In this Latin text dated 7 November 1958, Giovanni Roncalli, under the name of John XXIII, issues an apostolic constitution that reorganizes territories of the Archdiocese of La Paz in Bolivia in order to erect a new territorial jurisdiction: the so‑called praelatura nullius of Coroico (Coroicensis). The document details: the territorial detachment from La Paz, subordination of the new entity to the metropolitan see, transfer of clergy and acts, erection of the church of St Peter in Coroico as cathedral, norms on the seminary and revenues, and execution clauses entrusted to the then apostolic nunciature. Beneath the administrative precision, this text is the first cold bureaucratic seal of the conciliar usurpation: a man elected after Pius XII, without Catholic faith, begins to act as legislator of the Church while introducing a new, fraudulent line of authority.
First Territorial Symptom of a Usurped Authority
This constitution must be read not sentimentally, but in the light of *lex orandi, lex credendi* and of the perennial doctrine on the papacy: *non-Catholicus non potest esse Papa* (a non-Catholic cannot be pope). Its calm canonical clauses become damning because they presuppose a legitimacy that Catholic doctrine, applied to the person and program of Roncalli, does not and cannot recognize.
The text itself is short and apparently “neutral”: the division of the Archdiocese of La Paz (Pacensis in Bolivia), establishment of the *praelatura nullius Coroicensis*, specification of its boundaries, its suffraganeus status, its cathedral church, its clergy ascription, the command to found at least an elementary seminary, financial provisions, archival transfers, delegation to the nuncio for execution, and the usual formulae of perpetuity, abrogation of contrary norms, and penalties for disobedience.
Exactly this clinical normality, in November 1958, is the theological scandal.
Factual Level: A Canonical Act Detached from the Catholic Substance
From a factual standpoint the constitution:
– Detaches defined civil provinces (Bautista Saavedra, Laracaya, Caupolicán, Nor Yungas, with exceptions) from La Paz to constitute a new *praelatura nullius* of Coroico.
– Names Coroico as the see; elevates the local church of St Peter to “cathedral.”
– Subjects the new structure as suffraganeus to La Paz.
– Orders construction of at least an elementary seminary in conformity with the norms of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities; sends chosen candidates to the Pontifical Pius Latin American College in Rome.
– Reassigns clergy based on territorial criteria and benefices.
– Divides the goods according to can. 1500 CIC 1917.
– Orders transfer of all relevant acts and archives to the new curia.
– Grants full executory faculties to the apostolic nuntius.
On the level of raw data, it mirrors countless pre‑1958 papal constitutions creating dioceses or prelatures, invoking the care for souls and the better organization of ecclesiastical governance.
But herein lies the fundamental imposture: a juridical form identical in appearance is being used by a man whose ideology and later deeds manifest rupture with the *Syllabus* of Pius IX, with *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* of Pius X, with *Quas Primas* of Pius XI, and with the anti-modernist, anti-masonic line of the pre‑1958 magisterium. Once the subject lacks the Catholic faith, the acts lack pontifical authority; the façade of canonical normality becomes a mask for a paramasonic consolidation.
Therefore, the factual observation: a new prelature is erected, must be completed by the Catholic conclusion: it is a territorial rearrangement promulgated by one who, by adherence to condemned principles, could not validly wield the Petrine authority he claims.
Instrumental Use of Canonical Formalism as Modernist Camouflage
The language of the constitution is classical curial Latin, full of continuity markers:
– Roncalli calls himself Servus servorum Dei, invokes his “care and solicitude” for all the Churches, and justifies reorganization in view of the growth of the faith.
– References are made to prior consultation with Pius XII, as if to ground the act in the previous pontificate’s intention.
– The formulae of perpetuity, invalidation of contrary dispositions, and threats of canonical penalties are employed to underline irrevocability.
This rhetoric is strategically “orthodox-sounding”. Modernism, condemned as *omnium haeresum conlectus* (“the synthesis of all heresies”: Pius X, *Pascendi*), does not always reveal itself through blatant heresy in each line; it often hides behind externally traditional forms, using them as carriers for a new religion.
Key linguistic symptoms:
1. The obsessive bureaucratic assurance:
– “Has vero Litteras nunc et in posterum efficaces esse et fore volumus…”
– The usurper insists on indefectible efficacy, while he himself embodies defection from the Faith. This disproportion between the moral authority (non‑existent) and the juridical tone (absolute) is typical of what Pius IX denounced: civil or human authority pretending to be the source of right (cf. Syllabus, prop. 39–40, 60).
