The document attributed to Ioannes XXIII, dated 5 February 1960, grants the title and privileges of a minor basilica to the church of St Charles Borromeo at Carmel in the diocese of Monterey-Fresno. It praises the building’s antiquity, its connection with the early evangelization of California, the burial of Junípero Serra, its architectural and civic value, its popularity for nuptial ceremonies, and the devotion to “Our Lady of Bethlehem,” and concludes with the usual juridical formulae elevating the shrine. The entire text is a self-revelation of a curial mentality already detached from the supernatural mission of the Church and preparing the way for the conciliar revolution.
Elevation without Faith: A Neo-Catholic Shrine to Heritage and Sentiment
Historical Romanticism as a Substitute for the Supernatural Order
On the factual level, the letter constructs a narrative in which the Carmel church is exalted primarily because:
– it is ancient within the context of California mission history;
– it is associated with the name of Junípero Serra;
– it is architecturally noteworthy and counted among “principal monuments” of California;
– it attracts crowds for picturesque devotion and especially for weddings.
The crucial omission is immediate and devastating: there is practically no doctrinal content, no insistence on status gratiae (the state of grace), no recall of sin, sacrifice, penance, the necessity of the true Faith for salvation, or the universal and exclusive Kingship of Christ proclaimed by pre-1958 Magisterium. The church is recommended for:
“praeclara pietatis”,
“locorum amoenitas”,
the civic-national aura of Serra, and frequent nuptial celebrations.
What is this if not the early conciliar pattern: the transformation of the sanctuary from a fortress of the Faith into a museum-sentimental complex where religious language masks a thoroughly naturalistic appreciation of “heritage”?
Contrast this with Pius XI in Quas primas (1925), who teaches that peace, order, and blessing flow only when individuals and states recognize and submit to the reign of Christ the King in public and private life. Here, under Ioannes XXIII, the sanctuary is not held up as a bastion of the rights of Christ over the American state, but as a picturesque site embedded in the American narrative, crowned with distinctions pleasing equally to lay tourism, civic pride, and the conciliar sect’s liturgical bureaucracy.
The Carmel shrine is instrumentalized as an emblem of “Catholic presence” compatible with the liberal order condemned in the Syllabus Errorum of Pius IX—precisely the order that denies the exclusive truth of the Catholic religion (Syllabus 21), advocates separation of Church and State (55), devastates ecclesiastical rights (19–27), and exalts religious indifferentism and pluralism (15–18, 77–80). The letter is silent on all these points. That silence is not neutral; it is complicity.
The Language of Bureaucratic Piety: A Lexicon of Impending Apostasy
The rhetoric of the document betrays its spirit.
1. Junípero Serra is praised not primarily as a confessor of the integral Faith standing against error, but as:
“Apostolus Californiae… qui in eximiis viris, qui a Foederatis Americae Septemtrionalis Civitatibus publica laude feruntur, numerum obtinet.”
(“Apostle of California… who is counted among those outstanding men publicly praised by the United States of America.”)
The criterion of excellence is here contaminated by the appeal to public recognition from an officially religiously indifferent, Masonic-influenced state condemned repeatedly by pre-1958 popes. To set before the faithful as a note of honour that a Catholic missionary is enrolled among the civil pantheon of a liberal republic is to invert the supernatural order: the Church, once judge of nations, now glories that the nations condescend to applaud one of her own.
This rhetorical move is a symptom of the cultus hominis (cult of man) that will explode in the conciliar and post-conciliar epoch. Already the “Holy See” bureaucracy speaks in a way that seeks legitimacy from secular approval, instead of proclaiming that secular powers are judged by Christ and His Church. Pius XI explicitly rejected such relativistic harmonization; Pius IX unmasked it as liberalism. Ioannes XXIII’s diction caresses it.
2. The church is described as:
“praecipuis Californiae monumentis propter genus structurae, quo commendatur”
(“among the principal monuments of California on account of the type of structure by which it is commended”).
