At the opening of the fourth session of the Central Commission preparing the so‑called Vatican II, John XXIII addresses cardinals and officials with condolences for deceased members, sentimental Marian references (notably to Czestochowa), praise for the Polish hierarchy, and a pious-sounding exhortation that their labors serve “the glory of God” and the preparation of a “perfect people” for the Lord. Beneath this polished facade lies the serene self-presentation of a man already engaged in subverting the integral Catholic order: the speech is a calm overture to revolution disguised as continuity.
Conciliar Serenity as the Mask of Revolution
This allocution, delivered on 20 February 1962 by Antipope John XXIII to the Central Commission charged with preparing the Second Vatican pseudo-council, is short, smooth, and externally inoffensive. Yet precisely here its perfidy consists: not in open heresy shouted from the rooftops, but in the tranquil normalization of an enterprise that would dismantle the visible structures of Catholic Christendom.
From the perspective of *integral Catholic doctrine as it stood and was taught before 1958*, several elements must be underscored at once:
– The orator is the initiator of the conciliar project that produced the doctrinal novelties later condemned in substance by the perennial Magisterium: religious liberty as interpreted against the Syllabus of Pius IX, false ecumenism against the exclusive claims of the Church, the practical dethronement of Christ the King against Pius XI’s *Quas primas*, collegial democratization of authority against Vatican I.
– The Commission he addresses is the instrument for preparing a “pastoral” council whose real effect was the systematic relativization of dogma, liturgy, and discipline, leading to the “conciliar sect” that supplanted Catholic order in the structures occupying the Vatican.
– The speech’s tone, language, and strategic omissions reveal exactly the modernist method unmasked by St. Pius X in *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi Dominici gregis*: conceal revolution beneath traditional vocabulary, drain words of their dogmatic content, and avoid sharp doctrinal affirmations while fostering a new, horizontal mentality.
What appears as edifying prose is in reality the velvet glove of the *abominatio desolationis* (abomination of desolation) that would follow.
Sentimental Piety as a Substitute for Dogmatic Clarity
On the surface, the allocution speaks of:
“maternal auspices and prayers of the Church”, of human life’s mutability, of death as pilgrimage toward heaven, of hope for the deceased cardinals’ eternal reward, of unity between earth and heaven in the Church’s communion, of Marian protection over the conciliar labors.
None of this, taken materially, is objectionable when understood according to traditional doctrine. But precisely the omissions are decisive.
1. There is no explicit confession of the unique, exclusive necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation, defined by:
– The Fourth Lateran Council (1215): *Una vero est fidelium universalis ecclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur* (“There is indeed one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all is saved”).
– Boniface VIII, *Unam Sanctam* (1302).
– Pius IX, in the condemnation of indifferentism in the Syllabus (props. 15–18).
2. There is no mention of:
– Sin, divine justice, judgment, hell.
– The need for penance, conversion, reparation.
– The combat against heresy, Freemasonry, modernism.
Instead, death is treated in dulcet tones, presupposing their safe arrival in celestial reward without doctrinal sobriety about judgment. The “perfect people” he desires to prepare is not defined dogmatically as the people who profess the one true Faith, receive the true Sacraments, and submit to the true Roman Pontiff; it becomes an elastic formula ready to be reinterpreted as the “People of God” of Vatican II’s anthropocentric ecclesiology.
This shift from precise dogmatic language to vague, pastoral rhetoric is exactly the modernist method condemned by St. Pius X: corrupt doctrine not first by open contradiction, but by softening, sentimentalizing, and withholding.
Ecclesiology Dissolved into Horizontal Communion
John XXIII speaks of communion with the deceased cardinals and of earth being “joined” to the kingdom of heaven in support of the session’s fruitful outcome. This is classical vocabulary, but its instrumentalization is revealing.
– The supernatural communion of saints is not invoked to confirm immutable truth or to strengthen resistance to the world; it is invoked to wrap institutional proceedings in an aura of inevitability and sanctity.
– The implicit message: the very fact that these conciliar preparations occur within continuity of personnel and pious gestures proves their Catholicity.
