John XXIII’s Cult of Sentimentality and the Eclipse of True Penance
This Latin letter “Lilium,” dated 2 January 1962 and issued by the usurper John XXIII to Augustine Sépinski, Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, commemorates the 4th centenary of the death of Saint Peter of Alcántara. It praises Peter’s austerity, contemplative spirit, cooperation with Saint Teresa of Ávila, his reforming zeal, and proposes him as an exemplar especially for Franciscans and for all the faithful against rising “naturalism,” insisting on prayer, penance, poverty, and interior life as the soul of apostolate.
Beneath its pious veneer, however, this text functions as a studied exercise in selective hagiography, sentimental moralism, and strategic silence, preparing the conciliar revolution by neutralizing a great ascetic into a harmless decoration for the very naturalism and ecclesial subversion he spent his life opposing.
Manipulated Hagiography as a Tool of the Conciliar Revolution
On the factual level, the letter recites certain genuine elements:
– Peter of Alcántara: Spanish Franciscan, born 1499, renowned for extreme penance, contemplative life, reform of observance, friendship with and support of Saint Teresa of Ávila, author of the “Tratado de la oración y meditación.” These elements are historically sound and consonant with pre-1958 Catholic sources.
– His role in strengthening strict observance, solitude, prayer, mortification, and his impact on Carmelite reform are accurately acknowledged.
Yet precisely here emerges the core problem: John XXIII appropriates an authentically austere, counter-worldly saint to decorate an ecclesial project that is its antithesis.
Key facts systematically omitted or neutralized:
– No word about the doctrinal battles, the defense of dogma, the necessary resistance to error that marks the authentic Tridentine and post-Tridentine ethos in which Peter of Alcántara stands.
– No warning against heresy, modernist exegesis, indifferentism, religious liberty errors, or the Masonic and liberal assaults condemned definitively by Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
– No explicit reaffirmation of the obligation of states and societies to submit to the social Kingship of Christ, despite Pius XI’s clear teaching in Quas primas that peace and order are impossible unless Christ reigns publicly and juridically.
– No concrete denunciation of the very “naturalism” and laicism already doctrinally condemned in the Syllabus Errorum of Pius IX; instead, only a vague, rhetorical use of the term, emptied of the doctrinal precision that binds consciences.
Thus, a saint formed and canonized in the age that anathematized liberalism and modernism is re-presented as a universal icon of generic “spirituality,” safely disconnected from the doctrinal militancy and anti-liberal intransigence intrinsic to authentic Catholic sanctity.
This tactic is not accidental. It is the conciliar method: retain devotional vocabulary, evacuate dogmatic edge, and instrumentalize saints as ornaments to legitimize a new orientation. Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief): distort the liturgical and devotional remembrance, and you gradually redefine the faith itself.
Pious Language Masking the Demolition of Authority
On the linguistic level, the letter is externally traditional: elegant Latin, citations of Scripture, references to penance and contemplation, mention of “naturalism” as a danger. Precisely this classical style is weaponized to disarm.
Characteristic features:
– Abundant, soft-focus praise:
– Peter is “lilium… in horto concluso Ecclesiae” (a lily in the enclosed garden of the Church),
– “austera paenitentia et miraculorum gloria spectabilis,”
– renewing and surpassing the ancient hermits.
– Vague moral exhortations:
– The faithful should strive for “potiora et meliora.”
– Franciscans are encouraged to interior life, poverty, mortification.
– Carefully calibrated, non-combative vocabulary:
– No concrete condemnation of contemporary named errors.
– No denunciation of specific false doctrines spreading in seminaries and universities.
– No attack on the growing cult of man, interreligious relativism, or philosophical evolutionism already rampantly poisoning Catholic thought by 1962.
This rhetorical choice is itself symptomatic. When Saint Pius X confronted modernism, he did so with crystalline severity, listing and condemning propositions in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, identifying the enemy, naming his methods, anathematizing his principles. By contrast, this letter uses a cloud of devotional commonplaces to create the illusion of continuity, while carefully avoiding any concrete reaffirmation of those anti-modernist bulwarks.
The silence is not innocent. It is calculated. A text that claims to oppose “naturalism” but refuses to invoke or reassert the binding doctrinal condemnations of Pius IX and Saint Pius X is participating in the neutralization of those condemnations.
Undermining the Militant Church through Selective Supernaturalism
The theological level reveals the deeper inversion.
The letter rightly stresses:
– prayer and contemplation;
– austerity and mortification;
– the necessity that apostolate draw life from interior union with God.
These are genuine Catholic themes. But they are abstracted from their doctrinal and ecclesiological framework and thus subtly subverted.