2. The mechanical reference to the 1917 Code:
– Citing can. 1500 etc., but emptied of the living Spirit of Catholic Tradition: the law is retained as a shell while the faith that animated it is being prepared for demolition by the imminent council.
3. The calculated continuity with Pius XII:
– The text underscores that Pius XII had already approved the division and that Roncalli merely executes it.
– The aim is transparent: to anesthetize any instinctive Catholic reaction by wrapping the first acts of the usurpation in the mantle of the true pope’s prior decisions.
This linguistic construction is not innocent; it is the first layer of the conciliar sect’s method: maintain external canonical forms to smuggle in a new authority that will soon enthrone precisely what Pius IX and Pius X anathematized.
Theological Level: Why the Subject Cannot Exercise Petrine Power
Integral Catholic doctrine prior to 1958 provides the criterion to judge the legitimacy of the one issuing such constitutions.
Fundamental principles (paraphrased to avoid uncertain verbatim):
– The Roman Pontiff, in order truly to be pope, must be a member of the Church, i.e. must possess the Catholic faith. A manifest heretic is outside the Church and cannot be its head, as expounded by St Robert Bellarmine and the classical canonists. A non-Christian “in no way can be pope” because he cannot be head of what he does not belong to.
– Manifest, publicly professed adherence to condemned doctrines severs a man from the body of the Church prior to any sentence; he is *ipso facto* deprived of jurisdiction.
– Canon 188.4 CIC 1917 states that public defection from the faith causes tacit resignation of any ecclesiastical office by the law itself, without declaration.
– The Bull *Cum ex Apostolatus Officio* of Paul IV reaffirms that any election of one who has deviated from the faith or fallen in heresy is null, even if conducted with unanimous cardinalatial consent.
What concerns this constitution?
By November 1958, Roncalli’s doctrinal trajectory was not an unknown:
– His modernist associations and censured orientation in earlier decades.
– His diplomatic and ecclesiastical record steeped in “dialogue,” ecumenicist sensitivities, and indulgence towards condemned currents.
– The ideological line he would soon unveil: convoking a council to “update” the Church according to the world, preparing the rehabilitation of Modernist theses condemned by St Pius X, opening to religious liberty and collegiality that Pius IX and Leo XIII had directly or implicitly condemned.
When such a profile meets the pre‑1958 doctrinal criteria, it is incompatible with the papacy. Even if some personal errors were initially more veiled, the program of his reign, soon manifested, confirms that the occupant had already been ideologically aligned with condemned principles. Catholic doctrine is not a game of hindsight; the same doctrine that will later unmask the full consequences already judges the root: embracing Modernist presuppositions is incompatible with remaining a Catholic in the sense defined by *Syllabus*, *Lamentabili sane exitu*, *Pascendi Dominici Gregis*.
Hence this act: although formally mirroring legitimate papal legislation, proceeds from one who, measured by the Church’s own pre‑1958 standards, cannot be recognized as legitimate pontiff. The theological bankruptcy consists not in the geographical line drawn around Coroico, but in the usurpation of Christ’s authority by one preparing the assault against Christ’s Kingship and against the anti-modernist magisterium.
Symptomatic Level: Territorial Engineering as Pre‑Council Infrastructural Capture
One might object: is not the erection of a new prelature for missionary reasons intrinsically good? Under a true pope: yes, it can be a prudent pastoral response. Under the conciliar usurpers: it becomes part of the architecture of apostasy.
Consider the structural implications:
1. Consolidation of the chain of command:
– By reconfiguring boundaries and reinforcing dependence on the “metropolitan” hierarchy that will soon be entirely co-opted by post‑conciliarism, the conciliar sect shapes the map through which its errors will flow.
– The new *praelatura nullius Coroicensis* is fastened as suffraganeus to La Paz; once La Paz’s occupant embraces conciliar doctrines, the entire structure is enslaved to them.
2. Seminary directives:
– The constitution orders that candidates be formed according to norms of the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities and sent to the Pontifical Pius Latin American College in Rome.
– At this historical threshold, these institutions were already on the path to becoming laboratories for aggiornamento, eventually subjecting seminarians to precisely those tendencies condemned by St Pius X.
– Thus, under the guise of providing clergy, the document guarantees future clergy of Coroico will be manufactured within the ideological funnel of the conciliar revolution.
3. Financial and archival integration:
– By embedding the new entity financially and administratively within the same network that will after 1958 become the “Church of the New Advent,” the usurped regime ensures control over material assets and canonical memory.
– Archives, acts, and properties are placed into the hands of a chain of command that soon will serve not the *Regnum Christi* extolled in *Quas Primas*, but the cult of man and religious indifferentism.
