Quamvis religiosam as a Symptom of the Conciliar Sect’s Cult of Men
The Latin letter “Quamvis religiosam,” dated 10 July 1962 and issued by John XXIII to Eugène Tisserant, congratulates him on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal consecration. In a few paragraphs, John XXIII extols Tisserant’s “pastoral” activity as bishop of Ostia, Porto, and Santa Rufina, praises his prudence, zeal, and effectiveness, invokes divine assistance upon his ministry, grants him the faculty to impart a plenary indulgence on a chosen day, and concludes with an “apostolic blessing” for him, his auxiliary, and his flock.
Beneath its politely ornamented Latinity, this document is a distilled manifestation of the anthropocentric, modernist religion enthroning human dignity and administrative success in place of the crucified Kingship of Christ and the integral Catholic faith.
Glittering Banality: Empty Praise in Place of the Supernatural Combat
On the factual level, the text appears innocuous: an anniversary greeting, a customary laudatory epistle. Yet precisely this apparent harmlessness unmasks the depth of the problem.
John XXIII hails Tisserant:
“In cogitando sagax, in perficiendo efficax, consilio prudens, navitate magnificus, christianae disciplinae et vitae gregis curis tuis commissi bene consuluisti…”
(“In thought shrewd, in execution effective, in counsel prudent, in activity splendid, you have taken good care of Christian discipline and the life of the flock entrusted to your care…”)
No concrete mention is made of:
– preservation of *integral dogma* against the wolves condemned in “Lamentabili sane exitu” and “Pascendi” (Pius X, 1907),
– defense of the reign of Christ the King in society as demanded by Pius XI in *Quas Primas* (1925),
– rejection of liberalism, indifferentism, and Masonic infiltration denounced authoritatively in the *Syllabus* of Pius IX (1864),
– protection of the Most Holy Sacrifice from profanation and from doctrinal corruption,
– salvation of souls from eternal damnation.
Instead, the “praise” is managerial and horizontal: efficiency, prudence, activism. The entire evaluation of a bishop’s quarter-century is expressed in vague humanistic categories. The supernatural note appears only as thin devotional varnish. This is not accidental. It is the new religion’s method.
By 1962, when this letter was issued, the preparatory schemas for the upcoming council—crafted largely in continuity with prior condemnations of Modernism—were already being systematically dismantled by the very clique to which Tisserant belonged. He stood among the prominent figures facilitating the conciliar revolution that would enthrone:
– religious liberty over the social Kingship of Christ,
– ecumenism over the doctrine *extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*,
– “dialogue” over conversion.
Yet John XXIII’s letter offers only panegyric. There is no trace of a Roman Pontiff’s vigilance. The one who should cry out with St. Pius X against “the synthesis of all heresies” instead sings a brief hymn of human respect to one of its chief administrators. This is not paternal solicitude; it is complicity.
Linguistic Cosmetics as Theology: The Cult of Human Qualities
The rhetoric of “Quamvis religiosam” is revealing.
1. The letter opens with a pious commonplace about never being silent regarding heavenly benefits. Yet the “benefit” concretely highlighted is the career milestone of a hierarch functioning within a structure already in open drift towards conciliar apostasy.
2. The cumulative emphasis:
– “sollemnes anniversariae”
– “iucundiore luce fulgeat”
– “benevolentiae Nostrae”
– “bonae existimationis praeconio”
The vocabulary is one of ceremony, honor, benevolence, reputation. It is courtly, not Apostolic.
3. Tisserant is described as:
– “in cogitando sagax” – sharp in thought,
– “in perficiendo efficax” – effective in execution,
– “consilio prudens” – prudent in counsel,
– “navitate magnificus” – magnificent in activity.
These are secular-administrative virtues, perfectly compatible with being an efficient destroyer of Tradition. There is no criterion of orthodoxy. No mention of guarding the flock from heresy. No echo of the uncompromising language of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, or Pius XI. The language used becomes the confession: what matters now is not *fides integra* (integral faith), but performance.
4. When John XXIII speaks of Tisserant as “dispensator mysteriorum Dei” (“steward of the mysteries of God”), it is hollowed out by context. There is no reminder of the dread responsibility of a bishop who, if he teaches error, ceases to be a member of the Church, as expounded by St. Robert Bellarmine and consistently applied in pre-1958 theology. The phrase is recited, its doctrinal edge dulled, pressed into service as part of a congratulatory exercise.
This linguistic pattern is not mere style. It is the lex orandi revealing a lex credendi: the Church is reimagined as a polite society of functionaries affirming one another; dogma, combat, and judgment are excluded as impolite.
Suppression of the True Mission: Silence as an Indictment
The gravest doctrinal signal in this letter is its silence.
