The document is a Latin letter of the usurper John XXIII to William Slattery, then superior general of the Congregation of the Mission, on the 300th anniversary of the deaths of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac. It praises their charity, extols Vincentian works (missions, clergy formation, Daughters of Charity, lay associations), and urges renewed social and charitable engagement according to their spirit in the contemporary world, presenting this Vincentian model as providentially suited to modern conditions. From the standpoint of integral Catholic doctrine, this apparently edifying text is in fact a carefully polished instrument of ideological subversion: it severs authentic sanctity and charity from the fullness of Catholic faith, prepares the ground for naturalistic humanitarianism, and cloaks the conciliar revolution against the Kingship of Christ with the borrowed halo of two pre-conciliar Saints.
Sanctity Appropriated: How John XXIII Weaponizes Vincent de Paul
Personal Flattery in the Service of a Counterfeit Magisterium
Already the opening lines expose the operation. John XXIII addresses Slattery with paternal warmth, linking his own sentimental devotion to St. Vincent and St. Louise with their solemn commemoration, and places his voice into the celebration as quasi-normative. The entire letter presupposes him as legitimate Pope and his praise as a reliable interpretation of the Saints:
“Quapropter in peragendis hisce sollemnibus vocem Nostram tacere non patimur…”
“I therefore do not allow Our voice to be silent in the celebration of these solemnities…”
Under an integral Catholic lens, this is the first and decisive problem:
– Authentic magisterial praise of Saints is ordered to the confirmation of dogma, to the exaltation of the Cross, of penance, of the supernatural order, of the public Social Kingship of Christ, and to the condemnation of prevailing errors.
– Here, an illegitimate figure at the head of the conciliar sect exploits two canonized Saints (canonized long before the conciliar usurpation) as a moral ornament to legitimize his own authority and his program of aggiornamento.
The entire rhetoric functions as *captatio benevolentiae* for a new orientation of charity detached from its dogmatic, confessional, and hierarchical foundations. In light of the pre-1958 magisterium—Pius IX’s *Syllabus*, Leo XIII’s social encyclicals, St. Pius X’s *Pascendi* and *Lamentabili*, Pius XI’s *Quas Primas*—this is not neutral: it is an early specimen of the pseudo-pontifical technique by which pre-conciliar holiness is co-opted to lubricate post-1958 apostasy.
Selective Memory: Charity Without the Battleground of Truth
On the factual level, the letter evokes real elements: Vincent’s reform of clergy, missions in rural France, care for the poor, the Daughters of Charity, the spread of Vincentian works. But it is what is systematically omitted that unmasks the operation.
John XXIII:
– Speaks at length of social, moral, and charitable works.
– Extols “caritas” as a socially cohesive force.
– Emphasizes the expansion of Vincentian-inspired organizations as a “pacifer exercitus” against all forms of misery.
Yet he remains silent about:
– The absolute necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation (*extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*), dogmatically defined by Florence and constantly reaffirmed.
– The duty of charity to be intrinsically ordered to the supernatural end: conversion, sanctifying grace, the avoidance of mortal sin, preparation for judgment.
– The public and political rights of Christ the King over nations, solemnly proclaimed in *Quas Primas*, where Pius XI condemns laicism as a “plague.”
– The intrinsic link between authentic caritas and doctrinal intransigence; as St. Pius X exposes in *Pascendi*, to dilute dogma in the name of adaptation and human sympathy is Modernism, not love.
This silence is not accidental. It is programmatic. By detaching St. Vincent’s charity from his robustly Catholic milieu—his collaboration with bishops, his defense of ecclesiastical discipline, his fight against heresy, his insistence on doctrinal solidity in clergy formation—the letter produces a sanitized, horizontal figure: a proto-social worker canonized in advance as patron of post-conciliar humanitarianism.
Silentium de novissimis—silence about the Four Last Things, about hell, about the danger of damnation without true faith—is the gravest indictment. A document invoking one of the greatest priests of Catholic reform, and yet not once warning about the eternal ruin of souls outside the integral faith, is already operating in an alien theological key.
Linguistic Humanitarianism: Warm Fog Instead of Doctrinal Steel
The rhetoric of the letter is elegant, at times classically phrased, but its very elegance hides a subversive content.
Characteristic traits:
– Persistent emphasis on “humanissimum ingenium,” “dulce ac salubre vinculum mentium,” “delectamentum et decor,” “multiplici beneficentiae.”