The emphasis is aesthetic and cultural. The sanctuary is reduced to a “monument,” a category any secular tourist office can affirm. The document does not once assert that this place witnesses to the exclusive salvific truth of the Catholic Faith against heresy, apostasy, and the secularization surrounding it. In the mind formed by Pius X’s Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, such omission is paradigmatic of Modernism’s naturalization of divine realities: religion is collapsed into culture and history; the temple into monument; the Apostle into local icon.
3. Nuptial ceremonies are highlighted as a point of honour:
“saepeque nuptiarum sollemnia celebrent Ecclesiae ritu.”
(“and often the solemnities of marriages are celebrated according to the rite of the Church.”)
The text does not warn about indissolubility, sacramental gravity, or the necessity of Catholic faith and moral disposition condemned by Pius IX in Syllabus propositions 65–74 regarding errors on marriage. It is simply a “beautiful place for weddings.” This anticipates the post-conciliar prostitution of sacred places as photo-scenography for couples whose faith and morals are often utterly alien to Catholic doctrine. Silence here is already betrayal.
The language is odorless, bureaucratic, and devoutly vague. It typifies the mentality that soon will speak endlessly of “dignity,” “dialogue,” and “human values” while evacuating doctrinal precision. This is not the severe, crystalline idiom of Trent, of Pius IX, of Leo XIII, of Pius X, of Pius XI. The lexical shift signals the dogmatic shift.
Canonical Formulae in the Mouth of an Usurper: The Abuse of Ecclesiastical Juridical Style
The letter employs solemn legal language:
“certa scientia ac matura deliberatione Nostra deque Apostolicae potestatis plenitudine…”
(“with Our certain knowledge and mature deliberation and by the fullness of Apostolic power…”),
and concludes:
“has Litteras firmas, validas atque efficaces iugiter exstare ac permanere…”
(“these Letters to be firm, valid, and efficacious, to stand and remain forever…”),
with the characteristic condemnation of any contrary attempts as null.
From the perspective of integral Catholic teaching, once it is established that Ioannes XXIII inaugurates a line of manifestly heterodox usurpers whose authority cannot be reconciled with traditional doctrine, such formulae are juridically empty. The Church has always maintained, as articulated by St Robert Bellarmine and classical theologians, that a manifest heretic cannot hold the papal office since he is not a member of the Church and thus cannot be its head. The principles summarized in the provided Defense of Sedevacantism file echo this constant teaching: “manifestus haereticus… statim desinit esse papa” (“a manifest heretic… by that very fact ceases to be pope”).
Therefore, the more arrogantly and technically Ioannes XXIII invokes “the fullness of Apostolic power” and declares his acts to be perpetually binding, the more clearly he discloses the parody at work: a paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican drapes itself in juridical vestments it has already emptied of the Catholic Faith.
The manipulation is subtle: keep the phrases, remove the substance. The faithful habituated to such texts learn to revere procedures while forgetting truth. This juridicalism without dogma prepares the acceptance of any innovation (new rites, false ecumenism, religious liberty) as long as it is framed with the old formulas. It is precisely the method unmasked by Pius X when condemning modernists who “wrap their doctrines in ambiguous terms” while undermining dogma.
Theological Void: No Christ the King, No Condemnation of Liberal America
The letter’s treatment of the American context is telling. It notes with delight that Serra is honoured among national heroes. But:
– There is no insistence that the American Republic, like all states, must submit to the objective social kingship of Christ, as taught authoritatively in Quas primas and in Leo XIII’s social encyclicals.
– There is no reminder that indifferentism and pluralism—foundations of American civil religion—are explicitly condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (15–18, 77–80).
– There is no word on the Masonic and anti-Catholic currents dominating American public life, clearly denounced by 19th-century popes and again in the passages quoted in the Syllabus: the “sects… called masonic or bearing another name,” forming the “synagogue of Satan” warring against the Church.
