The document is a short Latin letter of 13 February 1963 in which John XXIII, addressing Giacomo Lercaro in Bologna on the fifth centenary of St. Catherine of Bologna’s death, offers “benevolent” wishes for the commemorations, praises the traditional local devotion to the saint, briefly recalls her virtues, mystical gifts, writings, and artistic talents, and imparts his “Apostolic Blessing” to Lercaro, clergy, religious, and faithful taking part in the celebrations.
Celebrating Sanctity While Advancing Apostasy: John XXIII’s Hollow Praise of St. Catherine of Bologna
Invocation of a Saint as a Cosmetic Veil for the Conciliar Revolution
From the first sentence John XXIII wraps himself in the authority of an authentic pre-Tridentine saint in order to bestow a spurious legitimacy on his own ministry and on the activities of Giacomo Lercaro, one of the principal engineers of the liturgical devastation later unleashed upon the faithful.
He writes that he “very much desires” that the jubilee solemnities “bear a happy course and produce rich and not passing fruits of piety,” and that devotion to St. Catherine—“by antonomasia called the Saint” in Bologna—may be enkindled more vividly as her virtues are recalled and her patronage implored for the city. He extols Catherine as first abbess of the Poor Clares Corpus Domini monastery, mistress of the “interior warfare,” a model of asceticism, mystical gifts, and liberal arts, and applies to her St. Cyprian’s words about virgins as honor and ornament of the Church.
All of this, considered materially and in isolation, would be unobjectionable if issuing from the mouth of a true Roman Pontiff continuing the integral tradition. The veneration of a fifteenth-century Poor Clare mystic wholly belongs to the supernatural, ascetical, sacrificial universe of the *Ecclesia sancta*.
Yet precisely here lies the central contradiction: John XXIII, the inaugurator of the conciliar revolution, is invoking St. Catherine as an ornament while systematically laboring to undermine the doctrinal, liturgical, and ascetical substance that formed her. The letter is a pious mask stretched over a program of subversion.
It is necessary therefore to unmask the underlying strategy at four levels: factual, linguistic, theological, and symptomatic.
Selective Hagiography Detached from the Substance of the Faith
On the factual level, the letter’s praise of St. Catherine is partial and instrumental.
John XXIII recalls that:
“the virtues, works, merits of the sacred virgin… will be recounted, who is an illustrious column and ornament of Bologna… peritissima militiae interioris magistra (most skilled mistress of interior warfare).”
But he is totally silent on what this “interior warfare” concretely means in Catholic terms:
– no mention of *mortal sin*, *penance*, *fear of God*, *judgment*, *hell*;
– no mention of the *Most Holy Sacrifice* as propitiatory, which nourished her;
– no mention of *strict enclosure*, *austerity*, *poverty*, *obedience*, whereby she crucified the world in herself;
– no mention of the duty of public and social subordination to Christ the King which defined the civilization in which she became a saint.
He speaks of “abundant fruits of piety” but never identifies piety as adherence to the integral Catholic faith and sacramental order defined against error. It is an aestheticized cult of virtues, safely detached from dogmatic clarity and from the uncompromising supernatural realism of the saints.
This omission is not accidental. It corresponds perfectly to the modernist tactic condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi dominici gregis: to retain Catholic vocabulary, devotions, and saints as emotive symbols, while draining them of their doctrinal density and harnessing them for a new religion. When integral doctrine is not explicitly reaffirmed, and when the context is a program that elsewhere relativizes it, such silence becomes an implicit falsification.
St. Catherine was a Poor Clare of rigorous Franciscan observance, of severe penance and Eucharistic adoration, formed by a Church that anathematized religious indifferentism, liberalism, and naturalism. To invoke her while preparing the aggiornamento that would enthrone precisely these condemned errors is an act of spiritual fraud.
The Language of Harmless Devotion: Pious Sentiment as Sedative
Linguistically, the letter is drenched in soft, irenic, and almost sugary rhetoric. It is revealing to examine its tone:
– “bene ominatis verbis,” “salutary prayers,” “happy course,” “rich and not passing fruits of piety,” “sweet fragrance of the lily,” “benevolent countenance,” “present helps and consolations,” “durable and sweet remembrance.”
Not one word is polemical against sin; not one is militant against heresy; not one warns of the stakes of salvation and damnation. The rhetorical field is purely horizontal: civic pride (Bologna’s “column and ornament”), cultural admiration (arts, letters), and generic “piety.”
This is diametrically opposed to the language of pre-1958 papal Magisterium when speaking of saints. When Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King in Quas primas, he denounced laicism as a “plague,” the rejection of Christ’s social reign as the source of war and dissolution, and he ordered the feast precisely to condemn public apostasy and proclaim that “peace will not be given… unless individuals and states recognize and practically honor the royal rights of Christ” (cf. Quas primas). That is Catholic language: clear, judicial, supernatural, public.
