In this short Latin epistle dated 28 August 1959, John XXIII congratulates the rector Martin John O’Connor and the Pontifical North American College in Rome on the centenary of its foundation. He recalls with satisfaction the college’s fruits for the hierarchy of the United States, praises benefactors and alumni, highlights the symbolic importance of the new building on the Janiculum, and extols Rome as the privileged place for priestly formation near the Chair of Peter. The letter culminates in pious wishes that the college continue to form clergy of learning, virtue, and zeal for the good of the Church and the homeland, ending with his “Apostolic Blessing.”
Laodicea on the Janiculum: John XXIII’s Humanist Seminary Ideal against the Kingship of Christ
Celebrating an Institution of Transition: Praises Devoid of the Supernatural Combat
Already at the literal level, this letter is a paradigm of the new religion’s mentality. John XXIII offers flowing compliments for one hundred years of the North American College, emphasizes national prestige, academic competence, and ecclesiastical careers, yet says nothing about the Most Holy Sacrifice as propitiation for sins, nothing about the danger of hell, nothing about the apostasy and errors condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium, nothing about the mortal threat of Modernism inside the clergy that St. Pius X called the “synthesis of all heresies” (Lamentabili sane exitu; Pascendi). Instead, an atmosphere of self-congratulating optimism is diffused — precisely the spirit that disarms the clergy in the face of the “synagogue of Satan” denounced by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors.
On the centenary of a priestly college, an authentic Roman Pontiff would have spoken first of the Cross, of the necessity of priests as sacrificial victims at the altar, of doctrinal intransigence against liberalism, naturalism, communism, and Freemasonry, of the binding condemnations of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII. John XXIII offers instead a diplomatic postcard: polite Latin, patriotic flattery, and a purely horizontal vision of formation. This is not an accidental omission; it is the early, programmatic unveiling of the conciliar sect’s agenda.
The Factual Level: Success Measured by Careers, Not by Fidelity
John XXIII notes with satisfaction that the college has produced numerous priests, “not a few” cardinals and bishops, who left “a noble name” in promoting “the kingdom of God.” He implicitly treats this institutional success as self-evident proof of supernatural fruitfulness.
Yet by 1959, the intellectual and moral decomposition of much of the European and American clergy — biblical relativism, liturgical experimentation, democratic activism, doctrinal minimalism — was already a matter of record. St. Pius X had exposed the very type of “advanced” seminary scholar and smooth ecclesiastic that such Roman institutions too often formed: men who outwardly kept the cassock while denying in practice the immutability of dogma, the inerrancy of Scripture, the uniqueness of the Church.
The letter is fatally silent about:
– The duty of these priests and bishops to defend the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX against liberal democracy and religious indifferentism.
– The obligation to combat Socialism, Communism, and the secret sects condemned repeatedly by the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
– The condemnation of Modernism in Lamentabili and Pascendi, which directly targeted precisely those trends flourishing in “elite” Roman houses of formation.
Instead of recalling these non-negotiable doctrinal lines, John XXIII only sees “just cause for rejoicing,” as though the last century of American Catholicism had not witnessed:
– The steady accommodation of the Church to the secular, Masonic constitutional order of the United States.
– The practical abandonment of the thesis of the social Kingship of Christ in favor of religious pluralism condemned by Pius IX (Syllabus, 15, 55, 77-80).
– The rise of an episcopate that, within a decade, would enthusiastically implement the conciliar revolution and dismantle Catholic identity in seminaries, schools, and public life.
Thus the letter measures success not by the criterion of *fides integra* (integral faith) but by institutional expansion and the ascent of alumni to positions inside what would become the neo-church’s bureaucracy. This is already the logic of the *conciliar sect*: numbers, visibility, promotion, “reputation,” instead of doctrinal militancy, Eucharistic reparation, and defense of Christ’s public reign.
Lingering Poison in the Language: Nationalism, Optimism, and Human Respect
At the linguistic level, the epistle is a polished specimen of the new rhetoric. The key features are revealing:
– Flattering reference to the United States as “flourishing and renowned fatherland,” where the Church supposedly enjoys “common respect of citizens.” No reminder that a state which constitutionally refuses to acknowledge the only true religion is, in the light of the Syllabus, in objective rebellion against God. No assertion that civil law must conform to divine and natural law (Quas Primas).
– Repeated accent on “joy,” “laetitia,” “hope,” “praise” — but divorced from penitence and combat. The militant dimension of the Church is dissolved into an amiable club of cultured gentlemen.
– Ideal of clergy enriched by “wider erudition,” “sense of Catholic vigor embracing all things,” shaped by “assiduous study of Christian antiquity.” In itself, study is good; but here it is presented as cultural expansion, not as armour against the doctrinal and moral rot of the age. The tone predisposes to that “historical consciousness” which Modernists use to relativize dogma.