Instead of exploiting the Carmel basilica to proclaim the incompatibility of liberal ideology with the Kingship of Christ, the document integrates the shrine into the American mythos, implicitly approving coexistence with religious pluralism and relegating Catholicism to one venerable strand in the “heritage” tapestry. This is not accidental oversight; it is a theological position in deed: the practical abandonment of the dogma that “outside the Church there is no salvation” understood in its perennial sense, and the abandonment of the Church’s duty to command nations as well as individuals to obey Christ.
Where Pius XI wrote that society’s wounds will be healed only when “all willingly accept the reign of Christ and obey Him,” Ioannes XXIII’s curia is content that the United States has given Serra a plaque. The contrast is irreconcilable.
The Devotional Cosmetics: “Our Lady of Bethlehem” and Sentimental Marianism
The letter alludes with favour to the Marian title:
“Almam Deiparam, ‘Dominam Nostram Bethleemitanam’… excolant ac venerentur.”
(“that the faithful venerate the nourishing Mother of God, ‘Our Lady of Bethlehem’…”)
There is nothing intrinsically problematic in a legitimate local Marian title. The problem is structural: Marian devotion is used as decorative piety to sanctify an ecclesiology that has ceased to confess her Son as the exclusive King of societies and that refuses to condemn the liberal order that crucifies Him publicly.
Pre-1958 popes present Mary as terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata (“terrible as an army in battle array”), the conqueror of heresies, refuge of sinners called to repentance, destroyer of Islam, error, and Masonry. Here, she is integrated into a soft, heritage-oriented narrative of local charm and weddings. Sentimental Marianism without dogmatic militancy functions as anaesthetic: it convinces unwary souls that, because Marian names and images are present, the doctrine underneath must still be Catholic. In reality, the conciliar sect empties Marian devotion of its doctrinal edge, aligning it easily with religious relativism and interfaith “dialogue.”
From Mission to Museum: The Betrayal of Junípero Serra’s Legacy
The document invokes Serra to legitimize its act, yet betrays his missionary spirit.
– True missionaries of Catholic Tradition sought to uproot idolatry, convert souls to the one true Church, and form Catholic societies subject to Christ the King.
– The letter does not recall this uncompromising claim; instead, it harmonizes Serra with American civil religion.
By boasting that Serra is classed among civic heroes, the text tacitly reinterprets him as a pioneer of “values” acceptable to pluralist democracy: education, culture, social organization. This dynamic is the same that the conciliar sect will apply to other saints, transforming them into ambassadors of “human dignity” rather than champions of Catholic exclusivity. It is exactly the type of distortion warned against in Lamentabili sane exitu, where modernists recast dogmas and the lives of Christ and the saints as expressions of social-religious evolution rather than supernatural truth.
Thus the Carmel basilica is turned into a monument of syncretized memory: a mission church safely museumified within the ideology that destroyed the mission.
Systemic Symptom: The Pre-Conciliar Mask of the Conciliar Revolution
Some might object that this is “only” a minor document, dealing with honorary basilica status. This objection misunderstands how apostasy works in history.
1. Apostasy proceeds through:
– the evacuation of doctrinal language in “small” texts,
– the renunciation of condemnations,
– the substitution of supernatural categories with cultural, artistic, or sentimental ones,
– all while retaining canonical forms.
2. This letter:
– Refuses to confront the liberal, Masonic, naturalistic principles of the American order surrounding the shrine, contrary to the entire tradition culminating in the Syllabus and in Quas primas.
– Praises compatibility between Catholic symbolism and civil prestige.
– Reduces missionary heroism to an ornament of national history.
– Celebrates the place where people “frequently” celebrate weddings without reminding them that only sacramental marriage in the state of grace, within the true Faith, is pleasing to God.