– Caritas is framed chiefly as tenderness, social alleviation, and mutual closeness. The passage about nations drawing nearer through technical progress and requiring charity adapted to vast social spaces is particularly revealing:
“Quodsi technicae cognitiones et artes nunc temporis in audaces progressus eunt… quam maxime egent nunc homines caritatis calore…”
“If technical knowledge and arts nowadays advance boldly… men now most of all need the warmth of charity…”
Where is the insistence—so clear in pre-1958 papal language—that:
– Charity without truth is corruption.
– Works of mercy severed from the confession of the true Faith become naturalism.
– Social efforts without the explicit and public acknowledgment of the reign of Christ fall under the condemnation enumerated, for example, in propositions 55, 77–80 of Pius IX’s *Syllabus*, which reject the separation of Church and State and the reconciliation of the Church with “modern civilization” understood as autonomous from God.
Instead, we see:
– Caritas linguistically dissolved into universal benevolence.
– No mention that care for the poor is ordered first to saving them from sin and error.
– No differentiation between Catholic and non-Catholic; the letter could be read almost unchanged at a philanthropic NGO congress.
This stylistic choice is itself doctrinal: lex orandi, lex credendi. Such sentimental humanism anticipates the conciliar sect’s cult of “dialogue,” “dignity of man,” and “universal fraternity,” condemned in substance by St. Pius X as the program of the modernists, who “make of the charity of Christ a kind of sentimentalism.”
Theological Emptying: Charity Without Dogma, Church Without Militant Contours
Measured against unchanging Catholic theology (prior to 1958), several theological deformities emerge.
1. Charity abstracted from the dogma of the Church as unique ark of salvation.
– Authentic pre-conciliar magisterium: The first command of charity is love of God above all and, inseparably, love of souls ordered to their supernatural end. This requires adherence to the one true Church and rejection of indifferentism (*Syllabus* 15–18).
– The letter: Caritas is a “vinculum mentium” (bond of minds), no longer articulated as adherence to Catholic doctrine but as affective-social cohesion. There is no recall that St. Vincent’s missions aimed explicitly at confession, conversion, doctrinal catechesis, and submission to the Church.
2. Lack of any polemic against the errors devastating the 20th century Church.
By 1960:
– Modernism had been solemnly condemned by *Pascendi* and *Lamentabili* (St. Pius X).
– Ecclesial liberalism, laicism, socialism, masonry had been identified by Leo XIII and Pius IX as enemies of Christ’s kingdom.
– Pius XII had warned against false “new theologies.”
John XXIII, in a letter on Vincentian mission and clergy formation, says nothing—nothing—about:
– Modernism poisoning seminaries.
– Communism and secularism as organized structures of apostasy.
– Freemasonry, which the *Syllabus* and multiple papal documents identify as the armed wing of the “synagogue of Satan” against the Church.
Instead, he indulges in a vague appeal to charity to heal the coldness of hearts. This evasion of doctrinal combat—the very combat which St. Vincent embodied in his priestly reform—betrays the modernist method: eliminate the Church Militant, keep the vocabulary of holiness, and refill it with soft, reconciling content.
3. Naturalistic understanding of “progress” and charity’s adaptation.
The letter speaks of technical progress shrinking distances and drawing peoples together, and calls for charity to be coordinated so as to reach broad spaces and distant nations. Yet he does not reaffirm:
– The obligation of nations to profess the Catholic faith publicly and conform their laws to Christ the King (Pius XI, *Quas Primas*).
– The condemnation of religious liberty indifferentist ideology (Pius IX, propositions 77–80).
This omission prepares precisely the conciliatory stance toward “modern civilization” condemned explicitly in the *Syllabus* 80: the idea that the Pope must “reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” John XXIII’s tone is that of accommodation: progress is assumed as given; charity must merely accompany it.
This is *pascendian* evolutionism: Christian life is adjusted to historical conditions, and the supernatural is quietly subordinated to immanent development.
Symptom of the Conciliar Revolution: Saints as Cover for Apostasy
The symptomatic value of this document is immense. It shows how the conciliar sect’s founding figure operates:
– He invokes a canonized Saint (Vincent) universally venerated in the true Church.
– He emphasizes those aspects easily assimilated into secular philanthropy (organization, kindness, social impact).
– He suppresses those aspects that would condemn his own program: intolerance for error, insistence on dogma, clerical discipline anchored in Tridentine rigor, subordination of all works to the altar and to the Most Holy Sacrifice.
The Vincentian spiritual heritage is thus rebranded as:
– A motor for “social Catholicism” emptied of confessionality.
– A bridge toward the democratic-humanitarian ethos that will explode at the false “Council” opened by this usurper.
This is precisely how the “conciliar sect” functions: it feeds on the capital accumulated by the pre-1958 Church while undermining the very doctrines that produced that capital. It is a parasitic structure: a paramasonic organism enthroned in the Vatican buildings, using venerable names and images to legitimize a new religion.
