from liberal and modernist infection, sworn against Modernism per the oath of St. Pius X.
Thus, factually, the document chooses the smallest and safest possible field: regalia and chapter structure—while the foundations of doctrine are about to be sawed through in Rome. In integral Catholic theology, such studied silence in a moment of doctrinal crisis is itself a grave sign: tacet, consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen to consent).
Bureaucratic Latin and the Aestheticization of Apostasy
The linguistic and rhetorical profile of “Chihuahuensis” is revealing. The text is saturated with:
– Legal formalism,
– Minute ceremonial prescriptions,
– Tranquil, administrative tone,
– Severely worded canonical threats for disobedience to the decree itself.
Contrast this with the robust, doctrinally charged language of pre-1958 pontiffs:
– Pius IX in the Syllabus speaks with apocalyptic clarity of liberal errors and Masonic conspiracies against the Church;
– Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, Humanum genus, and Pius XI in Quas primas and Ubi arcano insist rigorously that nations must submit publicly to Christ’s reign and reject laicism;
– St. Pius X in Pascendi unmasks modernist clerics as internal enemies, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and imposes strict disciplinary measures, including the anti-modernist oath.
By contrast, in “Chihuahuensis”:
– The only “gravity” is directed at canonical compliance with a structural decree:
– The text threatens penalties against those who would disregard “our decrees” about choir, chapter, and procedural execution.
– No comparable gravity is directed to defending:
– the purity of the faith,
– the Kingship of Christ over Mexico,
– the condemnation of the anti-Catholic state and secret societies clearly unmasked by Pius IX.
This inversion of emphasis betrays a mentality already detached from the militant, supernatural vision of the Church. We see the seed of the neo-church’s pathology: relentless solemnity about internal paperwork, casual indifference to the assault on dogma, morality, and the public rights of Christ.
This rhetorical decoupling—high style for low content—is not neutral. It anesthetizes. It accustoms clergy and faithful to accept as “pontifical” any text that wears the old Latin robe, regardless of doctrinal substance.
Theological Level: A Canonical Shell without Supernatural Purpose
Authentic Catholic doctrine regards cathedral chapters as:
– Bodies ordered to solemnizing the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary with greater dignity;
– Senates of the bishop: learned, doctrinally sound clergy supporting governance and defending orthodoxy;
– Instruments to protect the faithful from error through public worship and sound teaching.
Pius XI in Quas primas makes clear that all ecclesiastical structures must serve the proclamation and realization of the reign of Christ over societies:
– “Peace will not come so long as individuals and states refuse to recognize and obey the rule of our Savior.”
– The state is gravely bound to acknowledge Christ the King publicly and conform law and education to His law.
The “Chihuahuensis” text, however:
– Gives prominence to:
– vesture,
– protocol,
– allocation of benefices,
– procedural transfer from diocesan consultors to canons.
– Reduces its theological content to routine liturgical obligations on certain feasts, without articulating:
– the doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice,
– the necessity of state submission to Christ,
– the war against Modernism,
– the peril of liberal-democratic apostasy for Mexico.
This is not mere incompleteness; it is symptomatic of a horizontal reorientation.
From an integral Catholic standpoint, particularly instructed by St. Pius X:
– Omitting to confront rampant modern errors in a solemn legislative act concerning a key diocesan institution—at precisely the historical moment when those errors are about to be enthroned in a council—constitutes a grave theological delinquency.
– Such silence suggests that the projected chapter is not a bastion against apostasy, but a decorative component of a system which will, very soon, consent to religious liberty, ecumenism, and the cult of man.
Lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”): a capitular body without explicit formation and mandate to defend true doctrine in a persecuted, Masonic-infiltrated nation, under a signatory preparing the conciliar subversion, can only become an instrument of that subversion.
Symptomatic Level: An Early Symptom of the Conciliar Sect’s Strategy
When read historically and doctrinally, this constitution is a paradigm of how the conciliar sect secured institutional continuity while preparing doctrinal rupture:
1. Continuity of Forms:
– Use of traditional language, seals, curial signatures;
– Maintenance (and even multiplication) of dignities, vestments, titles;
– Invocation of canonical penalties to reinforce obedience to administrative decrees.