Measured by the unchanging Magisterium (prior to 1958), a bishop’s fidelity is determined by:
– his public profession and defense of the entire Catholic faith,
– his rejection of condemned errors: Modernism, indifferentism, naturalism, liberalism, false ecumenism, separation of Church and State,
– his guardianship of the sacraments and the Most Holy Sacrifice according to Catholic doctrine,
– his pastoral zeal for the salvation of souls and the horror of sin, hell, and divine judgment.
“Quamvis religiosam”:
– says nothing of the defense of doctrinal integrity;
– says nothing of the duty to resist liberal states that trample the rights of Christ the King and His Church (explicitly taught and defended in e.g. the *Syllabus* and subsequent papal interventions);
– says nothing about Freemasonry and secret societies that Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X identified as organized instruments of the “synagogue of Satan” warring against the Church;
– says nothing about the fierce war on the Church’s rights then raging globally, or about the infiltration of seminaries and universities by Modernists already condemned in 1907.
Instead:
– The “pastoral office” is praised in generic terms.
– The “faith of the flock” is assumed, not guarded.
– The encroaching apostasy is ignored.
This omission is not neutral. In light of Pius X’s condemnation in *Pascendi* that Modernists strive to “remain in the Church to work her ruin from within,” such silence is itself a sign of that new program: suppress the language of combat, of heresy, of judgment; substitute affirmations, smiles, and bureaucratic celebrations.
Pius XI warned that peace is possible only in the Kingdom of Christ and through submission to His law. “Quamvis religiosam” contains not a single word demanding that nations, societies, or rulers submit to Christ’s rule, nor that the bishop being honored fight for it. The supernatural mission of the episcopacy is tacitly reduced to dignified administration.
Modernist Flattery in the Service of the Conciliar Coup
Historically verifiable context (to be checked in standard ecclesiastical histories and official records):
– By mid-1962, John XXIII had convoked the “Second Vatican Council” (1962–1965) and stacked its levers towards a program diametrically opposed to the pre-1958 condemnations: religious liberty, collegiality, ecumenism, and aggiornamento.
– Eugène Tisserant played a crucial role in the conciliar machinery, aligned with the progressive bloc; he was central in committees reworking texts, supporting the dilution and reversal of traditional doctrinal schemas.
Therefore, this letter is not an isolated courteous note. It is part of the moral and symbolic capital-building of the emergent conciliar regime:
– It canonizes, at the level of papal style, the new type of “bishop”: politically adept, diplomatically useful, docile to the liberalizing agenda.
– It publicly confirms him as a model without any condition of doctrinal militancy.
Pre-1958 Popes, while certainly capable of praise, never separated such praise from the explicit framework of doctrinal fidelity and the fight against error. Pius IX, even in diplomatic dispatches, returned tirelessly to the rights of the Church, the evils of liberalism, the danger of secret societies. St. Pius X, Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII continually used their public writings to arm the faithful against the enemies of the faith.
Here, however, the word “Modernism” never appears; nothing in the letter indicates an awareness of the doctrinal war already raging. This is not omission through ignorance, but through program. The conciliar sect’s strategy: disarm Catholic resistance by saturating the official discourse with empty positivity, human dignity, and self-congratulation.
Thus, “Quamvis religiosam” is a small but clear brick in the architecture of apostasy: it solemnizes as exemplary precisely those agents who were dismantling the previous condemnations.
Perverted Conception of Authority: Indulgence as Political Currency
One of the most striking elements is the faculty granted:
“id tibi facultatis facimus, ut, quo volueris die, adstantibus christifidelibus nomine Nostro Nostraque auctoritate benedicas, plenaria Indulgentia proposita.”
(“We grant you the faculty that, on whatever day you wish, in the presence of the Christian faithful, you may bless in Our Name and with Our authority, with a plenary Indulgence proposed.”)
In the Catholic understanding (before 1958):
– The Church does indeed dispense indulgences as a participation in the treasury of Christ and the saints, under precise doctrinal conditions (faith, detachment from sin, state of grace, works prescribed).
– Authority over indulgences is serious and ordered to conversion and penance, not to flattery or image-crafting.
Here:
– The indulgence faculty is attached to an anniversary and to the person of a politically central “cardinal,” as a sort of jubilee ornament.
– No serious call to penance, conversion, or rejection of the reigning anti-Christian world is voiced.
– It functions rhetorically as an honorific privilege that crowns a laudatory curriculum vitae.
This instrumentalization of spiritual goods to enshrine conciliar leadership is a sign of the deviation: the supernatural is weaponized in favor of the conciliar project. Authority, rather than being exercised against error, is spent to decorate those enabling it.
Pre-1958 Popes repeatedly warned (cf. Pius IX, Leo XIII) that any cooperation with anti-Christian liberalism, secrecy, masonry would be a betrayal of Christ’s sovereign rights. To use the keys of indulgence as currency of mutual affirmation with those driving a program of rapprochement with the world is a direct inversion of their teaching.
