This Latin letter of antipope John XXIII, addressed to Cardinal Cento as his legate to Ávila for the fourth centenary of St. Teresa of Jesus’ Carmelite reform, is a solemn panegyric of Teresa, an exhortation to the Teresian family to fidelity to contemplative life, and a pious framing of her reform as a providential flowering parallel to Trent and as spiritual support for the then-upcoming Vatican II; it culminates in the wish that the Council bring forth a “new springtime” of beauty and renewal in the Church, allegedly obtained through the prayers and penances of Teresian Carmel. In reality, this text instrumentalizes St. Teresa’s authentic Catholic mysticism to bless the conciliar revolution, masking, under an odor of incense and rhetoric, a program that subverts the very doctrine and ascetical-theological principles she defended.
Teresa of Jesus Enlisted in Service of the Conciliar Revolution
1. Objective Content: Pious Ornament Covering a Different Foundation
On the factual surface, the letter:
– Recalls that St. Teresa founded the first reformed Carmelite monastery of St. Joseph in Ávila on 24 August 1562.
– Praises her austerity, contemplation, enclosure, poverty, and zeal for souls.
– Notes her influence on the Discalced Carmelites, her collaboration with St. John of the Cross, and the expansion of reformed monasteries.
– Emphasizes her conviction that prayer and self-offering are a privileged form of apostolate, especially for the conversion of heretics and infidels and the sanctification of priests.
– Addresses Carmelite nuns as a hidden but fecund “portion” of the Church and exhorts them to fidelity to their charism.
– Urges Carmelite friars, engaged also in exterior apostolate, to preserve the contemplative “precious pearl” received from Teresa and unite action and contemplation.
– Directly connects the Teresian family’s prayer and penance with obtaining graces for the “imminent Second Vatican Ecumenical Council”, described as a source of a “new spring” and “accumulated spiritual beauty.”
– Delegates Cardinal Cento as legate to preside at the Ávila celebrations, presenting this as an extension of John XXIII’s own participation.
All this is presented as if there were a harmonious continuity between the Tridentine-Carmelite renewal and the announced “new springtime” of Vatican II.
The crucial problem is that this letter weaponizes Teresa’s name and the vocabulary of traditional asceticism to crown the very conciliar process which would dissolve the doctrinal, liturgical, and ascetical foundations of her reform; the text is thus not a harmless devotional piece, but an act of symbolic annexation.
2. Linguistic Cloak: Sweet Unction Concealing a Programmatic Shift
The rhetoric is notable:
– Constantly soft, affective, emotive: “suave remembrance,” “sweetly moved,” “precious pearl,” “flowering and sweet-smelling spring.”
– Liberal use of honorifics and patristic citations (St. Cyprian, St. Bernard) to confer an air of unimpeachable Catholicity.
– Emphasis on “joy,” “spiritual joy,” “new spring,” “beauty,” more than on combat, militancy, judgment, or doctrinal precision.
– The key phrase linking Teresa to the Council:
…peculiaribus supplicationibus et voluntariis cruciatibus divinam largitatem eidem conciliet, qua e proximo Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano Secundo novum veluti ver, cumulatae pulchritudinis spiritualis praenuntium, exoriatur.
“…may by their particular supplications and voluntary sufferings obtain for [the Church] the divine bounty, whereby from the forthcoming Second Ecumenical Vatican Council a kind of new spring, a herald of accumulated spiritual beauty, may arise.”
This language is not accidental. It is the early lexicon of the *Church of the New Advent*: “springtime,” “beauty,” “renewal,” aestheticized and irenic, with no hint of the Church’s perennial note of militancy, *odium haeresis* (hatred of heresy), judgment of error, and insistence on the Kingship of Christ over public life. It is carefully crafted so that traditional souls, hearing familiar names (Teresa, John of the Cross, Trent), accept as Catholic the novel project to which these names are annexed.