But the Church has never taught that affective continuity guarantees doctrinal continuity. Pius X warns that modernists remain within ecclesiastical structures while internally subverting doctrine. The allocution exemplifies that tactic: a pious frame for a heterodox project.
Furthermore, there is a striking absence of any reminder—self-evident in previous ages—that:
– Councils and commissions are strictly bound by prior dogma.
– No “pastoral adaptation” may contradict *Quanta cura*, the Syllabus, *Pascendi*, *Quas primas*, or Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution *Pastor Aeternus*.
The silence serves a function: to habituate the audience to treating the upcoming council as a semi-creative event, not as a humble reiteration of received doctrine.
Selective Marian Devotion Preparing False “Ecumenism”
A central passage concerns Cardinal Wyszynski and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa:
“O Virginem Nigram, quam habemus carissimam! A iuvenilibus annis ea est Nobis admodum coniuncta…”
This personal effusion is emotionally powerful and, considered in itself, Marian devotion is profoundly Catholic. Yet in context:
– Marian symbolism will be used by conciliar and post-conciliar authorities to neutralize resistance: a sentimental “Marian” varnish over the demolition of Marian dogmatic centrality (especially the eclipsing of her role as victorious destroyer of heresies and universal Mediatrix).
– The same circles that orchestrate this devotion will later weaponize Marian pilgrimages and rhetoric to promote the ecumenical betrayal with non-Catholic sects and even non-Christian religions—against the explicit condemnations in Pius IX’s Syllabus (e.g., prop. 16–18) and against Pius XI’s teaching that peace is only possible under the social reign of Christ the King, not through interreligious diplomacy.
By exalting Czestochowa sentimentally while remaining silent about:
– the errors of Communism as rooted in atheistic, anti-Christian ideology,
– the errors of liberalism and religious indifferentism,
– the Freemasonic network already denounced by pre-conciliar popes,
the allocution helps inaugurate the “Marian ecumenism” that would reduce the Mother of God to a symbol of human fraternity instead of the *terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata* (“terrible as an army set in battle array”) leading the Church militant against heresy and apostasy.
Absence of the Kingship of Christ and the Condemnation of Laicism
Most revealing is what is not said regarding the public reign of Our Lord.
Pius XI in *Quas primas* (1925) teaches authoritatively:
– Peace cannot exist until individuals and states recognize and submit to the kingship of Christ.
– The Church, by divine right, possesses freedom and independence from secular authority and must form public life according to God’s law.
– The feast of Christ the King is a public condemnation of laicism and secular apostasy.
John XXIII, speaking to the supreme preparatory organ for a major council in 1962—amid global communism, laicism, moral collapse—never once:
– reaffirms explicitly the duty of states to acknowledge Christ the King;
– invokes *Quas primas* as a non-negotiable foundation;
– warns against the errors solemnly condemned in the Syllabus: religious indifferentism, separation of Church and state, secular control over education, etc.
This is not an accidental lacuna. It is symptomatic of the impending conciliar shift:
– from the proclamation of Christ’s kingship over nations,
– to the cult of human dignity, democracy, “religious liberty,” and dialogue, codified later in *Dignitatis humanae* and the praxis of the conciliar sect.
The allocution’s “we gather to promote the glory of God and His kingdom on earth” remains disembodied, detached from the concrete obligations dogmatically laid down by prior popes. It prepares the ground for the redefinition of “kingdom” as a vague, intra-temporal fraternity instead of the visible Catholic Church forming Christian society.
Modernist Method: Pastoral Euphemism and Programmatic Silence
At the linguistic level, the speech is a paradigm of modernist rhetoric:
1. Pervasive vagueness:
– Expressions like preparing a “perfect people,” promoting “the coming of His kingdom,” and trusting in Mary’s aid are left undefined.
– No doctrinal content is attached fastening them irrevocably to pre-1958 condemnations of error.
2. Pastoral self-limitation:
– John XXIII says, in effect, that he will not “effusively” unfold his thoughts, under pretext of recently having spoken.