2. Mutation of Substance:
– The same authority that signs this text will convoke the assembly that spawns religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality—condemned in essence by previous popes (cf. Pius IX’s rejection of indifferentism and separation; Pius XI’s binding of public order to Christ’s reign).
– The clerical elites formed under such administrative ethos will become the obedient executors of liturgical and doctrinal devastation, precisely because they were trained to equate “pontifical” with any Roman signature, not with fidelity to the prior infallible Magisterium.
3. Institutional Co-optation:
– Cathedral chapters, which should be bulwarks of doctrinal integrity, are left theologically undefined and therefore available to become:
– engines of the “renewal,”
– guardians of the new rites,
– endorsers of democratic and religiously pluralistic ideologies explicitly anathematized before 1958.
4. Replacement of Real Authority with Paramasonic Obedience:
– The document threatens severe consequences for those who “despise or in any way reject” these decrees.
– Yet the same emerging structure will—within a few years—praise “religious freedom,” “ecumenical dialogue,” and “openness to the world,” which Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI had branded as poison.
– Thus obedience is diverted:
– from fides quae semper, ubique, ab omnibus (the faith believed always, everywhere, by all),
– to a mutable, humanistic, conciliatory policy.
This is precisely what St. Pius X condemned as Modernism: the infiltration of a new conception of Church, revelation, and authority masquerading under traditional forms. “Chihuahuensis” is not the explosion; it is the laying of innocuous-looking wiring before the demolition.
Naturalistic Blindness to Mexico’s Anti-Christian Regime
Crucial context: Mexico, in the first half of the 20th century, endured ferocious anticlerical persecution, Masonic governments, and widespread martyrdom of faithful Catholics (Cristeros and others) resisting secularist tyranny. Pius XI’s and Pius XII’s responses to such regimes were, in various ways, marked by the principles later codified in Quas primas and the Syllabus:
– Christ must reign; the State is not religiously neutral;
– Secret societies corrupt governments and wage war on the Church (as Pius IX underlined in his explicit condemnation of Masonic sects);
– Catholics must resist legislation that contradicts divine and ecclesiastical law.
One would expect, in any serious apostolic constitution reordering a metropolitan see in such a context, at least:
– a reminder of Christ’s absolute sovereignty over Mexican public life,
– a denunciation of secularist encroachments,
– an exhortation that canons be champions of the social reign of Christ and of the Most Holy Sacrifice against profanation.
Instead:
– Nothing. Pure legal-ritual detail.
– No doctrinal standard; no supernatural militancy; no condemnation of the enemies already unmasked by previous popes.
– The Church is treated as an institution among institutions, organizing its internal bureaucracy in the shadow of a Masonic, laicist regime, without asserting publicly its divine rights over society.
This is naturalism in practice: behaving as if the Church’s mission consists primarily in self-administration; acting as if the public order of the State and the dogmatic integrity of the faith were secondary or “context” rather than central.
Such an attitude stands in direct contradiction to Pius XI’s insistence in Quas primas that the very purpose of liturgical and ecclesiastical structures is to proclaim and enact Christ’s Kingship against secular apostasy. No pontifical constitution can silently relativize this duty without manifesting rupture.
From Capitular Brocade to Liturgical Ruin
The constitution legislates solemn capitular ceremonies for:
– Christmas,
– Easter,
– Corpus Christi,
– Sacred Heart,
– Assumption,
– Holy Cross.
All these feasts are deeply tied to doctrinal truths that the conciliar sect will progressively distort or obscure:
– Corpus Christi: the Real Presence and propitiatory Sacrifice, later obscured by banquet language and communion-in-the-hand profanations;
– Sacred Heart: reparation for sins and the demand for social Kingship, later evacuated into sentimental “inclusion” rhetoric;
– Holy Cross: the salvific necessity of the Sacrifice, later replaced with humanistic narratives.
In 1959, the same authority that appears to strengthen solemn worship will preside over the process ending in the new rites that gut this theology. The Chihuahua chapter, erected without any doctrinal safeguards, will almost inevitably become a local vector of the new cult.
Thus, what looks like a promotion of solemn liturgy is, in historical reality, the preparation of a prestigious choir for the coming parody: a capitular façade bestowing legitimacy upon mutilated rites and modernist preaching. Abusus non tollit usum (abuse does not take away legitimate use); yet here the abuse is systemic and programmed.