– Rome is extolled as *urbs caput rerum* and *civitas sacerdotalis* — yet there is a subtle displacement: emphasis on the city, the institution, the building on the Janiculum; silence about the immutable dogmatic condemnations that made Rome truly the “city of priests.”
This bureaucratic and irenic language is not accidental. Modernists learned, under condemnation, to speak in a double register: outwardly pious, inwardly neutralizing. Here, we see the smiling mask which will soon legitimize Religious Liberty, Ecumenism, and the cult of man. Nothing sharp, nothing that might offend “common respect” or the liberal order. The letter is exquisitely respectable — and therefore theologically anesthetized.
Rome without the Syllabus: Theological Emptiness behind Institutional Praise
The theological heart of the document is its panegyric of formation in Rome as the safest guarantee of solid doctrine. John XXIII presents the city “at Peter’s Chair,” illuminated “from the Apostolic source,” as the ideal place to drink pure faith and Christian letters. This claim, read in isolation, borrows the venerable language of the true Church. But in 1959, two facts make it gravely duplicitous:
1. The Roman theological establishment had already been profoundly infiltrated by precisely those tendencies condemned by St. Pius X: historical relativism, biblical criticism that denied inerrancy, “pastoral” attenuation of dogma, “dialogue” with liberal democracy.
2. John XXIII himself, within a short time, would convoke a council whose very premises contradicted the anti-liberal, anti-indifferentist teaching of his predecessors, elevating “religious liberty” and “ecumenism” into programmatic principles of the new structure occupying the Vatican.
Thus the letter’s praise of Rome as guarantor of orthodoxy becomes, in reality, the self-legitimizing language of a usurping regime. By insisting that to be formed in Rome is to drink from “pure sources,” while those sources have been doctrinally contaminated, John XXIII sets up the mechanism by which future generations of American clergy will be transformed into apostles of the conciliar revolution — and will then export this apostasy back home under the label “Roman.”
Measured by pre-1958 doctrine:
– The Syllabus of Errors had condemned the equality of religions, the secular state, unrestricted press and speech, and reconciliation with liberalism.
– Quas Primas (Pius XI) had solemnly taught that nations and rulers are bound to recognize and submit to the social Kingship of Christ; peace is possible only under His public reign, not under neutral constitutions.
– Lamentabili and Pascendi had anathematized the reduction of dogma to historical forms, the evolution of doctrine, and the subjection of the Magisterium to so-called “living consciousness.”
Yet in this letter there is:
– No reference to these binding condemnations as the non-negotiable program of the college.
– No warning that American civil principles, as actually practised, contradict Catholic doctrine and must be judged by the Church, not vice versa.
– No insistence that alumni must openly resist liberalism, socialism, and Freemasonry, which Pius IX and Leo XIII had identified as mortal enemies of the Church, also in America.
In other words, the letter’s theological content is negative by omission: it refuses to arm the seminarians with the dogmatic weapons necessary for their time. Such silence is not neutral; it is complicity.
Systemic Symptoms: From Janiculum Optimism to the Conciliar Sect
Seen in the light of subsequent history — which merely unveiled what was already latent — this epistle is symptomatic of the systemic apostasy that would crystallize in the so‑called “Church of the New Advent.” Several elements stand out:
– Substitution of the supernatural combat with institutional self-celebration. The measure of success becomes centenaries, buildings, dignities, and national prestige. The Cross, reparation, doctrinal anathema, and the Four Last Things disappear from the horizon.
– Integration into liberal-democratic mythology. The American environment is praised without doctrinal critique, as if a pluralist, secular state could be considered normal for the Church. This paves the way for the later glorification of “religious freedom” as a supposed “right,” directly contradicting the teaching of Pius IX and Pius XI.
– Glorification of Roman academicism emptied of anti-modernist militancy. By idealizing Rome as the secure locus of formation, while Rome is already compromised, the letter locks seminarians into obedience to an apparatus preparing their doctrinal deformation. They are trained to revere the very environment that will teach them to reinterpret or ignore dogma.
– Absence of warnings against Modernism. Coming only decades after Pius X declared that Modernism must be rooted out, John XXIII’s silence is thunderous. Where a true pope would have renewed the anti-modernist oath and cited his predecessors, he omits all, signalling a deliberate rupture in vigilance.
Such features are not accidental; they constitute the spiritual genetics of the conciliar sect. The North American College, praised here, would indeed become a laboratory for the manufacture of hierarchs who, in perfect coherence with the spirit of this letter, would:
– Embrace “ecumenical dialogue” with heretics and infidels;
– Tolerate or promote liturgical profanations and doctrinal ambiguities;
– Acquiesce to, or cooperate with, anti-Christian civil regimes and cultural degeneracy;
– Persecute those few souls striving to keep integral Catholic faith and the true rites.