– This voluntary restraint is used to avoid explicit reaffirmation of prior solemn teachings that would bind or alarm the innovators in the Commission.
3. Strategic omissions:
– No recall of *Lamentabili* or *Pascendi*; no explicit warning against modernism, though the preparatory work occurs less than 55 years after these condemnations and in the midst of their blatant disregard.
– No mention of the grave condemnations of socialist, communist, or Masonic conspiracies found in Leo XIII, Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII.
– No insistence on the immutability of dogma; no reiteration that councils cannot innovate doctrine but only guard and explicate it *eodem sensu eademque sententia* (“in the same sense and the same judgment”), as Vatican I and Pius IX demand.
The very rhetoric condemned by St. Pius X—elevating “pastoral” tones over doctrinal precision, avoiding clash with modern errors, hiding behind spiritual generalities—is here on display, quietly legitimizing the trajectory towards the Church of the New Advent.
From Central Commission to Conciliar Sect: Symptomatic Reading
When this allocution is read in light of what followed, its significance becomes starkly evident.
– The Central Commission’s labors, blessed here in sugary language, would largely be tossed aside in the Council aula in favor of liberal, Northern European and paramasonic drafts, with the tacit or direct encouragement of the same usurper.
– The eventual fruits—new ecclesiology, false ecumenism, religious liberty, collegial structures, and the liturgical revolution culminating in the suppression of the Most Holy Sacrifice in favor of a protestantized assembly rite—are the precise embodiment of the tendencies carefully not opposed in this speech.
The speech is therefore not an isolated spiritual exhortation; it is a node in a coherent revolutionary process:
– Normalize the innovator as benign and Marian.
– Cloak procedural radicalization in continuity-phrases.
– Remove the edge of prior condemnations from public consciousness.
– Introduce a praxis in which doctrine can be de facto bracketed while structures and mentality are transformed.
This is the modernist strategy of *infiltratio* and *substitutio*: infiltrate the institutions, substitute meanings, never directly deny unless forced, and always speak of unity, charity, and pastoral concern.
Integral Catholic Response: Reassertion of Immutable Doctrine
Against the atmosphere created by this allocution and its conciliar sequel, the integral Catholic stance—grounded exclusively in pre-1958 magisterium—must be unambiguous:
– *Lex credendi non mutatur*: the rule of faith does not evolve into its contrary. Any “council” or “magisterium” that contradicts the Syllabus, *Quas primas*, *Pascendi*, or *Unam Sanctam* reveals itself as alien to the Church.
– The Church is a perfect, visible society, with a divinely instituted hierarchy and the exclusive right to teach, govern, and sanctify (Pius IX, Syllabus prop. 19–21 condemned). The conciliar vision of “People of God” as an indistinct, democratized, ecumenical mass is incompatible with this.
– State and Church separation, the enthronement of neutral pluralism, and the cult of “human rights” severed from the rights of God are condemned. No amount of allocutory silence can rescind those condemnations.
– *Modernismus est haereticorum collectio* (Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies, as St. Pius X taught). Any speech that deliberately omits warning against Modernism while launching or blessing an aggiornamento aligned with its principles participates objectively in that apostasy.
Thus, the theological and spiritual bankruptcy revealed by this allocution is not that it explicitly teaches heresy in its few pages, but that it performs—calmly and deliberately—the evacuation of militant Catholic consciousness right at the moment when the greatest vigilance was required.
Where Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII spoke with crystalline dogmatic authority against liberalism, naturalism, false ecumenism, and Modernism, John XXIII here smiles, reminisces, invokes sentiment, and gently guides the apparatus into a council that would enthrone precisely what his predecessors had anathematized.
This is why no Catholic bound to the immutable Magisterium can receive such an allocution as a harmless historical curiosity. It is one of the polite doorways through which the conciliar sect entered to occupy the visible structures, exile the Most Holy Sacrifice, and propagate a man-centered religion in place of the Kingdom of Christ our God and King.
Source:
Allocutio cum quartae sessionis labores incohabantur Commissionis Centralis Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano secundo appurando, habita (die XX m. Februarii, a. MCMLXII) (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025