Here, instead, John XXIII reduces St. Catherine’s example to a vague encouragement that “many may be led to sanctity of Christian discipline and be urged to pursue justice, piety, faith.” Justice, piety, faith—without specifying that justice first of all to Almighty God, *pietas* as adherence to revealed dogma, faith as theological virtue assenting to definite, immutable truths under pain of heresy.
Such cautious generalities function, in practice, as a liturgical-psychological sedative: the faithful hear the familiar music of saints and virtues, and are thus disarmed, made docile to the ongoing revolution. The bureaucratically benign tone betrays the modernist mentality: religion must be consoling, inclusive, non-condemnatory; saints are inspirational figures, not judges of ages.
Saints Torn from the Social Kingship of Christ
On the theological level, the crucial sin of omission is the total absence of any reference to the public reign of Christ, to the objective rights of God over Bologna and over civil society, and to the duty of city and state to submit to the law of Christ and His Church.
St. Catherine lived and died in a Christendom where, despite defects, the social order recognized the Church’s jurisdiction. Pius XI, articulating the perennial doctrine, taught that:
– Christ’s kingdom “extends not only to individuals but also to families and states”;
– rulers and governments have the “duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him”;
– laws must be conformed to the divine law, otherwise authority’s foundation is destroyed (Quas primas).
John XXIII, writing at a time when laicism and Masonic forces—as Pius IX exposed in the Syllabus and subsequent allocutions—were everywhere enthroned and the Church was under escalating attack, chooses to say nothing about:
– the condemned liberal thesis that the state must be religiously neutral (Syllabus, prop. 55);
– the secularization of laws and schools (props. 39–48);
– the denial of Christ’s social kingship (cf. props. 77–80).
Instead, he speaks solely of the saint’s “patronage” over “her city,” as a kind of spiritual mascot of Bologna’s civic identity, without reminding magistrates and people of their obligation to bend the knee to Christ in public law, education, and institutions.
This silence is again doctrinally charged. It prepares the ground for the later conciliar exaltation of religious liberty and the burial of the thesis of the Catholic State, in spite of the explicit condemnations by Pius IX and others. By transforming the saint into a cultural protective genius, the letter domesticates her, transforming a Poor Clare crucified to the world into a harmless emblem.
Co-opting Authentic Mysticism in Service of a New Religion
Symptomatically, we must situate this letter in its concrete historical nexus.
– Date: 13 February 1963, during the early phase of the so‑called Second Vatican Council.
– Addressee: Giacomo Lercaro, a central figure in the liturgical reform movement that would dismantle the Roman Rite, a promoter of “poverty” rhetoric weaponized toward a horizontalized, humanistic church.
– Author: John XXIII, who convened the council, rehabilitated condemned modernist currents, and programmed an aggiornamento incompatible with the immutability of doctrine as defended in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi.
In this context, the letter’s otherwise traditional-sounding elements reveal their real function: not to defend but to neutralize integral Catholicism.
Consider:
1. He highlights Catherine’s mystical gifts and artistic talents.
2. He praises her ascetical writings and calls her a “most skilled mistress of interior warfare.”
3. He wishes that the celebration, by placing her “in some lofty place” as a rare example, may spread the “fragrance” of her lily.
All this is entirely safe for the conciliar program as long as the doctrinal root is severed. Mysticism without dogmatic exclusivity; “interior warfare” without objective enemies; asceticism without polemical apologetics; liturgical cult without propitiation for sin and reparation for heresy. It becomes a devotional aesthetic easily assimilated to religious pluralism, ecumenism, and democratic sentimental Christianity.
This is exactly the progressive pattern:
– Retain saints as picturesque flowers;
– strip them of their denunciations of error, their adhesion to hard dogma, their fidelity to a Church that anathematized modernity’s principles;
– present them as endorsers of the new “pastoral” orientation.
By doing so, the conciliar sect accomplishes what St. Pius X warned: the corruption of dogma under the guise of development, placing living symbols of tradition at the disposal of a contrary agenda; *corruptio optimi pessima* (the corruption of the best is the worst).
The Counter-Witness of Pre-1958 Magisterium Against John XXIII’s Orientation
To gauge the gravity of this letter’s omissions, we must recall the pre-existing doctrinal framework:
– Pius IX’s Syllabus solemnly condemns the pillars of liberal modern society: religious indifferentism, secular state, subordination of Church to civil power, freedom for all cults, separation of Church and State, and the idea that the Roman Pontiff should “come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (prop. 80).
– St. Pius X’s Lamentabili and Pascendi condemn as modernist:
– the notion of evolving dogma;
– subordinating the Magisterium to the “Church listening”;
– reducing revelation to experience;
– denying the inerrancy of Scripture and the historicity of the Gospels;
– transforming sacraments, hierarchy, and dogmas into expressions of community consciousness.
Authentic saints like Catherine of Bologna belong to the doctrinal universe defended by these Magisterial acts. Their sanctity presupposes:
– belief in immutable dogma;
– submission to the objective authority of the Church’s teaching office;
– horror of heresy and error;
– participation in the sacramental economy as a propitiatory, objective mediation of grace.
