In this 1959 document, Angelo Roncalli, acting as “John XXIII,” establishes a collegiate chapter of canons at the cathedral of Culiacán. He specifies: the number of canons and prebendaries; one as Archdeacon, one as theologian, one as penitentiary; the mode of their provision; the partial norms for their prebends; the delegation of execution to the apostolic delegate; and, with remarkable detail, the choir dress and external habits these clerics may use. In other words: an elaborate piece of bureaucratic liturgical-administrative engineering, solemnly promulgated, which in retrospect exposes the central pathology of Roncalli’s regime—meticulous care for external structures and costumes accompanying, and serving as a prelude to, the systematic demolition of the faith.
Empty Ornaments before the Revolution: Roncalli’s Decorative Canonry as a Symptom of Impending Ruin
Canonical Formalism Without Supernatural Gravity
At first glance, the text appears impeccably “traditional”: Latin, canonical vocabulary, references to the Codex Iuris Canonici, insistence on solemn execution clauses, threats of canonical penalties for non-compliance. Precisely here lies the problem. Beneath the polished juridical surface, this constitution exemplifies a mentality that preserves the shell of pre-1958 Catholic order while already hollowing out its interior.
Key factual elements:
– Roncalli claims the authority of the Roman Pontiff:
“De summa Nostra potestate, haec quae sequuntur decernimus et constituimus.”
– He erects a collegiate chapter in Culiacán cathedral: six canons, two prebendaries.
– He designates dignities (Archdeacon, theologian, penitentiary), reserving certain nominations to “the Apostolic See.”
– He allows prebends and offices to be conferred even when proper fixed endowments for each are not distinctly assigned, permitting combination with existing benefices “even with the cure of souls.”
– He subjects the chapter to the 1917 Code and sets a limited list of days on which they must solemnly perform the divine office: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption, Guadalupe, and St. Michael.
– He devotes disproportionate space to prescribing choir dress, colors, tassels, capes, and the so-called “Pian habit” for use within diocesan boundaries.
– He closes with absolutist juridical formulas typical for papal constitutions, declaring all contrary provisions void, granting executory power to the apostolic delegate, and threatening canonical penalties against any who disregard these decrees.
There is nothing explicitly heretical in the wording. The bankruptcy is deeper and more insidious: a practical atheism of administration, the exaltation of external order severed from the militant proclamation of Christ’s Kingship and from the defense of the Church against precisely those forces—liberalism, Masonry, Modernism—that Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XI had denounced as instruments of the “synagogue of Satan” (Pius IX, Syllabus; multiple allocutions). While the enemies consolidate their assault, Roncalli arranges purple piping and lace.
Linguistic Cosmetics Masking Doctrinal Surrender
The rhetoric imitates former papal style yet reveals its degeneration.
1. Use of exalted formulas without corresponding doctrinal weight:
– The constitution invokes the traditional concern that bishops select “lectissimi viri” to augment divine worship and assist the bishop. But it remains entirely on the plane of decorum: canons as liturgical ornament and consultative body; no mention of their duty to guard doctrine, combat error, or uphold discipline against heresy.
– Pius XI in Quas Primas teaches that peace and order depend on publicly recognizing and submitting to the reign of Christ the King; he ties liturgical life explicitly to the condemnation of laicism and apostasy. Here, Roncalli preserves liturgical structures, while strategically omitting any word that would confront the revolutionary spirit soon enthroned in the “conciliar sect.”
2. Bureaucratic tone as symptom:
– Long, meticulous sections describe vesture:
“subcollari violaceo… veste nigri coloris cum orae textibus… caligis violaceis… mozeta lanea… habitum Pianum…”
– This obsessive attention to sartorial minutiae stands in grotesque contrast to the silence about:
– the state of souls,
– the gravity of sin,
– the defense of the Most Holy Sacrifice,
– the necessity of integral doctrine.
– Such an imbalance is not neutral. It conditions clergy to think of “tradition” as aesthetics and protocol, not as unbending fidelity to revealed truth and the condemnation of error.
3. Inflation of legal solemnity covering spiritual vacuity:
– The document deploys full-strength papal sanction formula:
“Has vero Litteras nunc et in posterum efficaces esse et fore volumus…”
and threats of canonical penalties for anyone who “despises” these decrees.
– But the decrees concern an essentially decorative structure, while the same author will preside over the calling and opening of the pseudo-council that unleashes doctrinal devastation.
– The disproportion reveals priorities: strict authority for ceremonial rearrangements; diplomacy, vagueness, and “dialogue” where divine truth and the rights of Christ the King demand uncompromising clarity.
The language betrays an emergent cultus externus sine fide integra (external cult without integral faith): reverence for forms that are about to be instrumentalized and then dismantled by the same regime.
Superficial Continuity against the Immutable Magisterium
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic teaching prior to 1958, several theological and ecclesiological problems emerge.
