Ad perpetuam rei memoriae huius imposturae: the short Latin rescript of John XXIII concerning the transfer of the head of St Venerius, presented as a pious concession to local devotion in the Gulf of La Spezia, orders that the relic (the skull) be moved from Reggio Emilia (church of St Peter) to the church of St Venerius in La Spezia, derogating, if needed, prior norms of Clement VIII on relics, and clothing the whole act with the full weight of supposed apostolic authority, perpetual validity, and canonical efficacy. Beneath this apparently humble gesture of honoring a confessor lurks the same principle that governs the entire conciliar revolution: the usurper on the Chair of Peter manipulates sacred things and venerable devotions to consolidate the counterfeit authority of the neo-church and to shift the faithful’s gaze from the reign of Christ the King and the immutable Magisterium to a sentimental cultic folklore obedient to a paramasonic regime.
Instrumentalizing Relics to Legitimize a Counterfeit Authority
The entire document is externally modest: a short *littera apostolica* for the transfer of a relic. It is precisely this apparent modesty that exposes its deeper corruption.
Key elements of the text:
– Emphasis on the “approved devotion” of the faithful of the Gulf of La Spezia toward St Venerius.
– Historical note: body moved in the 9th century from Tyro Maggiore to Reggio Emilia, preserved in St Peter’s.
– Request of Giuseppe Stella (La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato) to obtain the head or “insignificant relics” to strengthen local veneration after naming St Venerius patron.
– Agreement between local hierarchs; John XXIII grants by his supposed “Apostolic” authority:
– Permission to transfer and permanently keep the head in La Spezia.
– Explicit derogation from dispositions of Clement VIII (Apostolic Letters, 11 February 1595), i.e. from the strict, prudent pre-conciliar law on relics.
– Declaration that this concession is firm, valid, efficacious, and that anything contrary is null.
On the surface: a routine act of pastoral solicitude.
In reality: a paradigmatic sign of a usurping regime using sacred bodies to fabricate a false continuity with the Church it is betraying. The very form of the act pretends to be an exercise of the same authority that Pius IX used to condemn Liberalism and Freemasonry (Syllabus of Errors) and that Pius XI used to proclaim the universal kingship of Christ (Quas primas), while the person signing is the inaugurator of the conciliar apostasy.
Factual Level: A Legal Shell Without Legitimate Power
The text deploys solemn canonical formulas:
– “Apostolica Nostra auctoritate… concedimus et indulgemus…”
– “Haec statuimus, largimur, decernentes praesentes Litteras firmas, validas atque efficaces semper exstare ac permanere…”
– Nullification of all contrary attempts.
These formulas are traditional in genuine papal acts. But here they are uttered by John XXIII, the first in the line of public modernists who:
– Convoked Vatican II to “update” (aggiornare) doctrine, in direct collision with St Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis.
– Promoted religious liberty, ecumenism, and the softening of the Church’s condemnation of the world, precisely what Pius IX stigmatized as condemned Liberalism and indifferentism in the Syllabus (e.g. propositions 15–18, 77–80).
We face here a juridical simulacrum: a man who openly prepares doctrinal revolution claims to bind and loose in the same manner as pontiffs who anathematized such innovations. According to integral Catholic doctrine:
– A manifest public heretic cannot hold the Papacy nor any jurisdiction in the Church.
– St Robert Bellarmine: a manifest heretic “by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head… by which he can be judged and punished by the Church.”
– The older canonical tradition, summed in 1917 CIC can. 188.4, recognizes that public defection from the faith causes office to fall vacant *ipso facto*.
– A non-Catholic cannot be head of the Catholic Church: *non potest esse caput quod non est membrum* (he cannot be the head who is not a member).
The line that inaugurates and drives the conciliar revolution cannot simultaneously be the guardian of relics and the destroyer of the faith. Thus, the text’s “Apostolic” authority is objectively void; it is a shell, and its very correctness of form exposes the inversion: *forma papalis* in the mouth of one preparing the demolition of the papal office.
The act pretends to:
– Exercise the same authority as Clement VIII in order to derogate Clement VIII.
– Place itself inside the river of tradition while secretly diverting it.
The presence of a valid pre-1958 cardinal (Cicognani) consulted here does not transubstantiate the null authority of the antipope; it demonstrates how surviving pre-conciliar clergy were used as façade for a new religion.
Linguistic Level: Pious Latin as a Cloak for Subversion
The language is impeccably Roman:
– “Probatum studium pietatis…”
– “priscis temporibus…”
– Full legal cadences: “Contrariis quibusvis nihil obstantibus.”
But precisely this polish of curial style conceals the following:
1. The entire motive is emotional and horizontal:
– The center is “popular devotion,” *affectus populi*, not first the objective rights of God, nor doctrinal confession.
– St Venerius is described as “patron” in the folkloric sense: a heavenly mascot cementing local identity.
2. Omission of the central supernatural horizon:
– No reminder of the *regnum Christi* over the city and region.
– No call to repentance, to the state of grace, to flight from modern errors.