The bureaucratic-ceremonial tone of delegation (“we choose you our Legate to preside”) consolidates this: the usurper wraps his authority in traditional ceremonial to make the conciliar enterprise appear as simple continuity, a classic modernist tactic condemned by St. Pius X as using tradition’s external forms while emptying them internally.
3. Doctrinal Confrontation: Teresa and Trent versus the Conciliar Agenda
Measured against integral Catholic doctrine before 1958, the central fault lines become clear.
3.1. The Antipope’s Illegitimate Magisterial Pose
By 1962, John XXIII was publicly inaugurating Vatican II on principles directly colliding with the anti-modernist magisterium:
– Pius IX in the *Syllabus Errorum* condemned the core liberal theses on religious freedom, indifferentism, reconciliation with “modern civilization,” and the separation of Church and State (props. 15–18, 55, 77–80). This very letter’s sponsoring regime would shortly promulgate a council that canonized precisely those tendencies.
– St. Pius X’s *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* anathematized:
– The evolution of dogma.
– The reduction of doctrine to religious experience.
– The relativization of the Magisterium to the “sense of the faithful.”
All these would be actualized in conciliar and post-conciliar praxis.
An occupant of the Roman See who proposes, defends, and institutionalizes such modernist principles falls under the very theological principle restated by classical authors: *manifestus haereticus* non potest esse Papa (a manifest heretic cannot be Pope), because a non-member of the Church cannot be her head. This is not a private theory, but the common teaching of the pre-conciliar theologians as synthesized, for example, by Bellarmine and others (see FILE: Defense of Sedevacantism).
Therefore, the entire epistolary act is an usurpation of Apostolic authority to bless a council and a “renewal” already doctrinally suspect. His tone of paternal magisterium only aggravates the crime: *auctoritas* is invoked to draw Teresa into complicity with an anti-Tridentine revolution.
3.2. Co-opting Teresa’s Contemplative Apostolate for a “New Spring”
The letter correctly notes aspects of St. Teresa’s authentic spirituality:
– Strict enclosure, poverty, penance.
– Centrality of mental prayer and contemplation.
– Sacrificial intercession for priests, missionaries, and the conversion of infidels and heretics.
– Zeal for doctrinal truth and for the salvation of souls.
It even cites her burning concern that souls are lost and her insistence that the vocation of her nuns is to weep and plead that “the number of the damned be not increased.” That terrifying supernatural realism is entirely Catholic.
But the pivotal move is this: those same prayers and penances are then explicitly ordered to obtain divine favor for Vatican II as “a new spring.” Thus Teresa’s uncompromising supernaturalism is instrumentalized to power a council whose practical outcome would be:
– The abandonment of the obligation of confessional states and the Kingship of Christ in public order (against *Quas Primas*, which declares that peace cannot exist where Christ does not reign socially).
– The demolition of the anti-liberal, anti-modernist line of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X.
– The replacement of missionary zeal for conversion with “dialogue” and false ecumenism.
– The promotion of religious liberty as a civil right for error, condemned explicitly by pre-1958 Magisterium.
To present Teresa’s reform, born in the fire of Trent and directed against Protestant and worldly dissolutions, as the spiritual patroness of such an agenda is an inversion approaching blasphemy. *Quas Primas* insists that the ills of society come precisely from “removing Jesus Christ and His most holy law from public life”; yet the conciliar project that John XXIII urges Teresa’s daughters to support leads directly to the enthronement of secular “human rights” over the rights of Christ the King.
The letter thus commits a grave doctrinal fraud: it baptizes the future apostasy with Teresa’s tears.
3.3. The Silence that Condemns: No Warning against Modernism
What is not said is decisive:
– No warning against Modernism, although by 1962 the errors condemned in *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* had re-emerged among periti and bishops preparing the Council.
– No affirmation of the necessity of confessional Catholic states, despite the *Syllabus* and *Quas Primas*.
– No mention of the duties of rulers to publicly recognize and submit to Christ and His Church, even though the letter is addressed also to “public authorities” attending the celebration.
– No warning against the “religious liberty” and ecumenist programs already being advanced.