Systemic Fruits: From Quamvis religiosam to the “Church of the New Advent”
Seen symptomatically, this brief letter encapsulates several core pathologies of post-1958 post-conciliarism:
1. Anthropocentrism and the cult of personalities:
– The text exalts the human qualities and career of a hierarch.
– There is no parallel exaltation of Christ’s absolute kingship, no call to subject nations and laws to Him, contrary to the repeated doctrine of Pius XI in *Quas Primas* that peace and order are impossible without public recognition of Christ’s reign.
2. Neutralization of dogma:
– Orthodoxy is presumed and never measured.
– The great modern errors—so heavily and precisely condemned by Pius IX and St. Pius X—are not even hinted at, though they were in full offensive.
3. Transformation of bishops into executives of a paramasonic structure:
– The bishop is portrayed as an efficient manager, adviser, and organizer.
– The specifically Apostolic task to rebuke, to withstand heresy, to preach the Cross and the necessity of the Church is absent.
– This is exactly the model required for the “conciliar sect”: functionaries who implement decrees of aggiornamento, “dialogue,” and religious liberty, submissive to the world’s anti-Christian demands.
4. Use of sacred language to legitimize innovators:
– Expressions like “minister Christi,” “dispensator mysteriorum Dei,” “Apostolic Benediction,” and indulgence faculties are invoked over men and structures actively engaged in overturning the previous Magisterium in practice.
– This produces confusion deliberately: the faithful are led to believe the same Church continues, while slogans and personnel serve a different religion.
5. Silence as strategic tool of apostasy:
– By studiously omitting any reference to the doctrinal crisis, the text normalizes betrayal as if it were fidelity.
– This is precisely the Modernist tactic condemned by St. Pius X: remain, adapt meaning, avoid open contradiction, corrode from within.
In light of pre-1958 doctrine on the incompatibility of manifest heresy and ecclesiastical office (expounded by Bellarmine, Wernz-Vidal, John of St. Thomas, and reflected juridically in can. 188.4 of the 1917 Code), such systematic promotion of men who objectively collaborate in the demolition of Catholic order underscores the conclusion that the structure praising them is no longer the visible organ of the Catholic Magisterium but a counterfeit system: the “Church of the New Advent,” the paramasonic occupier, the “abomination of desolation” installed where the holy once stood.
Restoring the Catholic Criterion: Christ the King against the Conciliar Humanism
Measured against the perennial Magisterium:
– Pius XI in *Quas Primas* teaches that civil and social order must be subjected to Christ’s law; that denying His reign leads to chaos; that public recognition of His royal rights is non-negotiable.
– Pius IX’s *Syllabus* anathematizes:
– religious indifferentism,
– the separation of Church and State,
– the supremacy of the civil power in spiritual matters,
– the reconciliation of the Papacy with liberalism and “modern civilization.”
– St. Pius X in *Pascendi* and *Lamentabili sane exitu* unmasks Modernism as a system that:
– naturalizes Revelation,
– evolves dogma,
– submits faith to history and subjective experience,
– denies the immutable character of Catholic truth.
“Quamvis religiosam” fits not the Catholic pattern, but the Modernist:
– It treats the episcopate and its celebration as events in an ecclesial bureaucracy adapted to “modern civilization.”
– It omits the great battle lines so clearly marked by prior Popes.
– It extols as exemplary a figure bound up with the conciliar program that would enthrone religious liberty and ecumenism condemned in advance by the authentic Magisterium.
The integral Catholic response must therefore be unambiguous:
– Such texts, arising from the conciliar usurping structure, have no doctrinal weight against the already defined teaching of the Church.
– The faithful must measure these humanist paeans by the pre-1958 criterion and recognize in them symptoms of a new religion that exalts man, suppresses the rights of Christ the King, and sacrifices the salvation of souls to diplomatic convenience and worldly acclaim.
– True obedience is owed not to the cult of conciliar functionaries, but to the unchanging doctrine that proclaims: *non licet* (“it is not permitted”) to reconcile Christ with Belial, or the Chair of Peter with the programs of those condemned as enemies of the Church.
“Quamvis religiosam,” in its brevity, stands as a polished shard of the larger mirror in which the conciliar sect reveals its face: smiling, flattering, devout in phrases—and utterly silent where the true Vicar of Christ would thunder. This silence is its self-condemnation. Only by returning without compromise to the doctrinal clarity of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII can the faithful disentangle themselves from a counterfeit authority that dares to use the language of the Church to crown those dismantling her visible bastions.
Source:
Quamvis religiosam – Ad Eugenium S. R. E. Cardinalem Tisserant, Episcopum Ostiensem, Portuensem et Sanctae Rufinae, quinque a suscepta episcopali dignitate lustra implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025