– No warning against the enemies of the Church—Freemasonry, liberalism, modernism—which Pius IX and St Pius X denounced precisely as the forces manipulating both states and pseudo-religious movements.
3. The rhetoric of smooth administrative benevolence:
– The text breathes a bureaucratic “kindness” devoid of doctrinal fierceness.
– It reflects a mentality in which the Church’s supreme authority is exercised chiefly by adjusting devotions, moving relics, issuing polite concessions—while in the background the same authority is abused to prepare ecumenical betrayal and religious liberty.
This antiseptic pastoralism is itself symptomatic: a Church that once issued thundering anathemas against error is now represented by a man whose public program is “opening the windows to the world.” The style is thus a mask; beneath a thin patina of traditional diction lies an aggiornamento mentality, which is naturalistic, horizontal, and allergic to the integral confession of truth.
Theological Level: Contradiction with Pre-1958 Doctrine on the Nature of Authority
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic theology, several points must be stated clearly.
1. Usurped jurisdiction cannot sanctify.
– All sacramental and juridical acts depend on communion with the true Church and a validly reigning Roman Pontiff.
– When a public modernist, promoter of condemned principles, assumes papal titles, his acts lack the divine guarantee. He may shuffle bones; he cannot bind consciences.
2. Potestas clavium (power of the keys) is intrinsically ordered to:
– Guarding the deposit of faith unaltered.
– Condemning error and heresy.
– Ordering worship to the true God.
Therefore:
– Using “papal” authority to undermine the doctrinal condemnations of the past is an abuse and a sign of nullity.
– A regime preparing to enthrone religious liberty, collegiality, and ecumenical relativism contradicts the infallible teaching:
– Syllabus of Errors rejects the notion that the Church cannot condemn philosophical or theological errors, or that Catholicism should reconcile itself with Liberalism and modern “civilization” (propositions 80, 77–79).
– St Pius X in Lamentabili and Pascendi condemns the very evolutionary conception of dogma and democratization of magisterium that the conciliar sect exalts.
The document’s self-assured formula:
“praesentes Litteras firmas, validas atque efficaces semper exstare ac permanere…”
is thus theologically void. It is a naked assertion of authority where the substantive conditions for authority (orthodox faith, continuity with prior condemnations) are denied in practice.
3. Disregard of the gravity of relics.
In traditional teaching:
– Relics are venerated as testimonies of the sanctity of those who lived and died in full Catholic faith and communion.
– Their translation is surrounded by severe juridical protection and caution to prevent abuse, superstition, and the fragmentation of the sacred.
John XXIII:
– Freely derogates the dispositions of Clement VIII, one of the pontiffs who codified the discipline of relics precisely to safeguard their dignity and authenticity.
– Turns a once-restrictive norm into plasticine, subordinated to local sentimentality and episcopal lobbying.
This reveals a mentality in which:
– The old discipline is no longer sacrosanct; it is material for discretionary “updating.”
– What Quas primas teaches about Christ’s Kingship—peace and order only in the full submission of nations and institutions to His reign—is not the guiding principle. Instead, the guiding principle is administrative flexibility in cultic matters without any integral doctrinal framework.
Symptomatic Level: A Micro-Icon of the Conciliar Revolution
This apparently minor text is a microcosm of the wider apostasy.
1. Assertion of supreme power divorced from the faith.
– The usurper acts as if he were the true Pontiff, while architecting a council that will:
– Dilute the uniqueness of the Catholic Church.
– Promote collegiality, religious freedom, and false ecumenism.
– This is precisely what Pius IX had foreseen and condemned: denying that the Church is the only true religion (Syllabus, 21), the separation of Church and State as an ideal (55), and reconciliation with liberal modernity (80).
2. Use of saints and relics as propaganda material.
– Instead of calling souls back to the integral faith of the confessor, the document uses him to:
– Confirm the prestige of a post-conciliar hierarchy.
– Cement local identity under a counterfeit magisterium.
– Thus the saints are reduced to ornaments of the “Church of the New Advent,” whose faith they would not recognize.
3. Substitution of the supernatural mission with pious adornments.
– There is total silence about:
– The necessity of the state of grace for salvation.
– The gravity of mortal sin, modernist doctrines, and naturalism.
– The war of Freemasonry and liberal sects against the Church, which Pius IX explicitly links with the “synagogue of Satan” in the Syllabus’ appended texts.
– Instead of warning the faithful of wolves in sheep’s clothing, the text soothes them with the gift of a skull.
Silence here damns more than words. A true Pontiff, in 1960, with the world enslaved to atheistic ideologies, Freemasonry, and moral corruption, would:
– Proclaim with Pius XI that “peace will not come until individuals and states recognize the reign of Christ.”
– Condemn anew the doctrinal deviations infecting theology, not prepare a council to enthrone them.
– Demand public reparation, not merely authorize the repartition of relics.
The absence of this supernatural clarity is a sign that the author speaks not in the name of Christ the King, but as the manager of a religious organization adapting itself to the world.