– No exhortation to combat specific errors (Protestantism, liberalism, socialism, Freemasonry) which St. Teresa and her era’s Popes would naturally have in their sights.
– No mention of the absolute necessity of the state of grace, judgment, hell, and the danger of sacrilegious communions flooding a lax Church—although Teresa spoke with terrifying clarity about damnation and self-deception.
Instead, the “Teresian apostolate” is reoriented in generic terms toward “the good and progress of the Church” understood as the conciliar project. Silence about the concrete doctrinal battlefield—while deploying mystical rhetoric—is not neutrality; it is complicity.
In integral Catholic theology, such studied omission about the reigning doctrinal crisis is itself a sign of modernist infiltration: *tacere de necessariis* (to be silent about what must be condemned) is a betrayal of office.
4. Language as Symptom: Aestheticized Spirituality without Militant Dogma
The text’s vocabulary betrays modernist tendencies beneath its classical Latin:
– “novum veluti ver” (“a kind of new spring”): a programmatic image later omnipresent in conciliar propaganda, contrasted with the supposed “rigidity” of the pre-conciliar Church.
– “Accumulated spiritual beauty”: an aesthetic category, vague and unthreatening to the world, replacing the precise language of dogma, anathema, and the Kingship of Christ.
– Continual emphasis on “hidden fecundity” of contemplatives for “society,” but with no parallel insistence that this fecundity must produce conversions out of false religions toward the one true Church.
The rhetoric about contemplative life and apostolate is, taken superficially, orthodox. But its function here is to:
– Legitimize the conciliar sect in advance by aligning it with revered contemplative tradition.
– Reduce Teresa’s fierce doctrinal clarity to an innocuous symbol of “prayerful support” for whatever “renewal” authorities choose to undertake.
– Shift from ascetical-mystical combat to a harmonious integration of contemplation with a broadly defined “external apostolate” whose doctrinal content is left unspecified, i.e., available for later modernist reinterpretation.
The linguistic sugarcoating is precisely what St. Pius X unmasked: Modernists speak the language of tradition while filling it with novel content. This letter is an early, emblematic specimen.
5. Theological Inversion: From Christ the King to Conciliar Humanism
Measured against pre-1958 doctrine on the Church, state, and apostolate:
– *Quas Primas* (Pius XI) teaches that true peace and order require public recognition of Christ’s social Kingship; secularism and religious indifferentism are denounced as sources of societal ruin.
– The *Syllabus* condemns religious liberty as understood by liberalism, the separation of Church and State, and the reconciliation of the Papacy with liberal-modern civilization.
– *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* condemn attempts to historicize and evolve dogma, and to subject the Magisterium to modern thought.
Within this doctrinal framework:
– Any “Council” aiming at “reconciliation” with liberalism, human rights ideology, religious freedom in the condemned sense, and interreligious relativism, is objectively incompatible with the Catholic Magisterium.
– Any preemptive spiritual mobilization that calls down graces on such a project, without precise doctrinal conditions, is not neutral prayer but participation in a deformation.
Thus when this letter commands the Teresian Carmel:
…peculiaribus supplicationibus et voluntariis cruciatibus… ut… e Concilio… novum ver exoriatur.
“…by particular supplications and voluntary sufferings… that from the Council a new spring may arise.”
the intent is theologically perverse: it yokes the pure victimhood of cloistered nuns to the service of a paramasonic restructuring of ecclesial life, turning their vocation into spiritual fuel for the “abomination of desolation.”
This is the archetypal modernist maneuver: to claim the support of saints whose entire life contradicts the innovations being introduced in their name.
6. Symptomatic Fruit: Teresian Charism under the Conciliar Sect
Look at the historical consequences that flow coherently from the spirit enshrined here:
– After Vatican II, many Carmelite houses suffered:
– Relaxation of enclosure.
– Dilution or abandonment of strict poverty and penance.
– Psychologization of mysticism; suspicion toward Teresa’s robust supernatural realism.
