This Latin letter, issued by Antipope John XXIII to Antonio Caggiano on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal consecration, is a short panegyric. It:
– Praises Caggiano’s government of Rosario: multiplication of parishes, construction of a seminary, promotion of religious formation, organization of lay apostolate.
– Commends his role in shaping Catholic Action in Argentina “according to the wishes of the Roman Pontiffs”.
– Extols his transfer to Buenos Aires and encourages him to continue his pastoral zeal.
– Grants him the faculty to impart, in John XXIII’s name, a blessing with plenary indulgence on the occasion of the jubilee.
All of it is wrapped in courtly phrases of paternal benevolence and institutional self-congratulation, without a single word of doctrinal combat against Modernism, Communism, naturalism, or the growing global apostasy.
Panegyric without Faith: John XXIII’s Letter as Symptom of the Conciliar Betrayal
From Apostolic Vigilance to Institutional Flattery
The document is formally modest, but precisely in such “small” acts the inner spirit of the emerging conciliar sect reveals itself.
The author styling himself “Ioannes PP. XXIII” addresses Caggiano as a faithful collaborator and praises his quarter-century in the episcopate as a success story of pastoral management and organizational growth. The entire text is a hymn to bureaucratic efficiency, external expansion, and the apparatus of “Catholic Action” understood as an administrative machine.
Key features of the letter (translation-summary of its own affirmations):
– “We congratulate you” for having governed Rosario actively, multiplying parishes, erecting a beautiful seminary, promoting religious education, launching lay apostolate structures.
– “Argentina owes you much” for configuring Catholic Action in line with papal directives.
– We trust that in Buenos Aires you will exercise the same zeal “with gentle wisdom and industrious charity”.
– As a special favor for your jubilee, when you celebrate pontifical Mass you may impart Our blessing with a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions.
Nowhere:
– A reminder of the integral Catholic dogma as immutable norm.
– A warning against condemned errors: Modernism, Liberalism, Communism, laicism, religious indifferentism, false ecumenism, naturalism.
– A reference to the absolute social Kingship of Christ as binding law over states, as taught by Pius IX and Pius XI.
– A call to defend the flock from masonic and revolutionary forces, so clearly denounced by the pre-1958 Magisterium.
– A word about sin, the state of grace, judgment, hell, or the supernatural stakes of episcopal responsibility.
This silence is not accidental. It is programmatic. A letter that should mirror the uncompromising line of Pius IX’s Syllabus, Leo XIII’s social teaching, St. Pius X’s anti-modernist campaign, and Pius XI’s *Quas primas* instead reads as a diplomatic note of a religious NGO. In such omissions, the outline of the *ecclesia nova* appears.
Linguistic Cosmetics as Theology: The Rhetoric of Comfortable Apostasy
The tone and vocabulary expose the underlying mentality.
1. Exuberant, self-satisfied praise:
– The text overflows with courteous formulae, presenting Caggiano’s activity as unambiguously exemplary. There is no conditionality, no reminder of accountability before Christ the Judge.
– The bishop is encircled by “joys of his flock,” with the tone of a corporate anniversary, not of a shepherd who will render account for souls (cf. Heb 13:17).
2. Reduction of grace to decor:
– “Beautiful seminary buildings,” “well-ordered structures,” “laity organized” are held up as proof of success. The letter nowhere asks whether the doctrine taught there is the same integral doctrine defended, under anathema, by Trent, Vatican I, and St. Pius X.
– It never asks whether seminarians and laity were being formed against Modernism condemned in *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi Dominici gregis*, or gently prepared for its triumph.
3. Naturalistic, horizontal vocabulary:
– Words like “operosa caritas,” “placida sapientia,” “apt structures,” “fruit” of social action appear without any explicit anchor in dogma, sacramental life, or the warfare against error.
– This soft, irenic language anticipates the conciliar style: soothing phrases covering the demolition of dogmatic clarity. The Church of Christ is, in traditional doctrine, *militans*; here we are given an ecclesial managerialism that avoids combat.
4. The indulgence as institutional branding:
– The permission to impart a plenary indulgence “in Our name and by Our authority” is here primarily a ceremonial ornament; there is no doctrinal catechesis on what a plenary indulgence requires: confession, Communion, detachment from sin, ecclesial communion in the true faith.
– The gesture functions as a stamp of legitimacy for a hierarchy already inwardly gravitating towards the conciliar revolution. The supernatural is cosmetically invoked to canonize an institutional status quo.
The rhetoric is thus an anaesthetic. Words of “benevolence” mask the reality: the occupant of Rome confirms a hierarchy that is not being summoned to guard the deposit of faith (*depositum custodi*), but to administer an evolving system soon to be reshaped by Vatican II.