1. The Church as perfect and sovereign society
Authentic doctrine (e.g., Pius IX in the Syllabus, Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, Pius XI in Quas primas) insists that the Church is a *perfect society*, possessing from Christ full rights, and that states are bound to recognize the true religion and submit to Christ’s Kingship. In this letter:
– The Church appears only in the context of interior piety and religious orders.
– There is no affirmation of her juridical rights.
– There is no recollection that Peter of Alcántara’s heroic penance is part of a Church that legislates, judges, condemns errors, and demands the subjection of nations.
By truncating the supernatural mission to the plane of “exemplary spirituality,” the letter aligns with the liberal thesis condemned in propositions 19–21 and 55 of the Syllabus: the reduction of the Church to an organism whose rights and claims are implicitly limited, preparing the acceptance of the separation of Church and State and religious liberty as later “conciliar” principles.
2. Penance without dogmatic combat
Peter’s terrifying penances were inseparable from his adhesion to the precise dogma, sacramental theology, and ecclesial discipline of the Counter-Reformation. The same Holy See that canonized him also:
– condemned indifferentism and liberalism,
– anathematized the thesis that all religions are equal ways to salvation,
– repudiated any modernization that dilutes dogma.
Yet John XXIII:
– Extracts the aesthetic of austerity;
– Omits the dogmatic fierceness;
– Calls Franciscans to penance, but not to doctrinal intransigence against modernism.
Such a de-fanged penance, cut loose from doctrinal war, becomes an innocuous “personal spirituality” that can coexist peacefully with the very naturalistic, ecumenical, evolutionist agenda the conciliar sect was preparing to ratify.
3. “Naturalism” without its doctrinal content
The letter laments that “naturalism” infiltrates society, reducing everything to the limits of nature and destroying morals. This could have been a bridge back to the integral magisterium: to recall the condemned propositions on rationalism, subjectivism, laicism, and the false exaltation of human reason and freedom.
Instead:
– “Naturalism” remains undefined.
– No mention is made that it includes religious liberty, the leveling of religions, democratic relativism, or the cult of human autonomy.
– No indication is given that the same virus is already ravaging clergy, seminaries, and episcopates.
In other words, the text feigns supernatural concern while carefully shielding the internal enemies condemned by Saint Pius X as the “most dangerous” because they hide within.
Such an approach is directly at odds with Lamentabili and Pascendi, which condemn as heretical the idea that dogma evolves with consciousness, or that Church authority should limit itself and accept pluralism. The omission here is an implicit betrayal.
An Instrument of Self-Legitimation for a Paramo dernist Regime
On the symptomatic level, this letter reveals its true function: it is a self-legitimating gesture by an intruder preparing the revolution.
Key points:
– John XXIII, the inaugurator of the conciliar catastrophe, appeals to a severe ascetic saint to give moral shine to his pontificate’s image.
– The letter is dated 1962, the year he opened the so-called “Second Vatican Council,” which would enthrone principles condemned for a century: collegiality, false ecumenism, religious liberty, anthropocentric rhetoric, and the practical dethronement of Christ the King in civil society.
– There is a grotesque juxtaposition:
– on the one hand, praise for Peter’s poverty, enclosure, silence, and penance;
– on the other hand, a real-world program of aggiornamento, liturgical dismantling, doctrinal dilution, and opening to the world, culminating in a neo-church whose spirituality is sentimental, horizontal, and allergic to true austerity.
This is a classic paramasonic maneuver: wrap revolutionary intentions in the cloak of ancient symbols. Use authentic saints as “lilies” to perfume the swamp of forthcoming apostasy.
Moreover, the letter’s insistence that Franciscans maintain interior life “lest apostolate become vain noise” is turned against itself: the very order is being corroded by modernist formation, false obedience to the conciliar sect, and abandonment of its Rule’s spirit, while the usurper offers them a sanitized model of sanctity instead of commanding them to repudiate modern errors.
Simulatio sanctitatis (simulation of holiness) becomes a pastoral technology: encourage personal devotions, while the foundational structures of doctrine, worship, and law are inverted. The result is precisely what Pius X condemned: a Church transformed from within, keeping forms and words but changing their sense.
The Betrayal of Saint Peter of Alcántara’s Spirit
How does this letter, in substance, betray the very saint it celebrates?
1. By detaching his penance from doctrinal militancy
– Peter of Alcántara belongs to the world that confesses the unchanging faith, defends Tridentine dogma, and makes no peace with error.
– He is shown here only as exemplar of asceticism, not as soldier of the Church militant in a dogmatic war.