3. These omissions are not random. They are organically aligned with:
– the hermeneutic of “aggiornamento” launched by Ioannes XXIII,
– the preparation of a council that would enthrone religious liberty and ecumenism,
– the systematic dismantling of all those elements condemned by Pius X as Modernist: the reduction of faith to experience, the adaptation of doctrine to modern man, the glorification of history and culture over immutable dogma.
In this sense, the document is a specimen of the disease: a curial act whose style, priorities, and silences are inconceivable under Pius IX or Pius X without severe doctrinal counterbalance. Here there is none.
The Inversion of Authority: Basilica Privileges in a Pseudo-Church
By granting the title of minor basilica, Ioannes XXIII pretends to:
– confer specific spiritual privileges,
– inscribe the church more deeply into the orbit of the Roman See,
– highlight its exemplary role for the faithful.
But within the post-1958 context, this elevation:
– symbolically subordinates a formerly missionary stronghold to the conciliar sect,
– integrates it into the network of sanctuaries used to propagate the new religion of democracy, human rights, and interreligious conviviality,
– and masks this upheaval under the vocabulary of continuity (“ad perpetuam rei memoriam” – “for perpetual remembrance”).
True basilicas, in the Catholic sense, are centres where the full, unadulterated doctrine is preached and the Most Holy Sacrifice offered according to rites expressing that doctrine. Once a paramasonic, dogma-subverting structure claims jurisdiction, its recognitions and titles no longer signify incorporation into the Mystical Body, but absorption into the novus ordo pseudo-ecclesial organism.
Thus the same formulas once used by true Roman Pontiffs to guarantee orthodoxy are here employed to consolidate the opposite. Lexical continuity, doctrinal inversion: the mark of the revolution.
Silence on Modernism and Freemasonry: The Loudest Condemnation
Perhaps the most damning feature of the letter is what it does not say.
– No mention of the plague of Modernism denounced in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, though its effects—historicism, naturalism, culturalism—are everywhere assumed.
– No warning against the secret societies exposed by Pius IX and Leo XIII as the driving force behind secular persecution and religious relativism.
– No reaffirmation of the Church’s right and duty to judge states and legislate for Catholic life in public order.
– No insistence that any honour paid to Serra or to the Carmel church must be subordinated to the profession of the one true Faith and rejection of errors.
In Catholic tradition, particularly in times hostile to the Faith, the omission of necessary truths is itself culpable. To crown a shrine in the heart of a liberal power without one word against the ideology that has enthroned man where Christ must reign is an implicit renunciation of the Church’s divine mission.
This silence reveals the alignment of Ioannes XXIII’s apparatus with the system condemned in the Syllabus. Under the appearance of honouring a missionary church, they celebrate its harmless incorporation into an order that denies the rights of God and His Church.
Conclusion: A Shrine Co-opted for the Religion of the New Advent
The 1960 letter on the Carmel church is not an innocent bureaucratic flourish. It manifests:
– A shift from supernatural criteria (truth, grace, sacrifice, salvation, the Kingship of Christ) to naturalistic criteria (heritage, architecture, civic recognition, sentimental devotions, picturesque weddings).
– An appropriation of canonical style to cloak a practical abandonment of the condemnations and doctrines of the pre-1958 Magisterium.
– A deliberate silence on Modernism, liberalism, indifferentism, and Freemasonry which, according to Pius IX and Pius X, are the very forces striving to annihilate the Church.
– The absorption of a once-missionary bastion into the symbolic economy of the conciliar sect: a network of “historic” churches and “basilicas” which, under usurpers, serve as stage sets for a neo-religion where Christ the King is dethroned in favour of man, culture, and the secular state.
Under the unchanging Catholic rule articulated by the authentic Magisterium, any act that ornaments the Church’s monuments while betraying her dogma is not an act of honour but of profanation. The Carmel church deserves to be what its stones were laid to be: not a compliant monument blessed by a usurper, but a fortress of the integral Faith, where Serra’s true legacy is continued: the conquest of souls and societies for the exclusive reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Source:
Caeruleum mare (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025