The text is a brief Latin congratulatory letter in which John XXIII, acting as “Pope,” flatters Cardinal Benjamin de Arriba y Castro, archbishop of Tarragona, on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal consecration, praises his attachment to the Roman See, commends his care for priestly “holiness” and migrant workers, exhorts him to persevere, and grants him the faculty to impart a blessing with a plenary indulgence in the “Pope’s” name on a chosen day for the faithful of his diocese. It is a polished, pious-sounding diplomatic note whose form is Catholic while its context is the consolidation of the conciliar revolution’s personnel and spirit.
Hollow Benedictions: John XXIII’s Epistolary Cult of Men
Usurped Authority and the Parasite Logic of Conciliar Congratulations
From the perspective of the integral Catholic faith, this document must be read not as an innocuous curial politeness, but as a manifestation of a usurped authority consolidating its own network and mentality.
John XXIII, first in the line of conciliar usurpers, speaks in this letter as if he were the legitimate successor of Peter, dispensing spiritual goods and apostolic blessings. Yet the unchanging doctrine—summarized by theologians like St. Robert Bellarmine and codified juridically in the 1917 Code—affirms that a manifest heretic cannot hold the papal office nor exercise jurisdiction over the Church, since non potest esse caput quod non est membrum (he cannot be the head who is not a member). When a man inaugurates and architecturally sponsors a council that enthrones religious liberty, collegiality, and ecumenical indifferentism condemned solemnly by the pre-1958 Magisterium, any claim of his to be the voice of the Roman Pontiff becomes objectively suspect and, once manifestly heterodox, null.
This short letter is therefore not a benign trifle; it is a juridical and symbolic act by which the paramasonic, post-1958 structure:
– Confirms one of its own high-ranking functionaries.
– Wraps its self-legitimization in the language and insignia of the true Church.
– Dispenses “indulgences” and “apostolic benedictions” that, proceeding from a line divorced from Tradition, lack the theological foundation of authentic jurisdiction and become instruments of deception.
The very gesture of authorizing a plenary indulgence “in Our Name, and by Our authority” crystallizes the core problem: it is the exploitation of the categories of the true Church to perpetuate an alien, conciliar sect.
Factual Level: What Is Said, What Is Omitted, What Is Instrumentalized
On the surface, the content is simple:
– John XXIII notes that twenty-five years have elapsed since Benjamin de Arriba y Castro was made bishop.
– He praises his “faithful obedience” and close union with the Roman See.
– He commends his concern for priestly sanctity and pastoral attention to migrant workers.
– He expresses wishes for perseverance and invokes heavenly aid.
– He grants to him, for his jubilee, the power to bestow a plenary indulgence once, in his name, upon the faithful.
None of this, considered abstractly, is heretical. But Catholic judgment does not end at surface politeness. The integral faith demands that we examine:
1. The dogmatic context:
– By 1960, the same John XXIII had convoked the council that would dissolve the public reign of Christ the King into laicist “religious freedom,” in direct collision with Pius XI’s teaching that peace and social order are only possible under the open social kingship of Christ (Quas Primas).
– The same current was preparing to relativize the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, which had condemned precisely the “liberal Catholicism” subsequently enthroned by the conciliar sect.
2. The selection and promotion of men:
– The letter treats the archbishop as an exemplary cooperator. In practice, those promoted and confirmed by John XXIII and his successors were, as a rule, men ready to accept the conciliar aggiornamento: liturgical desacralization, ecumenism, the dilution of dogma into “dialogue.”
– The praise of “obedient attachment” to the See is therefore not a call to fidelity to unchanging doctrine, but to loyalty toward the already-operative program of revolution.
3. The striking omissions:
– No mention of the absolute necessity of guarding the flock from modernist errors, even though St. Pius X had just a few decades earlier condemned Modernism as *“the synthesis of all heresies”* (Lamentabili sane exitu, Pascendi), and bishops are strictly bound under pain of grave sin to extirpate such errors.
– No exhortation to defend the authentic Most Holy Sacrifice against already emerging abuses, innovations, and pressures to transform it into a communal “meal.”
– No reminder of the last ends: judgment, hell, necessity of the state of grace, the social reign of Christ, as insisted upon by the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
Instead, what is emphasized?
– Humanly framed pastoral initiatives.
– Recognition in terms of anniversaries, honors, mutual compliments.
– A smooth and conflict-free image of episcopal government.
In other words: the letter functions as part of a diplomatic cult of men, not as a supernatural, combative confirmation in the faith. This silence—on heresy, on Modernism, on public apostasy—is not neutral; it is damning.