But the Church has always taught that sanctity includes uncompromising adherence to revealed truth and to the magisterium which condemns novelty. Penance divorced from doctrinal clarity is an empty shell, apt to be exploited by any ideology.
2. By instrumentalizing him for a non-combative “spirituality”
The letter repeatedly:
– calls Franciscans to cultivate “sanctae orationis et devotionis spiritum,”
– underscores that apostolate without interior life is sterile.
True. But when the same regime that utters these truisms simultaneously pushes the Church toward reconciliation with liberalism and modern civilization (condemned directly in Syllabus 80: the lie that the Pontiff can and should make peace with such “progress”), those words function as a decoy. They invite orders to retreat into internal piety while surrendering the public doctrinal ramparts.
Peter of Alcántara, who concretely helped Teresa strengthen the Carmelite observance against laxity, is proposed as model by an authority presiding over the largest project of laxity, liturgical profanation, and doctrinal relativization in history. This is a sacrilegious appropriation.
3. By ignoring the social kingship of Christ
Pius XI solemnly taught that peace and order in society are impossible until individuals and nations publicly acknowledge and obey Christ as King, and instituted the feast of Christ the King precisely to condemn laicism and liberalism as a “plague.”
In a world (1962) already enthroning secularism and Masonic principles in law and culture, a letter about a great penitent and reformer could—and should—have:
– recalled that his penance serves the triumph of Christ’s reign over nations;
– urged religious and laity to combat juridical apostasy;
– denounced liberal and Masonic regimes undermining the Church.
Instead, we receive only a vague spiritual warning against naturalism in morals. The juridical and political dimension of Christ’s Kingship, asserted in Quas primas, is quietly suppressed. This silence is a tacit rejection.
Continuity in Form, Rupture in Substance: The Conciliar Method Unveiled
This letter is a paradigmatic example of how the conciliar sect manufactures the illusion of continuity:
– It uses Latin, biblical citations, references to saints, and praise of penance.
– It includes no explicit formal heresies.
– It retains a superficially Catholic lexicon: prayer, mortification, contemplation, apostolate.
But at decisive points it:
– refuses to reassert anti-modernist doctrine;
– avoids confronting concrete heresies and philosophical currents already condemned;
– presents the Church’s mission in terms compatible with the liberal-democratic, religiously pluralist order;
– gently shifts emphasis from dogmatic certitude and juridical claims to affective spirituality and individual moral exhortation.
This is precisely the operationalization of what Saint Pius X condemned: the modernist who outwardly respects formulas but inwardly empties them, letting dogma “evolve” by reinterpretation and neglect. The letter’s pathos thus becomes an instrument of *oblique* subversion: what is not said is more guilty than what is said.
Qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent appears to consent): silence about the integral anti-liberal, anti-modernist magisterium, in a context that demands its proclamation, amounts to an implicit renunciation.
A Call to Recover the True Legacy of Saint Peter of Alcántara
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith grounded exclusively in the immutable pre-1958 magisterium, the path is clear:
– Saint Peter of Alcántara must be reclaimed not as a neutral symbol of “interior life,” but as a champion of:
– unchanging dogma,
– strict observance,
– authentic sacramental life centered on the Most Holy Sacrifice offered with the Roman Rite organically received,
– reform understood as return to tradition, not innovation.
– His penance is meaningful only within the Church that:
– anathematizes modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” (Saint Pius X),
– condemns indifferentism, religious freedom, false ecumenism, and liberalism (Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI),
– proclaims and demands the social reign of Christ the King.
Any appropriation of his figure by the conciliar structures occupying Rome, which promote precisely those condemned novelties, is a lie.
Therefore:
– Let those who would follow Peter of Alcántara reject the sentimental exploitation of his person by the conciliar sect.
– Let them embrace his true legacy:
– severe penance joined to doctrinal intransigence,
– contemplative life feeding militant defense of the faith,
– poverty united with reverence for the hierarchical, juridically sovereign Church instituted by Christ.
– Let them denounce as hypocrisy any attempt by usurping “pontiffs” to invoke great saints while simultaneously dismantling their faith and discipline.
Only in fidelity to the pre-1958 magisterium does the lily of Alcántara bloom within the true enclosed garden of the Church. Outside of that, his image is merely pressed into the pages of a counterfeit narrative, a pious illustration printed over the blueprint of apostasy.
Source:
Lilium – Ad Augustinum Sépinski, Ordinis Fratrum Minorum Ministrum Generalem, quarto revoluto saeculo ex quo S. Petrus de Alcantara in caelum migravit (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025