Theological Evasion and the Betrayal of Pre-1958 Doctrine
Measured against the immutable Catholic magisterium up to 1958, this letter is gravely symptomatic. Its content and its silences stand in stark contrast to the true papal teaching that the conciliar sect pretends to inherit.
1. Silence on the Kingship of Christ
– Pius XI in *Quas primas* teaches that peace and order depend absolutely on the public and social reign of Christ: civil laws, institutions, education must be submitted to His law.
– The letter, written in 1960 in Argentina—a country deeply shaken by liberalism, masonic influences, and anticlerical currents—does not exhort the archbishop to fight so that the state recognize Christ the King, nor to oppose laicist laws, nor to defend Catholic education against secular usurpation. It is a silence directly opposed to the spirit and letter of *Quas primas* and the Syllabus of Pius IX, which condemns the separation of Church and State (Proposition 55), religious indifferentism (15–18), and liberal “freedoms” that relativize truth (77–80).
2. Silence on Modernism and condemned errors
– After *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi*, every bishop is gravely bound to combat the “synthesis of all heresies,” which dissolves dogma into evolving “religious experience.”
– This letter does not thank Caggiano for defending the faith against Modernism, does not remind him to enforce the anti-modernist oath (still in force), does not even mention the danger of doctrinal corruption. Instead, it highlights Catholic Action as structured according to “Roman Pontiffs’ desires,” without distinguishing authentic pre-1958 instructions from the imminent conciliar distortions of “lay apostolate” used as Trojan horse for democratization of the Church.
– The omission, given the date (1960, on the threshold of Vatican II), is damning: in a moment demanding maximum doctrinal vigilance, the antipope offers only human congratulations.
3. Naturalization of “Catholic Action”
– Under Pius XI and Pius XII, Catholic Action was understood (at least doctrinally) as participation of the laity in the hierarchy’s apostolate, subordinate, ordered, and doctrinally controlled.
– In practice, however, it often became a vehicle for horizontal activism, politicization, and infiltration. The letter praises Caggiano for shaping Catholic Action “per eius fines… aptis structuris temperasti” – as if the primary success consisted in adapting structures, not in preserving doctrine pure from liberal-social contamination.
– Missing is any insistence that Catholic Action must aim first at the sanctification of souls through the Most Holy Sacrifice, sound catechesis, and submission to the integral Magisterium. Instead, it is presented as a technical success, a prelude to the post-conciliar cult of “engaged laity” and parliamentary ecclesiology.
4. Subtle undermining of the Church Militant
– The letter upholds an image of the bishop as a kindly administrator who, with “placid wisdom and industrious charity,” ensures growth, harmony, and organizational expansion. There is no mention of his duty to condemn heresy, to excommunicate obstinate error, to resist anti-Christian laws.
– Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI openly describe the struggle of the Church against Freemasonry, secularism, socialism, modern liberalism, and their agents within states and within Catholic institutions. The present letter ignores entirely the masonic war against the Church explicitly described in the Syllabus’ appended texts and subsequent condemnations.
– This is not merely incomplete; it is incompatible with the traditional papal ethos. The “gentle” pastor without sword becomes the prototype of the conciliar “shepherd” who blesses error by silence.
One More Stone in the Foundation of the Conciliar Sect
This text must be read as part of a broader system, not as an isolated courtesy.
1. Legitimation of a hierarchy preparing revolution
– By celebrating Caggiano’s episcopal work without doctrinal criteria, John XXIII validates a model bishop whose measure is external efficiency, institutional prestige, and harmonious integration with the secular environment.
– This is precisely the profile later demanded by the “Church of the New Advent”: bishops as facilitators of dialogue, managers of structures, promoters of laicized “apostolate,” and loyal executors of conciliar aggiornamento.
– *Lex orandi, lex credendi* (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”) has its analogue at the level of governance: *lex laudandi, lex promovendi* – what is officially praised reveals what is being built. Here, what is praised is not the militant defense of the deposit of faith, but the pre-conciliar shell already emptied of its doctrinal soul.
2. The indulgence as counterfeit currency
– The letter’s concession of indulgence is invalid as coming from an antipope; but its theological function within the conciliar narrative is revealing. It uses the language of traditional spirituality to put a sacred seal on a hierarchy that will soon collaborate in demolishing the very theology of indulgences, sin, punishment, and satisfaction.
– The faithful are thus habituated: external forms of Catholicism remain, while their interior content is quietly inverted. This is the essence of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X: preserving words, changing meanings.
3. Continuity of structures, rupture of faith
– The letter boasts of increased parishes, a splendid seminary, organized laity. To the superficial observer, it radiates “Catholic vitality.” In reality, those very structures would be the channels of post-1962 doctrinal corruption, liturgical devastation, and moral collapse.