Contradiction with the Spirit of Quas primas and the Syllabus of Errors
Pius XI in Quas primas:
– Grounds the entire social order in the visible reign of Christ and obedience to His laws.
– Establishes a feast to condemn laicism and to recall rulers and peoples to public worship of the true King.
– Teaches that laws and education must be conformed to divine and ecclesiastical authority.
Pius IX in the Syllabus:
– Condemns indifferentism, rationalism, socialism, and the laicist state.
– Unmasks Masonic and liberal conspiracies against the Church.
Measured against this:
– John XXIII’s document is theologically anemic:
– No invocation of Christ’s Kingship over the region.
– No integration of the relic’s transfer into a call for social and personal submission to the divine law.
– It functions as a prelude to the very reconciliation with “modern civilization” that Quas primas and the Syllabus anathematize.
Thus the act’s inner message is:
– “We still move relics and speak Latin; therefore, we are the same Church.”
While in reality:
– They are preparing to enthrone doctrines that Pius IX and Pius XI declared incompatible with the Catholic faith.
This is the classic modernist tactic condemned by St Pius X:
– Preserve forms, change substance.
– Keep the vocabulary (*Apostolica auctoritas, patronus, reliquiae*), invert the orientation.
The Abuse of Clemens VIII’s Norms: From Protective Severity to Modernist Plasticity
The explicit derogation:
– “Derogantes, quatenus opus sit, dispositionibus Clementis Papae VIII…”
signals more than a technical adjustment. It is emblematic.
Clement VIII’s legislation on relics:
– Aimed at safeguarding authenticity.
– Prevented arbitrary divisions and translations.
– Reflected the conviction that sacred things belong to the Church as guardian of the deposit, not to arbitrary local pressures.
John XXIII:
– Places himself above these norms in the very historical moment when the conciliar sect will:
– Dilute liturgical discipline.
– Invent vernacularized rites.
– Multiply questionable cults and “apparitions” to feed pious credulity while doctrine dissolves.
The same mentality that treats the Roman Rite as modifiable at will treats the law of relics as clay. Both betray the same dogma-evolutionist, utilitarian rapport to tradition: it is raw material, not binding inheritance.
Silence on Modernism and Apostasy: The Gravest Accusation
From integral Catholic faith, the silence of this letter on the real battlefields is itself indictment.
At the historical moment of 1960:
– The poison of Modernism, condemned in 1907, has re-entered seminaries and episcopates.
– Biblical criticism, liturgical subversion, and ecumenical relativism advance.
– Freemasonry exerts pressure on states and infiltrates religious structures.
A true successor of Pius IX and St Pius X, addressing the faithful of La Spezia regarding their heavenly patron, would:
– Exhort them to resist liberal and secular powers;
– Warn against errors condemned in Lamentabili and Pascendi;
– Call them to defend Christ’s social kingship in their laws, schools, and customs.
Instead, we receive:
– A sterile administrative decree about a skull, without doctrinal teeth, without prophetic rebuke.
This is not a minor omission. It is the very method of the conciliar sect:
– Speak of “pastoral care,” “piety,” and “devotion,” yet never touch the idols of modern man:
– autonomy of the state,
– religious liberty,
– interreligious relativism,
– the cult of human dignity detached from Christ.
Qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen as consenting). The muteness on the true enemies of souls, in a text claiming apostolic weight, manifests complicity with the age’s apostasy.
Conclusion: A Pious Shell Covering the Machinery of the Neo-Church
This short letter is:
– Historically: a decree about moving a relic.
– Theologically: a self-exposure of the conciliar operation’s method.
It shows:
– The usurper employing all venerable forms, seals, and formulas of the Papacy.
– An apparent zeal for saints and piety.
– A calm willingness to override rigorous traditional norms.
And at the same time it:
– Omits the proclamation of Christ’s Kingship and the battle against Modernism.
– Ignores the doctrinal warfare identified by Pius IX and St Pius X.
– Serves to normalize John XXIII as a legitimate Pontiff in the eyes of devout faithful, so that those same faithful will later follow him and his successors into the liturgical and doctrinal abyss.
Thus, what appears as an innocuous rescript is in fact an element of a wider strategy: to annex the faith of simple Catholics—expressed in devotion to saints and relics—to the service of a *conciliar sect* whose principles are condemned by the very popes and councils it dares to cite.
Those who adhere to the integral Catholic faith must:
– Recognize that acts of a manifestly modernist usurper lack binding force.
– Venerate true saints according to the immemorial teaching and discipline of the Church, not as ornaments of a paramasonic structure.
– Return to the doctrinal clarity of Quas primas, the Syllabus of Errors, Lamentabili, and Pascendi, wherein the Church, not a neo-church, speaks with the voice of Christ the King.
Source:
Probatum studium, Litterae Apostolicae Caput S. Venerii ex urbe Regio Lepidi in urbem Spediam perpetuo transfertur, d. 3 m. Septembris a. 1960, Ioannes PP. XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025