In this short allocution of 26 May 1959, John XXIII congratulates the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine on the 900th anniversary of the Lateran Synod of Nicholas II, recalls the historical reform and growth of their institute, evokes the prestigious figures of Eugene IV and Saint Lawrence Giustiniani from San Giorgio in Alga, and rejoices over the newly established federation of the four congregations, the appointment of an Apostolic-See-approved Abbot Primate, and the election of a new Abbot General. He exhorts them, in mild devotional language, to follow the rule of Saint Augustine, to love truth, unity, charity, and to be fervent in spirit.

---

From the perspective of integral Catholic doctrine, this apparently pious talk is a crafted prelude to institutional neutralization: it empties religious life of its militant, sacrificial Catholic substance and subordinates an ancient order to the coming conciliar revolution.

John XXIII’s Captatio Benevolentiae as a Program of Controlled Disarmament

Historical Flattery as a Screen for a New Regime

At the factual level, the allocution appears harmless:

“Felicitous solemn events… have brought you… to Rome… Nine hundred years have passed since Our Predecessor Nicholas II, at the Lateran Synod… improved your religious institute and confirmed it with new laws… From then it grew… through the Catholic world…”

The structure is deliberate:

– He binds the Canons to papal authority by recalling Nicholas II’s reform.
– He links them emotively to San Giorgio in Alga and to Eugene IV and Saint Lawrence Giustiniani, then to himself as having “succeeded” them in Venice.
– He highlights:
– the “felicitously initiated federation” of the four congregations,
– the appointment (by the Apostolic See) of an Abbot Primate,
– the election of a new Abbot General.

What is missing is more telling than what is said:

– No mention of the *Most Holy Sacrifice* as propitiatory.
– No warning against the already condemned errors of *Modernism* (Saint Pius X, Pascendi, Lamentabili sane).
– No reaffirmation of the unchanging doctrine on the unique, exclusive truth of the Catholic Church, as strongly defended by Pius IX in *Quanta Cura* and the attached *Syllabus*, and by Pius XI in *Mortalium Animos*.
– No call to combat the sects and Masonic forces that the pre-1958 Magisterium clearly identified as warring against Christ the King and His Church (cf. Pius IX, Syllabus; Leo XIII, *Humanum Genus*; Pius XI, *Quas Primas*).

Instead of recalling *lex orandi, lex credendi* in its integral, sacrificial, anti-liberal sense, John XXIII anchors his exhortation in organizational and sentimental motifs: federation, administration, historic memories, emotional ties. This is the psychological method by which the conciliar sect disarms a religious institute: offer it apparent honor while gently shifting its obedience from the perennial magisterium to the new paramasonic regime.

Linguistic Softness as Symptom of a Naturalistic Reorientation

The tone and vocabulary betray the theological intent.

Key stylistic notes:

– Persistent use of gentle, affective language: “dearest to Us,” “fatherly house,” “sweetly touches and moves Our soul.”
– Emphasis on “feliciter” (happily), “secundo et prospero exitu” (favorable and prosperous outcome), “splendid” and “copious” “harvest” – all without specifying the supernatural content of that “harvest”.
– The exhortation is reduced to generic virtues:
–

“Love truth, hold unity, foster charity…”

– with a citation from Augustine about fervor and charity, presented in isolation from his uncompromising doctrine on grace, the Church, and the condemnation of heresy.

This rhetoric is typical of the coming conciliar language:

– Indeterminate, irenic, stripped of dogmatic precision.
– No mention of:
– *state of grace*,
– *mortal sin*,
– *hell*,
– *the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation* (against Syllabus errors 15–18),
– *the warfare against error* demanded by all pre-1958 popes.

It is a language engineered to coexist with liberalism and religious pluralism. By avoiding sharp dogmatic markers, the speaker prepares religious minds to accept a “pastoral,” non-condemning council and to dissolve their identity into the “People of God” ideology.

Suppression of the Kingship of Christ and the Anti-Liberal Magisterium

Measured against Pius XI’s *Quas Primas* (1925), the allocution’s omissions are damning.

Pius XI taught:

– Christ must reign socially and politically; states are bound to recognize Him and His Church.
– The crisis of the world stems from the expulsion of Christ and His law from public life.
– The Church must publicly oppose laicism, indifferentism, and liberalism; peace is possible only in the Kingdom of Christ.