Linguistic Level: The Sweet Poison of Human Respect
The rhetoric is polished, paternal, and carefully emptied of doctrinal sharpness. Typical expressions:
– “animi Nostri suaviter commoti” – “Our heart sweetly moved.”
– Praise for “faithful obedience” and “benevolence.”
– Generic mentions of “priestly sanctity” and migrant care, without doctrinal definition.
This style reveals several symptomatic features:
1. Sentimentalism over doctrinal clarity:
– The letter offers emotion and ceremony where the real moment demanded vigilance and warning. By 1960, the enemies defined and unmasked by Pius IX and St. Pius X—Freemasonry, liberalism, Modernism—were no longer at the gates but inside the structures occupying the Vatican.
– Yet John XXIII’s vocabulary avoids militant Catholic categories (*error, heresy, condemnation, Syllabus, Modernism*). It prefers a soft, irenic, bureaucratically spiritual tone.
2. Diplomatic flattery over evangelical parrhesia:
– Instead of reminding a bishop that his first duty is to defend the deposit of faith unchanged (*depositum custodi, devita profanas vocum novitates*), the text caresses his sensibilities and status.
– Such courtly style, devoid of doctrinal severity, is utterly unlike the language of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, or Pius XI, who bound pastoral charity to clear denunciation of errors.
3. Pious clichés masking revolutionary praxis:
– Phrases about “union with the See of Peter” and “Apostolic Blessing” are deployed precisely by one inaugurating a council destined to contradict the very principles solemnly defended in the Syllabus, Quas Primas, and Lamentabili.
– This is not accidental politeness. It is the linguistic method of Modernism: to keep the old words while infusing them with a new, opposed content. This is the essence of the condemned notion of “evolution of dogma.”
Thus the rhetoric itself is a sign: *dulce venenum* (sweet poison). The letter’s tone is a liturgical vestment covering a doctrinally inverted altar.
Theological Level: Empty Gestures from a Vacated Chair
The crux is the claim of jurisdiction and the distribution of indulgences.
The text states, in substance:
…we grant you the faculty that, on a chosen day, in the presence of the Christian faithful, you may bless in Our Name and by Our authority, with a plenary indulgence, those present…
This presupposes:
– That John XXIII is truly Roman Pontiff.
– That he holds universal jurisdiction.
– That faculties and indulgences flowing from him participate in the treasury of the Church entrusted to Peter.
But unchanging Catholic theology, reaffirmed by pre-1958 authorities, teaches:
– A manifest heretic cannot be Pope, because he is not a member of the Church. This is not a novel theory but the common doctrine defended in substance by the classical theologians and grounded on the visible nature of the Church as a unity of faith.
– Canon 188.4 (1917 Code) affirms that public defection from the faith vacates ecclesiastical office by the law itself.
– The Church’s prior Magisterium (e.g., Syllabus of Errors, Quanta Cura, Mortalium Animos) solemnly binds the conscience against the errors that the conciliar revolution, launched by John XXIII, would proceed to embrace and institutionalize.
Once a claimant to the papacy uses his position to initiate a systematic reversal of prior, irreformable teaching—particularly on religious liberty, ecumenism, and the confessional state—his legitimacy is no longer a matter of private pious presumption; it is placed under the objective theological principle that no true Pope can impose or promote condemned doctrines upon the universal Church.
Therefore:
– The indulgence “granted” here is, in the order of reality, void, because it is predicated on a jurisdiction that, if tied to public doctrinal subversion, is not held.
– The invoked “Apostolic Benediction” does not carry the firm guarantees associated with the living magisterial organ of the true Church; instead, it is a simulacrum: form without substance, a juridical costume worn by an authority that has cut itself from the prior rule of faith.
Moreover, even at the level of content, the letter’s “theology” is anthropocentrically thin:
– No mention that the very heart of a bishop’s jubilee is fidelity to the unadulterated deposit of faith.
– No call to defend Quas Primas’s doctrine of Christ’s social kingship against the advancing cult of religious liberty that John XXIII and his successors would normalize.
– No warning against the modernist exegesis anathematized by Lamentabili sane exitu, which by 1960 had already infected much of the theological establishment.
This silence is incompatible with the duty of a true Roman Pontiff as defined by Vatican I: to guard, not innovate; to confirm the brethren in the same faith, not to prepare their minds for its democratic “re-reading.”
Symptomatic Level: A Micro-Icon of the Conciliar Sect’s Self-Construction
This little letter is an icon in miniature of the wider conciliar revolution:
1. Institutional self-legitimization:
– The conciliar sect clothes itself with the insignia of the papacy and curia, using courteous documents, “blessings,” and appointments to weave a seemingly continuous institutional narrative with the pre-1958 Church.