1. The claim of authority versus the principle on manifest heresy:
– The provided Defense of Sedevacantism file accurately recalls the doctrine articulated by St. Robert Bellarmine and others: a manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church; by public defection, an apparent pope loses office ipso facto (by the fact itself), as codified in 1917 CIC can. 188.4.
– Roncalli’s later and broader program—ecumenism, religious liberty, aggiornamento, the invitation of periti infected with condemned Modernism—is historically verifiable and in direct conflict with Pius IX’s Syllabus (esp. 15–18, 55, 77–80) and Pius X’s Lamentabili and Pascendi.
– This constitution, dated 1959, belongs to that liminal moment: externally compliant with canonical forms, internally already oriented toward the neutralization of anti-liberal, anti-modernist militancy. It forms part of a continuum culminating in teachings and acts incompatible with prior dogmatic condemnations.
– Therefore, the very use of “de summa Nostra potestate” by Roncalli is the use of papal style as a mask for an authority that, once manifestly wielded against defined doctrine, proves itself deprived of legitimacy. The document is a juridical act of an emerging usurping regime, cloaked in traditional forms.
2. Silence where doctrine demands speech:
– Pius IX, in the appended passages, explicitly attributes the contemporary war on the Church to Masonic sects; Pius XI in Quas Primas denounces secularism as a direct rejection of Christ’s rights; Pius X in Lamentabili and Pascendi brand Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”.
– In this constitution:
– No reference to the need to defend the flock from Modernist infiltration.
– No mandate that canons preach, teach, or guard doctrine against liberal errors.
– No call to uphold the Syllabus, or to resist the laicisation of public life.
– The omission is not accidental; by 1959, post-war diplomatic Catholicism has already normalized coexistence with precisely those revolutionary principles previously anathematized.
– Such silence is a grave theological fault. Qui tacet consentire videtur (“who is silent is seen to consent”): when the supreme authority speaks solemnly about roles and dignities in the Church and does not even allude to her gravest dogmatic battles of the age, it reveals an intention to bracket and ultimately to betray them.
3. The treatment of canonical offices as ornamental:
– The office of penitentiary should embody the Church’s power to bind and loose, the primacy of confession, the horror of sin, the urgency of grace.
– Yet here, the penitentiary is simply listed among dignities; no stress on safeguarding the sacrament of penance in an increasingly apostate world.
– The theologian-canon is mentioned as a title, not as a doctrinal bulwark charged to defend the deposit of faith against the very errors condemned in Lamentabili.
– The chapter as “senatus episcopi” is invoked, but only as a consultative and ceremonial body; there is no hint of its duty to defend Catholic orthodoxy against both secular governments and internal traitors.
– The reduction of substantive spiritual functions to ranked honors and dress codes is a deformation of Catholic ecclesiology, a preparation for evacuating these roles of any confessional content in the coming “neo-church.”
Liturgical Aesthetics as Pre-Conciliar Sedation
Particularly revealing is the detailed catalogue of vestments and the restricted list of feasts for solemn capitular office.
1. Selective solemnization:
– Canonical capitular office is limited to a handful of days (Nativity, Easter, Pentecost, Assumption, Guadalupe, St. Michael).
– It is presented primarily as a ritual function, disconnected from the full cycle of the Church’s doctrinal proclamation and spiritual battle.
– Contrast with the pre-1958 understanding: capitular chapters were to be communities of clerics bound to the solemn recitation of the divine office, custodians of the liturgy and of ecclesial continuity. Emptying their obligations while preserving their signs of honor weakens the daily sacrificial and intercessory life of the Church.
2. The cult of the “Pian habit” divorced from Pius X’s anti-modernist spirit:
– Roncalli authorizes the so-called “Pian” habit—externally evoking St. Pius X—precisely as his regime prepares to nullify the anti-modernist measures of that same Saint.
– This is emblematic: appropriate the symbols of true reform (Pius X) while in practice dismantling his doctrine (Lamentabili, Pascendi, the Oath against Modernism).
– The apparel becomes camouflage: neo-clerics dressed in the signs of the old order, tasked to shepherd the faithful quietly into the “Church of the New Advent.”
3. Aesthetic traditionalism as anesthesia:
– Some may naively point to this constitution as “proof” that Roncalli respected traditions. On the contrary, such gestures are what allowed so many to sleep through the revolution.
– The pseudo-continuity of choir dress and capitular structures softened resistance, while the doctrinal trajectory bent steadily toward accommodation with condemned liberal principles: religious liberty, ecumenism with heretics and infidels, and the muting of the Church’s exclusive claims.
– Thus this constitution is the tranquilizer administered shortly before surgery: preserving cosmetics to disable vigilance.
Systemic Apostasy: From Culiacán to the Conciliar Sect
This document must be read as one symptom of a larger pathological organism: the transformation of the visible Roman structures into a paramasonic structure that retains legal vestiges while internally aligning with the enemies condemned by the true Magisterium.