Here, by contrast:

– John XXIII speaks of:
– internal federation,
– administrative consolidation,
– emotional communion with illustrious predecessors,
– but is silent about:
– the militant proclamation of Christ the King in public order,
– the doctrinal war against secularism and freemasonry described explicitly by Pius IX in the *Syllabus* and by Leo XIII as the “synagogue of Satan”.

This silence is not neutral; it is *programmatic*. At the very moment when Western legislation, culture, and education are further enslaved to Masonic naturalism, the man who will soon convoke the pseudo-council refrains from the integral language of *Quas Primas* and *Syllabus Errorum* and instead envelops ancient canons in a fog of devout rhetoric.

This is how one neutralizes an order that should be, by nature, a bastion of the reign of Christ: you drown it in harmless sentiments, and you praise “unity” without defining it as unity in the rejection of error.

The Theological Emptiness of the Federation: Canonical Reorganization Without Supernatural Militant Purpose

John XXIII exults:

“The federation of the four Congregations… is happily promulgated; the Abbot Primate has been designated by the Apostolic See; the chapter has elected a new Abbot General.”

On the surface, this is a call to unity. In reality:

– The “felicitous federation” serves to integrate all branches into a centralized framework controlled by the very authority that is preparing to overturn:
– liturgy (towards the future fabrication of the Novus Ordo),
– doctrine (through ambiguous “pastoral” texts),
– religious discipline (through aggiornamento and accommodation to the world).

Pre-1958 papal teaching presents a radically different pattern:

– Pius IX, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII repeatedly:
– condemned submission of religious life to secularist or liberal control;
– insisted that religious institutes are *bulwarks* of the faith against modern errors;
– warned against “adaptations” that empty religious vows of their sacrificial and counter-cultural nature.

Here, there is no warning against:

– secular infiltration,
– doctrinal capitulation,
– liturgical innovations,
– Modernism already condemned as the “synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi, Lamentabili sane).

Instead, the order is urged to walk “higher, purer, better paths of virtue” in harmony with “the circumstances of these days,” with no denunciation of the poisonous doctrinal environment.

This is the method of the conciliar sect: *ordo sine veritate* (order without truth), a bureaucratically well-ordered religious life emptied of its confessional sharpness, ready to be turned into a respectable ornament of the new humanitarian religion.

Appropriation of Saint Augustine While Erasing His Ecclesial Intransigence

John XXIII invokes Augustine:

“Love truth, hold unity, foster charity… be fervent in spirit, enkindled by the fire of charity…”

But what does he carefully omit?

Saint Augustine:

– Fought relentless battles against Manicheans, Donatists, Pelagians.
– Affirmed the necessity of belonging to the Catholic Church for salvation.
– Defended the coercive authority of the Church to protect souls from heresy.
– Linked *unitas* strictly with *veritas* – unity without truth is a lie.

The allocution:

– Extracts a sweet fragment about fervor and charity,
– Detached from Augustine’s hard doctrine that:
– heretics are outside the Church,
– the Church has authority to repress error,
– schism, false worship, and doctrinal compromise are mortal dangers.

This is intellectual manipulation: using Augustine as an aesthetic ornament while abolishing his doctrinal edge. It anticipates the conciliar habit of citing the Fathers selectively to baptize its evolutionist and irenic agenda.

Silence on Modernism and Freemasonry: A Strategic Omission

Measured against the explicit condemnations in the documents provided:

– *Syllabus of Errors* (Pius IX):
– Rejects religious indifferentism, the equal standing of religions, the separation of Church and state, liberal education, the subjugation of the Church to civil power.
– *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi* (Saint Pius X):
– Condemn the evolution of dogma, historical relativism, the subordination of faith to “experience,” the denial of biblical inerrancy, the reduction of Christ to a mere religious leader.

In 1959:

– These errors are not theoretical; they dominate theology faculties, episcopates, and Roman institutions.
– The duty of a true Roman Pontiff would be:
– to recall the anathemas,
– to command religious orders to stand as bastions against error,
– to denounce and extirpate Modernist teachers and infiltrated sects.

Instead, John XXIII:

– Uses an opportunity with a centuries-old order to:
– say nothing about heresy,
– say nothing about the war against the faith,
– say nothing about the enemies of the Church vigorously unmasked by his predecessors.

This studied muteness is itself a sign of rupture. It exposes allegiance not to the pre-existing magisterium, but to a new project: to integrate religious life into a conciliatory, world-pleasing “Church of the New Advent.”