So the apparently benign, even laudable, focus on missionary structuring, in reality, becomes infrastructure for spreading the new religion. The entire conciliar operation often operates this way: *primo gradu* (in the first stage) nothing outwardly shocking, only “pastoral” or “administrative” acts; *secundo gradu* the same structures become conduits of doctrinal poison.
Linguistic Poverty: Silence about Christ the King and the Supernatural End
Even within a juridical text, authentic Catholic acts reveal their spirit. Compare this constitution’s tone and content with Pius XI’s *Quas Primas*:
– Pius XI constantly subordinates ecclesiastical arrangements to the proclamation of the universal kingship of Christ and the duty of nations, families, rulers to submit publicly to Him.
– He explicitly condemns laicism and insists that civil laws, education, and public life must be ordered to God.
In the Coroicensis text:
– There is superficial mention of making conditions more apt for the growth of the faith, yet:
– No mention of the *Regnum Christi* over nations.
– No warning against secularism, socialism, Freemasonry, or modernist theology in those territories.
– No call to defend the faithful from masonic sects condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (section on secret societies).
– No insistence on safeguarding doctrinal purity in seminaries as demanded by *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi*.
This silence is not “neutral.” At the hinge between Pius XII and the conciliar usurpation, a genuinely Catholic pontiff, conscious of modern errors, would have used any reorganization to reaffirm:
– The absolute necessity of the true Faith for salvation.
– The nullity and mortal danger of liberal indifferentism.
– The subordination of all ecclesiastical structures to the restoration of Christ’s public reign, against the liberal state.
The constitution confines itself to technicalities. This reduction of the Church’s concrete exercise of jurisdiction to administrative geometry, without explicit doctrinal testimony adequate to the times, betrays a mentality already infected with naturalism: as though the Church’s mission were fulfilled by correct cartography and procedurally correct decrees, independent of militant confession against the plague of modern errors.
In the face of the modernist assault denounced by St Pius X as “most grave” and pervasive, such antiseptic prose is itself condemnable. Silence where confession is due is a symptom of treachery.
Contradiction with Anti‑Modernist Magisterium and the Syllabus
Measure the underlying assumptions of the constitution against pre‑1958 axioms.
1. The document tacitly inaugurates a regime whose subsequent acts will support:
– Religious liberty states and practical separation of Church and State, explicitly condemned in Syllabus prop. 55 and Pius XI’s consistent teaching.
– False ecumenism, placing the Catholic Church on a level with heretical and pagan sects, condemned in Syllabus props. 15–18.
– Collegial and democratic deformations of authority, attacked in *Tuas libenter* and *Pastor Aeternus* (Vatican I) by implication.
Therefore, while the constitution itself does not spell out those errors, it functions as an early juridical expression of a claimed “pontificate” that is about to enthrone precisely these condemned propositions. *Ecclesia non mentitur* (the Church does not lie), but a paramasonic structure occupying her visible organs does.
2. The continuity formulas (“we decree, we order, contrary prescriptions notwithstanding”) collide head-on with *Cum ex Apostolatus Officio*:
– That bull solemnly asserts that if ever a man who has fallen into heresy or deviated from the faith were elected, his elevation is null and void. The conciliar sect desperately pretends this principle vanished historically, but the 1917 Code’s repeated references to it as juridical background show otherwise.
– Applying Paul IV’s principle and the doctrine summarized by classical theologians, Roncalli’s modernist trajectory invalidates his claim from the start. Thus his decrees, despite canonical dress, lack the bond with Peter that alone guarantees authority.
3. *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* condemn:
– Not only open, brutal denials, but the method of historical-naturalistic, evolutionary, and pastoral re-interpretation of doctrine.
– The conciliar sect, beginning formally with Roncalli’s “pontificate,” will employ those exact methods.
– Therefore, enabling that program via such constitutions is not a neutral act; it is part of the apparatus of what Pius X stigmatized as “the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church.”
The theological and spiritual bankruptcy here is simple: a constitution that externally imitates the juridical solemnity of true papal acts, but is interiorly severed from the faith and the anti-modernist mind of the Church. It is an empty legal skin animated by a different soul.
Apostasy in Embryo: When “Care for Souls” Serves the New Religion
The constitution claims pastoral motives: better organization, formation of clergy, facilitation of evangelization. However, when the authority itself is falsified, these words invert their meaning.
– The “care for souls” becomes care to integrate souls into the conciliar sect.
– The “seminary” becomes an organ to train men in liturgical revolution, ecumenism, religious liberty, and the cult of human dignity without Christ the King.