– In reality, it is a *ruptura sub specie continuitatis* (a rupture under the appearance of continuity).
2. Personnel as the transmission belts of apostasy:
– By praising and confirming bishops without binding them explicitly to the anti-modernist measures of St. Pius X or to the anti-liberal condemnations of Pius IX and Leo XIII, John XXIII tacitly signals that such intransigence is no longer required.
– These men become the human infrastructure that will obediently implement liturgical devastation, doctrinal relativization, and ecumenical betrayal in the following decade.
3. Sacral cosmetics over doctrinal decomposition:
– Diplomatic Latin, talk of “holiness,” Marian or pious language, indulgences—all are used to lull the faithful into believing that nothing essential has changed.
– Meanwhile, the same regime prepares documents, councils, and reforms directly opposed to what Quas Primas and the Syllabus of Errors solemnly taught: the necessity of the public reign of Christ, the condemnation of religious indifferentism, and the subordination of states to the law of God.
4. Silence as complicity:
– Most devastating of all is the cultivated omission of the supernatural battle lines. A true Pope, writing in 1960 to a senior bishop, would have thundered against the advance of secularism, socialism, and masonic conspiracies exposed already by Pius IX and Leo XIII, and insisted on applying Lamentabili and Pascendi to extirpate Modernism.
– Instead, the letter offers tranquil bureaucratic “encouragement” devoid of doctrinal militancy. This is not mere omission; it is the psychological conditioning of a hierarchy soon to rubber-stamp the conciliar aggiornamento.
In this sense, the document is spiritually bankrupt: it bears the external style of Catholic Rome while serving the consolidation of the Church of the New Advent, a paramasonic structure that preaches a horizontal humanism, dilutes dogma into “dialogue,” and mutilates the Most Holy Sacrifice into a communal show. It neither guards the deposit nor arms the bishop against wolves; it decorates the wolves in episcopal purple.
God’s Rights Trampled by the Diplomacy of Flattery
Integral Catholic doctrine is unequivocal:
– Christ is King not only of souls but of societies; states must publicly recognize His law (Quas Primas).
– Liberty to propagate error is not a right but a perversity condemned by the Syllabus of Errors.
– The Church’s duty is to anathematize heresy, not to reconcile herself to “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” understood as emancipation from revealed truth.
Measured against this standard, the letter’s world is chillingly horizontal:
– No summons to restore Catholic Spain, or any nation, under the full social reign of Christ.
– No protest against the liberal-secular onslaught, Masonic machinations, or anti-Christian legislation denounced repeatedly before 1958.
– No call to the bishop to act as a defender of God’s rights above the pretended rights of man.
Instead, the indulgence and congratulations are used as candy for docile administrators of the conciliar program. The hierarchy is trained to rejoice in anniversaries and polite praise rather than to tremble before the judgment of Christ, who will demand an account for every soul lost through doctrinal compromise.
It is precisely this displacement—from the absolute primacy of God’s rights to the soft veneration of human dignities, careers, and jubilees—that characterizes the conciliar sect. The letter is a polished shard of that broader apostasy.
Conclusion: A Courteous Seal on the Machine of Desacralization
Taken in isolation, “Quoniam mox” could appear as a harmless ceremonial note. Seen within the unbroken line of Catholic teaching before 1958 and the subsequent conciliar upheaval, it is revealed as:
– A juridical gesture of a usurped office, distributing indulgences and blessings without the guarantee of true papal authority.
– A linguistic exercise in sentimental flattery and institutional self-congratulation.
– A theological vacuum where the pressing duties of guarding the faith, denouncing Modernism, and asserting the kingship of Christ are replaced by vague praise of pastoral activities.
– A symptom of the deeper perversity whereby the external forms of the Church are retained to lubricate the transition into the Church of the New Advent, the abomination of desolation enthroned where the holy should be.
In such documents, the structures occupying the Vatican display their method: retain the Latin, the style, the epistolary courtesies, while quietly severing any real continuity with the anti-liberal, anti-modernist, Christocentric, and monarchic Catholic order. It is precisely because the letter sounds “pious enough” that it is so dangerous: it anesthetizes the faithful and clergy while the foundations are being demolished.
Source:
Quoniam mox, Epistula ad Cardinalem De Arriba et Castro, quintum et vicesimum annum a suscepto episcopato implentem, d. 5 m. Aprilis a. 1960, Ioannes PP. XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025