– Authentic Catholic evaluation would ask: Are vocations formed to the Tridentine priesthood and the propitiatory sacrifice? Are seminarians instructed according to Thomistic doctrine and anti-modernist vigilance? Are laity fortified against liberalism and indifferentism? The letter asks none of this. It blesses the form while the content is being prepared for inversion.
In classical Catholic ecclesiology, a bishop’s primary glory is fidelity to the immutable faith and defense of souls against error, not statistical growth or proximity to civil elites. By that standard, the silence of this letter is a theological accusation.
Contrast with the Pre-Conciliar Magisterium: A Non-Serviam in Velvet Gloves
To unmask fully the bankruptcy of the mentality expressed in this document, one must juxtapose it with key pre-1958 teachings which it effectively ignores.
1. Against Liberalism and Separation
– Pius IX in the Syllabus condemns as errors:
– The claim that man is free to embrace any religion (15–16).
– The notion that the State may be religiously indifferent or separate from the Church (55).
– The exaltation of unlimited “freedoms” of cult and press as neutral goods (77–79).
– A genuine successor of Pius IX writing to the archbishop of a major Catholic nation in 1960 would remind him to resist these liberal principles and to seek, as duty, the recognition of the true religion by the State. John XXIII’s letter does not even allude to this obligation. He treats the bishop’s role as purely intra-ecclesial administration.
2. Against Modernism and Doctrinal Evolution
– St. Pius X in *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* condemns:
– The reduction of dogma to mutable expressions of religious experience.
– The subordination of magisterial teaching to “historical criticism.”
– The displacement of supernatural Revelation by immanentist philosophy.
– This letter, in 1960—when Modernist currents are already well entrenched in seminaries, biblical institutes, and Catholic Action—says nothing of the bishop’s duty to expel such errors, to enforce the anti-modernist oath, to purify Catholic Action of subversive ideologies.
– Such systematic omission, at this precise historical juncture, is itself evidence of complicity with the Modernist program: *tacere, consentire* (to be silent is to consent).
3. For the Kingship of Christ
– Pius XI’s *Quas primas* commands pastors to preach and promote the social reign of Christ the King, denouncing secularism as a “plague” of our age and insisting that states and rulers must publicly honour Christ and His law.
– In this letter to the leading prelate of Argentina, there is no call to work for the submission of legislation, education, and public life to Christ’s reign; no warning against masonic, socialist, and liberal projects destroying Catholic order.
– This omission effectively disarms the episcopate and adapts it to coexist with apostate political structures. It contradicts the very purpose for which *Quas primas* instituted the solemnity of Christ the King: to resist the laicist state and to condemn public apostasy.
Thus the letter, under a thin veil of pious language, functions as a practical negation of prior infallible doctrine. It does not formally preach heresy in its few lines; it does something more insidious: it normalizes an episcopal ethos that quietly abandons the sworn responsibilities defined by true pontiffs.
Diagnosis: Spiritual Emptiness Behind Polite Latin
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine prior to 1958, several elements emerge as spiritually and theologically bankrupt:
– Absence of any reference to the integral deposit of faith as a fixed, non-negotiable norm.
– Sanctioning of an episcopal career model based on projects, constructions, and organizational schemes instead of combat for truth and sanctity.
– Instrumentalization of spiritual goods (blessing, indulgence) as decorative confirmations of an emerging new order, without any serious catechesis on their conditions or relation to the true Church.
– Total silence about the enemies of the Church: no mention of Freemasonry, socialism, communism, liberalism, rationalism, Modernism – all abundantly documented and condemned by preceding popes, including repeated denunciations of masonic sects as the operational arm of the “synagogue of Satan.”
– Substitution of the Church Militant with an ecclesiastical administration pursuing harmony, expansion, and structures, not the triumph of Christ the King over nations, laws, cultures, and souls.
In sum, this letter, though outwardly “Catholic” in form, is internally consistent with the conciliar sect’s program: preserve enough traditional vocabulary to anaesthetize resistance, but excise the militant, dogmatic, anti-liberal, anti-modernist substance of the Roman Church. It is a minor but telling stone in the edifice of the coming “abomination of desolation,” in which the language of piety is used to legitimize the surrender of the faith.
Those who wish to measure spirits according to the rule of the true Magisterium must recognize in such documents not continuity, but contradiction veiled by courtesy. For a true pope, the 25th anniversary of an archbishop would be an occasion to recall: *non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam* (“not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your Name give glory”)—and to demand from that bishop fidelity to the unaltered doctrine, courageous opposition to the world, and unwavering defence of the Kingdom of Christ over every nation. Here, instead, we find only the self-satisfaction of a hierarchy already turned toward the council that would enthrone man where Quas Primas proclaimed Christ.
Source:
Quoniam ab episcopali – Ad Cardinalem Caggiano vicesimum quintum a suscepto episcopatu annum implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025