– The “cathedral of St Peter” becomes a symbolic camouflage: under the name of the Prince of the Apostles, a structure is subjected to those who will soon betray the very primacy and uniqueness of the Catholic Church he confessed.
This is precisely what Pius XI warned against in *Quas Primas*: the plague of laicism and the dethronement of Christ. Here, instead of explicitly preaching Christ’s public reign as the foundation of the new circumscription, Roncalli issues a purely management-oriented instrument, which will effectively be harnessed to a system that repudiates the Syllabus and the anti-modernist magisterium.
Thus, what at first glance seems a small canonical measure is, in fact, a microcosm of the conciliar strategy:
– Retain traditional titles and formulas.
– Utilize existing canon law.
– Multiply circumscriptions, seminaries, offices.
– Then, through these same channels, diffuse a new creed: modernism, ecumenism, religious liberty, and the cult of man.
The bankruptcy lies in the deceit: souls believe they receive Catholic jurisdiction and Catholic sacraments; in reality, they are folded into a neo-church that mocks the pre‑1958 doctrine in practice and, soon, in explicit documents.
Justice and Authority: Not in the Hands of the Conciliar Sect
The constitution threatens canonical penalties upon those who would disregard its clauses; it demands “religious” observance of its provisions. This presupposes that the one speaking is the Vicar of Christ.
Integral Catholic theology teaches:
– Authority to bind consciences in the Church belongs solely to legitimate pastors in communion with, and subordinated to, a true Roman Pontiff.
– When a man publicly promotes propositions condemned in *Syllabus*, *Lamentabili*, *Pascendi*, or sets in motion a program leading straight to them, he places himself outside Catholic unity; his legislative threats become empty.
Therefore:
– The threats in this text, solemn though they sound, are devoid of supernatural authority; they are the commands of an intruder whose “pontificate” inaugurates the very revolution previous popes had combated as satanic.
– Lay rebellion, liberal anti-clericalism, or democratic self-governance remain condemned; it is not the laity who judge according to private whim. Rather, it is the pre‑1958 magisterium itself that passes sentence: by its principles, the conciliar usurpers are unmasked. *Iudicium doctrinale* (a doctrinal judgment) is rendered by the perennial teaching; Catholics merely recognize and adhere to it.
The faithful must neither follow the conciliar sect nor invent new pseudo-churches with their own whims. They must cleave to that faith, that sacramental order, that papal office as taught de fide before 1958, and measure all later claimants, including Roncalli, against it. The Coroicensis constitution fails this test at its root.
Conclusion: A Precise Seal on the Path to the Abomination
Seen in isolation, “Pacensis in Bolivia” might seem a small canonical adjustment. Seen in the light of integral Catholic faith and the incontestable anti-modernist magisterium, it appears for what it is:
– An early, meticulously formatted assertion of universal jurisdiction by one whose ideology and later actions prove incompatibility with Catholic orthodoxy.
– A deployment of canonical forms in the service of a nascent paramasonic, conciliar structure that will overthrow the Syllabus, *Quas Primas*, and *Lamentabili/Pascendi* in practice and principle.
– A territorial and institutional preparation that ensures Latin American clergy and faithful will be trapped inside the upcoming revolution under the illusion of obedience to Peter.
The theological and spiritual bankruptcy does not lie in the precision of boundaries or in the desire for evangelization as such, but in the usurpation of the name and authority of Christ’s Vicar to build the skeletal system of the neo-church. What calls itself the “praelatura Coroicensis” under this constitution is not ennobled; it is chained to a regime that, step by step, will replace the Unbloody Sacrifice with a horizontal assembly, the Kingship of Christ with the “rights of man,” and the condemnations of Modernism with celebrations of precisely those errors.
Against this, the immutable voice of the pre‑1958 Church stands:
– Only in full submission to the social and public reign of Christ the King is there hope for authentic peace and order (Pius XI, *Quas Primas*).
– The Church must never reconcile herself with liberalism, modern civilization understood as emancipation from God, or with the principle that State and Church be separated as if equal (Pius IX, *Syllabus*).
– Modernism in all its forms must be rejected as heresy; its promoters cannot claim ecclesiastical authority (*Lamentabili*, *Pascendi*).
Therefore, this constitution is not to be revered as a papal act but recognized as an element in the machinery of the conciliar usurpation. Fidelity to Christ, to His immutable doctrine, and to the true papacy demands lucid rejection of such fraudulent legislative pretensions, and an unwavering return to the integral Catholic faith that the conciliar sect seeks to bury under a mountain of impeccably formatted, utterly poisoned documents.
Source:
Pacensis In Bolivia (Coroicensis) (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025