Usurped Authority and the Weight of Canon 188.4 and the Anti-Modernist Tradition
From the perspective of unchanging doctrine, the moral authority of John XXIII’s acts must be confronted with principles elucidated by pre-1958 theologians and canon law:
– A manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church, because he cannot be head without being a member. This is articulated by St. Robert Bellarmine and reflected in classical ecclesiology.
– Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code teaches that public defection from the faith effects an automatic, tacit resignation from ecclesiastical office.
– The Bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio of Paul IV (which informed later discipline) states that if someone has deviated from the faith prior to election, such an “election” is null and void.
When a figure initiates, promotes, or presides over:
– the programmatic softening and reversal of the solemn condemnations of liberalism, religious liberty, and ecumenism;
– the conceptual and practical undermining of the social Kingship of Christ;
– the preparation of a council destined to adopt positions repeatedly proscribed by the Magisterium;
then the presumption of his authority is gravely shaken by Catholic principles themselves. One must at least recognize the objective incompatibility between:
– Pius IX’s, Leo XIII’s, St. Pius X’s, Pius XI’s, Pius XII’s doctrinal line,
– and the direction clearly embodied in the early acts, decisions, and public programmatic language of John XXIII.
“Chihuahuensis” is a minor text, but its significance lies in this: it asks unquestioning submission to its juridical prescriptions while being embedded in a broader trajectory of doctrinal deviation. Under integral Catholic principles, submission is due only insofar as an act participates in the same immutable rule of faith; formal obedience to a structure preparing apostasy is not virtue, but complicity.
Exposing the Void: Ceremony in Service of the Church or of Another Religion?
The constitution concludes with a thunderous assertion:
– that these letters are to be “now and in the future” effective;
– that all contrary prescriptions are abrogated;
– that anyone, of whatever authority, acting against them incurs canonical consequences.
Note the irony: the same juridical register will soon be used to bulldoze traditional liturgy, impose doctrinally ambiguous innovations, and punish resistance to errors that had been condemned for a century. In that light:
– The Chihuahua chapter is not simply a neutral restoration of a venerable institution;
– It is the enlistment of a diocesan elite into the orbit of an authority that will demand from them not only liturgical solemnity but doctrinal surrender.
Pre-1958 doctrine teaches that:
– Suprema lex salus animarum (the supreme law is the salvation of souls), which depends on uncorrupted doctrine and valid sacraments.
– The Church’s laws and structures are instruments ordered to this end; when they are diverted to propagate another gospel, they lose moral binding force as such.
By erecting a chapter without binding it explicitly to militant defense of the prior, anti-modernist Magisterium, this act prepares a noble choir for ignoble songs. In itself, the form of a collegiate chapter is good. But when that form is placed under a usurped magisterial program, it becomes an ornament for the conciliar sect:
– outwardly solemn,
– inwardly alien to the integral Catholic faith,
– an “auxiliary engine” for the Church of the New Advent.
This is the spiritual bankruptcy exposed: meticulous care for tassels and mozettas, indifference to the looming betrayal of Christ’s Kingship; legal threats to ensure capitular obedience, silence about the divine law that binds all nations to adore and obey the King of kings.
Conclusion: Choose between the Kingship of Christ and the Conciliar Masquerade
“Chihuahuensis” stands as a microcosm of the conciliar strategy:
– Preserve appearances,
– Multiply dignities,
– Speak flawless Latin,
– Threaten disobedience to minor decrees,
– All while preparing to overturn, in practice, the doctrinal edifice defended by Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
An integral Catholic reading cannot be deceived by this aesthetic. The only legitimate use of capitular structures is to defend and manifest:
– the unchanging doctrine of the Church,
– the Most Holy Sacrifice as propitiatory,
– the exclusive truth of the Catholic religion,
– the absolute social Kingship of Christ,
– the rejection of modernist novelties condemned in Lamentabili and the Syllabus.
Where a so-called apostolic constitution functions instead as a decorative annex to an agenda that will enthrone religious liberty, ecumenism, and anthropocentrism, it ceases to be a true exercise of the authority of Christ and becomes, however pious in its vocabulary, an instrument of the abomination of desolation.
Source:
Chihuahuensis In Metropolitano Templo Chihuahuensis Ecclesiae Canonicorum Collegium constituitur, die VIII m. Ianuarii A.D. 1959, Ioannes PP. XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025