John XXIII, by contrast, is historically and doctrinally bound to the dissolution of this framework. His council opened the floodgates for:
– ecumenism that relativizes the unique truth of the Catholic Church, in direct conflict with Syllabus 15–18, 21;
– religious liberty theories against Syllabus 77–79;
– collegiality and democratization against the monarchical constitution of the Church;
– the “new theology” explicitly suspected by Pius XII as endangering dogmatic stability.
In this light, his use of a saintly Poor Clare as a decorative seal on his “Apostolic” congratulations to Lercaro is more than a benign courtesy; it is part of a systematic attempt to baptize an anti-doctrinal revolution with traditional fragrance.
The Irony of John XXIII’s “Apostolic Blessing”
The letter concludes:
“To you, Beloved Son of Ours, to the Franciscan religious, clergy and people entrusted to your care, who will celebrate the five centuries elapsed from St. Catherine of Bologna’s birth, We very lovingly impart the Apostolic Blessing, pledge of heavenly protection.”
This “blessing” encapsulates the tragedy: an invalid authority, architect of aggiornamento, bestowing his counterfeit apostolic seal upon a commemoration that, if rightly directed, should have been an implicit condemnation of his own work.
St. Catherine, whose life was hidden with Christ in God, whose existence was Eucharistic, penitential, cloistered, doctrinally simple and firm, would stand in radical opposition to:
– the liturgical desacralization championed by Lercaro;
– the reconciliation with liberalism condemned by Pius IX;
– the modernist methodologies unmasked by St. Pius X.
To invoke her without recalling this, to use her as a spiritual patroness for pastoral trajectories leading away from the pre-1958 Magisterium, is to instrumentalize her sanctity.
If her intercession is indeed sought sincerely, the first grace she would implore for Bologna would be deliverance from the conciliar sect, restoration of the *Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary* in its authentic Roman rite, reinstatement of the full Syllabus and anti-modernist teaching, and the grace of true pastors faithful to the integral Catholic faith.
Silence on Heresy as the Gravest Accusation
The gravest indictment of this letter is not what it says, but what it obstinately refuses to say:
– No mention of the necessity of belonging to the one true Church for salvation, against indifferentism.
– No warning against the errors already fermenting and soon to be enthroned in the council halls.
– No reaffirmation of the condemnations of modernism, liberalism, ecumenism, and religious freedom.
– No call to reparation for sins against doctrine and liturgy.
– No reminder that saints are raised up by God to recall men to penance, not to furnish an alibi for revolution.
Such omissions, from one claiming the Chair of Peter while dismantling its doctrinal fortifications, amount to a tacit betrayal. *Qui tacet consentire videtur* (he who is silent is seen to consent): the silence about the enemies of the Church in a context demanding confession is itself an act of complicity.
In the face of increasing domination of the Church’s visible structures by forces long unmasked by Pius IX as Masonic and naturalistic, the role of a true Pontiff would have been to wield precisely the integral arsenal of Quas Primas, the Syllabus, Lamentabili, Pascendi, to arm the faithful. Instead, we see a gentle letter about St. Catherine, addressed to a protagonist of liturgical ruination, framed in an entirely horizontal register.
This is theological and spiritual bankruptcy: the cult of saints severed from the dogmatic, sacramental, monarchic order that made them; piety without truth; devotion without militancy; incense burned on an altar already being cleared for the cult of man.
Conclusion: St. Catherine as Witness Against the Conciliar Sect
To read this letter with Catholic eyes is to see an emblem of the conciliar process:
– authentic saint,
– authentic virtues,
– authentic language of piety,
– subtly repurposed to cloak an emerging anti-church.
St. Catherine of Bologna does not belong to the aggiornamento. She belongs to the uninterrupted line of sanctity nourished by the immutable doctrine dogmatically defined, the uncompromised liturgy, and the public kingship of Christ proclaimed by the pre-1958 Magisterium.
Her true voice, if allowed to speak, would:
– rebuke the demolition of the Most Holy Sacrifice and of the sacred;
– condemn the flirtation with liberal principles anathematized by the Syllabus;
– demand penance and separation from contamination, not dialogue and convergence;
– call Catholics back to the hard, narrow path, not to a sentimental religion emptied of dogma.
In invoking St. Catherine while advancing a contrary orientation, John XXIII’s letter unwittingly sets her up as a witness for the prosecution. The Poor Clare mystic stands, by the very facts of her life and doctrine, as an accuser of the conciliar sect that dares to trade on her name while trampling the conditions of her sanctity.
Those who truly wish to honor her five centuries later must therefore reject the modernist betrayal, return to the integral Catholic faith, and once more confess publicly and privately what Quas Primas taught with apostolic clarity: that peace, order, and sanctity are possible only under the unshared, social, and doctrinal reign of Christ the King.
Source:
Bene ominatis – Epistula ad Iacobum tit. S. Mariae in Transpontina S. R. E. Presb. Cardinalem Lercaro, Archiepiscopum Bononiensem, quinto saeculo volvente a pio S. Catharinae de' Vigri obitu, d. … (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025