Symptomatic Fruition: From Soft Rhetoric to Structural Apostasy

Seen in retrospect through the lens of integral pre-1958 doctrine, this allocution prefigures the entire trajectory of the conciliar revolution.

1. Replacement of militant supernatural language with sentimental moralism.
– The stress on “charity,” “unity,” “fervor,” detached from doctrinal combat, leads directly to the pseudo-ecumenical betrayal condemned in advance by *Mortalium Animos*: treating non-Catholic communions as legitimate paths, and later constructing a “dialogue of religions.”

2. Institutional centralization serving a heterodox agenda.
– The federation and appointment of an Abbot Primate by the same authority that will soon promulgate a new ecclesiology and a new worship shows the pattern: first bind structures, then reprogram them.

3. Disciplined but deracinated obedience.
– The Canons are summoned to docility to “Our exhortations” without any mention that such obedience is bound by *fides perennis* and cannot extend to doctrines or rites deviating from that faith (*lex credendi non mutatur*).

4. Systematic evacuation of anti-liberal teaching.
– Everything articulated by Pius IX in the *Syllabus*, by Leo XIII in *Immortale Dei* and *Humanum Genus*, by Saint Pius X against Modernism, by Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, vanishes from the horizon. This is not development; it is suppression.

5. Preparation of religious for liturgical and doctrinal vandalism.
– Once religious identity has been reduced to generic virtues plus organizational compliance, it becomes easy to:
– impose fabricated rites that attack the doctrine of the sacrifice,
– inculcate a false notion of the Church as an evolving, democratic community,
– harness ancient orders as decorative legitimizers of the paramasonic neo-church.

The allocution is therefore not an innocent pastoral address; it is a micro-manifesto of the method by which the conciliar sect captured and neutralized Catholic religious life.

True Catholic Criterion: Why This Speech Cannot Stand

Measured solely by pre-1958 magisterial doctrine:

– A genuine successor of Peter, speaking to an ancient order in 1959, in a world enslaved by laicism, atheistic regimes, liberal democracies hostile to Christ, and an academy saturated with Modernism, would:
– reiterate solemnly the condemnations of:
– indifferentism,
– historical relativism,
– the denial of biblical inerrancy,
– false ecumenism,
– the separation of Church and state.
– recall that:
– “there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) in the Catholic Church as the one ark of salvation,
– “error has no rights” in public life, as expressed in the constant papal magisterium.
– command religious to:
– guard the purity of doctrine fiercely,
– resist infiltration of liberal theology,
– preserve faithfully the Roman liturgy as received,
– reject any innovation contradicting tradition.

This allocution does none of that.

Instead, it:

– glosses over the real doctrinal crisis,
– praises administrative moves that will facilitate future subjugation to modernist authority,
– reinterprets Augustinian heritage as a vague interior fervor divorced from confessional combat.

Under the immutable Catholic criterion, such a stance is not pastoral prudence; it is abdication. It functions as a rhetorical lubricant for the construction of the “conciliar sect,” the “structures occupying the Vatican” that will enthrone religious freedom, ecumenism, and anthropocentrism against the entire pre-1958 magisterium.

Conclusion: A Pious Tone Masking Spiritual Bankruptcy

The allocution’s theological and spiritual bankruptcy is thus exposed on four levels:

– Factual: historical praise and institutional news are selectively presented to celebrate organizational change while ignoring the dogmatic and moral storms of the time.
– Linguistic: the softened, emotive vocabulary avoids the precise, anti-liberal, anti-modernist language characteristic of true papal teaching of the previous century.
– Theological: the address omits the kingship of Christ over society, the necessity of the Catholic faith, the duty to condemn error, and any mention of the war against Modernism and freemasonry, in open dissonance with the binding magisterium.
– Symptomatic: it exemplifies the method by which the conciliar revolution absorbs and neutralizes religious orders: by gentle flattery, administrative centralization, and spiritual vagueness.

Thus what seems like an innocuous fatherly exhortation in 1959 is, in light of the constant doctrine of the Church, a revealing instrument of the coming apostasy: a speech that blesses structures and sentiments while leaving unmentioned the very truths for which religious life exists and without which every federation, every title, and every consoling word becomes simply another step toward the abomination of desolation.

---

Source:
Allocutio ad Canonicos Regulares S. Augustini, e quattuor Congregationibus, quibus Ordo constat, feliciter mox inita foederatione (die 26 m. Maii, A. D. MCMLIX)   (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025