– Liturgical devastation, with the Most Holy Sacrifice replaced by vernacular assemblies, communion in the hand, profanations—precisely those practices which, as integral Catholic theology shows, are at least sacrilegious, often idolatrous.
– The missionary thrust shifted from converting non-Catholics to “dialogue,” an approach that Teresa, fierce daughter of Trent, would have repudiated.
This decay is not accidental; it is the predictable fruit of the conciliar principles that this letter seeks to pre-sanctify. The same authorities who here praise Teresa’s zeal for the conversion of heretics would within a few years inaugurate Assisi-style relativism, affirm “the esteem” for false religions, and praise “religious liberty” in direct contradiction to the prior Magisterium.
By its silence and its misdirection of contemplative prayer, the letter reveals itself as an ideological instrument of the conciliar sect: it does not defend Teresa against modernism; it kidnaps her for modernism.
7. Betrayal of Supernatural Realism: Soft Words, Hard Omission
St. Teresa’s doctrine and experience are marked by:
– Acute awareness of hell and the danger of damnation.
– Horror of mortal sin.
– Uncompromising obedience to the Church’s dogma and confessors.
– Humble yet clear submission to the objective structure of hierarchy and sacramental life.
– Zeal for the sanctity of priests and for the conversion of heretics to the one true fold.
In contrast, this letter:
– Speaks not one word about the eternal loss of souls in the context of the Council’s agenda.
– Says nothing about the duty of Catholic rulers (also addressed) to restore the reign of Christ the King in civil law.
– Fails to remind Carmelite contemplatives that the first object of their prayer is that God preserve His Church from error and heresy—particularly modernism, the “synthesis of all heresies” (St. Pius X).
– Encourages trust in the conciliar process, not vigilance against doctrinal subversion.
This is the gravest indictment: *silentium de necessariis suprema fraus* (silence regarding what is necessary is supreme fraud). A text that purports to guide Teresa’s spiritual daughters in 1962 and does not command them to oppose the emerging modernist avalanche, but instead blesses it, is not Catholic direction but conciliar manipulation.
8. Conclusion: Teresa against the Neo-Church That Invokes Her
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith anchored in the pre-1958 Magisterium:
– The letter’s devotional segments on St. Teresa, taken in isolation, echo genuine Catholic doctrine on contemplative life and spiritual apostolate.
– But these truths are annexed to a false premise: that Vatican II and the “new springtime” would be a legitimate and organic continuation of Trent and the anti-modernist Popes.
– Because that premise contradicts the solemn condemnations of liberalism, religious indifferentism, and modernism taught authoritatively by the true Magisterium, the entire operation is vitiated.
– The figure issuing this letter, as promoter of a conciliar revolution incompatible with the Catholic rule of faith, cannot be accepted as a true Roman Pontiff; his use of Teresa’s name and Carmelite celebrations is an abuse of stolen authority.
Thus this document stands as:
– A revealing early monument of the conciliar sect’s method: cloaking novelties in the garments of saints.
– A warning to all souls of good will:
– Do not be deceived by pious language when it serves anti-Catholic ends.
– Do not allow the mystical innocence of saints like Teresa of Jesus to be drafted into the service of the “Church of the New Advent,” the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican.
– Return to the unchanging doctrine of the Popes and Councils before 1958; measure every text, even one drowning in incense, by that standard alone.
If Teresa is to be honored in truth, it will not be by invoking her as patroness of a “new springtime” of doctrinal dilution, but by restoring the faith, discipline, liturgy, and social Kingship of Christ that she loved, defended, and suffered for. Everything in this letter that tends in the opposite direction must be rejected with the same holy intransigence with which she rejected the world’s vanities and the errors of her age.
Source:
Ad Ferdinandum tit. S. Eustachii S. R. E. Presb. Cardinalem Cento, quem Legatimi eligit ut Abulae in Hispania religiosis caerimoniis praesideat, quarto saeculo exeunte ab inchoata a S. Teresia a Iesu … (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025