In that sense, this letter is not innocent hagiographical prose. It is part of what can be called an ideological laundering of sanctity:
– The radical condemnations contained in *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi*—against those who see dogmas as mere evolving interpretations of religious experience, or charity as autonomous from revealed truth—are not recalled.
– Pius XI’s insistence that peace and social order are impossible unless individuals and states accept the yoke of Christ the King is ignored, though it is precisely St. Vincent’s royal Master whom the letter pretends to honor.
In effect, John XXIII proposes a “Vincentian” model that the integral pre-1958 magisterium would anathematize if severed from dogma: a charity that glosses over doctrinal division, that is compatible with religious pluralism, that serves as soft power for the Church of the New Advent.
Caritas versus Caritas: The Only Authentic Vincentian Spirit
To unmask the theological bankruptcy of the attitudes expressed, it is necessary to recall what authentic Catholic doctrine demands, applying it relentlessly to the letter’s content and omissions.
– Caritas is a supernatural virtue, infused by God, ordering man to love God above all and his neighbour for God’s sake; it cannot exist in contradiction to dogma, nor can it tolerate the cult of false religions.
– The pre-1958 Church teaches that assistance to the poor, education, and missions are acts of charity precisely because they are subordinated to the goal of bringing souls into the one true Church and keeping them there.
– Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII consistently teach that:
– Liberalism, indifferentism, communism, and masonic naturalism are incompatible with Catholic charity.
– Any apparent philanthropy that does not lead souls to Christ the King and His Church is, at best, sterile natural goodness, at worst an instrument of deception.
St. Vincent de Paul’s historical practice:
– Formation of clergy according to Tridentine norms.
– Missions that called peasants and elites alike to confession, catechism, abandonment of sin, fidelity to Catholic doctrine.
– Absolute obedience to and defense of legitimate ecclesiastical authority and dogma.
John XXIII’s letter:
– Does not once exhort Vincentian communities to defend Catholic dogma against errors of the age.
– Does not once mention the necessity to shield the poor from heretical and modernist contagion.
– Does not once identify masonry, socialism, secularism as enemies of the poor and of Christ.
– Presents caritas as a unifying, pacifying force that can sit comfortably alongside the ideological currents condemned by the previous Magisterium.
Thus, we face a counterfeit: a rhetoric of Vincentian charity without Vincentian Catholicism. The letter promotes *caritas evacuata*—charity emptied of its dogmatic soul—convenient to a paramasonic neo-church whose project is precisely to dilute Catholicism into a dogmaless, humanitarian, pan-religious fraternity.
The Final Peril: A Sweet Language Leading to Desolation
The danger of such documents is greater than that of open heretical manifestos. They seem pious, quote Scripture, mention Saints, and speak of love. Yet precisely by their omissions, by the gentle displacement of supernatural priorities, they achieve what blatant error could not: they acclimatize clergy and religious to a conception of their mission in which:
– Social works overshadow the Most Holy Sacrifice and sacramental life.
– Human fraternity takes precedence over defense of truth.
– The authority at Rome—no longer guarding the deposit, but engineering aggiornamento—appears as harmonious continuity.
Against this, integral Catholic faith, grounded solely in pre-1958 doctrine, must state with unflinching clarity:
– Any “magisterium” that refuses to proclaim the exclusive rights of Christ the King and the unique salvific necessity of the Catholic Church, while flattering modern progress and humanistic sentiments, is not the voice of Peter but of the “abomination of desolation” standing where it ought not.
– Any appeal to St. Vincent de Paul that does not command the fight against liberalism, Modernism, and false ecumenism, betrays him.
– Any conception of charity that can be applauded equally by secular democrats, socialists, masonic humanitarianists, and the conciliar sect is not the theological virtue of *caritas*, but a counterfeit that leads souls away from the Cross and from the one true Fold.
In this light, John XXIII’s 1960 letter is not an innocuous commemoration. It is an early, polished fragment of the conciliar program: the exploitation of genuine saints as spiritual camouflage for a new, naturalistic religion that dethrones Christ and dissolves His Church into the world.
Authentic disciples of St. Vincent and St. Louise, if they wish truly to honor their founders, must repudiate this appropriation and return without compromise to the doctrinal and sacramental foundations laid by the pre-1958 Church: *non nova sed eadem* (not new things, but the same)—the immutable faith, the integral confession, the militant charity that conquers the world for Christ the King, not for the idolatrous cult of man.
Source:
Cum tria saecula – Ad P. Villelmum sSlattery,tertio exeunte saeculo a pio obitu S. Vincentii a Paulo et S. Ludovicae de Marillac, XX Februarii a. 1963 (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025