1. Concord with condemned liberalism:
– Pius IX explicitly condemns proposition 80: that the Roman Pontiff can and must reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation in the sense of autonomous, secularized order.
– Yet Roncalli’s entire pontificate, culminating in the calling of the “council” that produced the so-called “religious liberty” and interreligious “dialogue” program, embodies precisely this reconciliation.
– The Culiacán constitution’s silence about the war of sects against the Church, its neutrality regarding secular apostasy, and its concentration on minor canonical adornments illustrate a hierarchy already intellectually reconciled with the world.
2. Continuation of structures, inversion of mission:
– Titles, chapters, and habits remain—but their orientation shifts:
– From defending the rights of Christ the King over states (as in Quas Primas) to coexisting with secular regimes indifferent or hostile to Him.
– From condemning errors to engaging in “dialogue” with them.
– From jealously guarding sacramental integrity to experimenting with rites, “active participation,” and eventually the liturgical dismantling enshrined by the conciliar usurpers.
– The Culiacán chapter, as envisioned here, is perfectly suited to function within the emergent neo-church: impressive, robed, canonically neat—and mute.
3. Abuse of coercive formulas:
– Roncalli uses the full arsenal of juridical language to impose his purely administrative dispositions, even threatening those who resist with penalties for ignoring “the orders of the Supreme Pontiffs.”
– When such solemn legal potency is spent on vestimentary and honorary minutiae, while looming doctrinal conflicts are buried in silence, the moral authority of law is prostituted. This habituates clergy to obey unquestioningly in smaller things, preparing them to submit when the same apparatus is later used to enforce genuinely heterodox policies.
4. From decorative capitulars to conciliar demolition:
– Historically verifiable: within a few years of this constitution, the same regime will:
– Invite theologians previously censured for Modernism.
– Promote ambiguous and novel formulations on collegiality, ecumenism, religious liberty.
– Prepare liturgical “reforms” that culminate, under Roncalli’s successors in the line of usurpers, in the near universal replacement of the Unbloody Sacrifice by a protestantized assembly rite.
– The Culiacán act is not isolated; it is one brick in a carefully staged transition: maintain the façade of continuity long enough for the internal inversion to be cemented.
The Weaponized Contrast with True Catholic Teaching
To expose fully the bankruptcy of the mentality embodied in this document, it is necessary to juxtapose it explicitly with pre-1958 doctrine.
1. Public reign of Christ versus discreet decorative piety:
– Pius XI: Peace and order depend on nations publicly recognizing the kingship of Christ; secularism is a social apostasy that must be condemned, not accommodated.
– Roncalli’s constitution: speaks of canons and their purple trim, but not of their role in upholding Christ’s rights over Mexican public life amidst Masonic and secularist forces condemned repeatedly by prior popes.
– The contrast is stark: *the earlier Magisterium arms pastors for combat; Roncalli outfits them for ceremony.*
2. Anti-Modernist rigor versus procedural ambiguity:
– St. Pius X: the Magisterium can and must determine the true sense of Scripture and doctrine; those who resist its anti-modernist decrees incur grave penalties; dogma does not evolve into contradictory meanings.
– Roncalli: rehabilitates many who had chafed under these condemnations; his governance style and preparatory acts (including this one) indicate a refusal to continue the anti-modernist struggle.
– The constitution’s studious neutrality—no insistence that canons defend Pascendi, no mention of the Oath against Modernism—exposes its orientation.
3. Church’s rights versus practical capitulation:
– Pius IX denounces the pretension of the State to dominate ecclesiastical structures, and the claims that concordats and laws can void the Church’s rights.
– Roncalli’s constitution, while formally asserting papal prerogatives over the chapter, does not arm that chapter to resist anti-Catholic laws or secular encroachment. It is an inward-looking adjustment, not a militant assertion of liberty of the Church.
– In practice, such inward bureaucratic preoccupation is a form of self-disarmament.
Conclusion: A Beautifully Sealed Envelope Containing Spiritual Emptiness
Culiacanensis is not scandalous because it erects a canonical chapter—that is, in itself, a legitimate and venerable institution in the life of the Church. It is scandalous because, in the concrete historical and doctrinal context of 1959, it exemplifies the emerging spirit of the conciliar sect:
– Preservation of solemn forms, devoid of the prior anti-liberal, anti-modernist content.
– Prolix detail about attire and protocol, coupled with total silence on the duty to defend immutable doctrine against the exact errors raging in the world.
– Deployment of papal juridical authority for decorative and honorary ends, while that same authority is being quietly redirected toward reconciling with condemned principles.
The constitution thus stands as a polished, self-referential monument of ecclesiastical aestheticism at the threshold of apostasy: a ceremonial curtain behind which the revolution prepares its stage. It reveals, by what it attends to and what it steadfastly ignores, the theological and spiritual bankruptcy of the regime that would soon enthrone the “Church of the New Advent” and eclipse, in the occupied structures of Rome, the visible expression of the one true Catholic Church of all ages.
Source:
Culiacanensis (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025