The letter’s benign vocabulary thus hides a program of disarmament: the stripping of the future clergy of their identity as soldiers under Christ the King, in order to make them functionaries of a paramasonic structure.
Rome versus the Social Kingship of Christ: The Betrayal by Omission
Pius XI in *Quas Primas* taught unequivocally: peace and order in individuals and nations are possible only when they acknowledge and publicly submit to the reign of Christ the King; the Church has both the right and duty to demand that states conform their laws to His law. This is not a marginal devotion but the doctrinal antidote to laicism and secular tyranny.
Confront this with John XXIII’s letter:
– He lauds the United States as a flourishing country where the Catholic Church prospers and enjoys respect, without even hinting that the refusal to recognize the only true religion in public law is a grave disorder.
– He calls for clergy who will, by broad culture and universal outlook, serve both Church and homeland — but never says that their first duty is to call that homeland to abandon its indifferentist, Masonic principles and submit to Christ the King.
– He exalts Rome but does not place at the centre Rome’s mission to condemn error and impose the law of Christ on nations as well as individuals.
This omission is betrayal. It effectively accepts the liberal thesis forbidden by the Syllabus (55: separation of Church and State; 77–80: acceptance of religious pluralism and reconciliation with liberal progress). Once one grants, by silence and praise, that a neutral state is good enough, one has destroyed the Kingship of Christ in the temporal order, even while piously invoking His name.
Thus the North American College, far from being summoned to form confessors ready to suffer for the restoration of a Catholic order, is invited to produce well-mannered chaplains for the liberal empire — a role its alumni largely fulfilled in the decades after the council, by their complicity in moral, liturgical, and doctrinal collapse.
Clergy without Anathema: The Manufacture of Harmless Functionaries
Integral Catholic faith demands that priests be men of sacrifice, truth, and combat, configured to Christ the High Priest who offered Himself on Calvary and sent His Apostles to teach all nations “whatsoever I have commanded you,” not to negotiate dogma with the world. The pre-1958 Magisterium consistently taught:
– Dogma is immutable; its sense cannot be altered to please modern thought.
– The Church has the right to judge, condemn, and, when needed, use temporal means to defend the faithful against poisonous doctrines.
– There is no salvation outside the Church; Protestantism, liberalism, rationalism are condemned errors.
John XXIII’s letter — like so many of his pronouncements — is meticulously cleansed of any such edge:
– No mention of error, heresy, or condemned propositions threatening seminarians.
– No reiteration of the anti-modernist oath, no reminder of the Index, no call to reject condemned authors and tendencies.
– No admonition against the seductions of biblical criticism hostile to inspiration and inerrancy, directly targeted in Lamentabili.
– No evocation of the Four Last Things, which alone give gravity to priestly responsibility and seminary asceticism.
The result is a blueprint for the modernist “priest”: educated, courteous, patriotic, dialogical, but doctrinally fluid and liturgically desacralized. That such a model is blessed from the very top reveals the depth of the transformation: a clergy purposely crafted not to resist the revolution, but to administer it.
Conclusion: A Mild Text as Manifesto of a Violent Revolution
This 1959 epistle may seem at first glance banal and pious. Precisely therein lies its danger. Its mild surface masks a concatenation of omissions and insinuations that, when measured by the unwavering doctrine of the pre-1958 Church, expose a radical reorientation:
– From supernatural militancy to humanistic optimism;
– From Christ the King over states to religiously neutral patriotism;
– From Rome as guardian of anathema to Rome as distributor of decorous careers;
– From seminaries as fortresses against Modernism to seminaries as channels of Modernism, canonized by Roman approval.
The Pontifical North American College is held up not as a school of martyrs and confessors of the Syllabus, but as a nursery of ecclesiastical gentlemen perfectly suited to the conciliar sect that would soon enthrone the cult of man, dismantle the Most Holy Sacrifice into a communal meal, and subordinate divine Revelation to the idol of “modern conscience.”
By refusing to recall the condemnations of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, and by clothing liberal Americanism and Roman academicism in tones of unqualified approval, John XXIII’s letter functions as a quiet charter of disorientation. It exemplifies how the anti-church revolution advances not only through blatant heresies, but through carefully curated silences where the integral Catholic faith should thunder.
Source:
Centum – Ad Martinum Ioannem O'connor, Archiepiscopum Tit. Laodicenum in Syria, Pontificii Collegii Foederatarum Americae Civitatum in Urbe rectorem: saeculo exeunte ab eodem Collegio condito (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025