The document is a brief Latin congratulatory letter in which John XXIII, acting as “pope,” flatters and praises Cicognani—then a leading Curia figure and coordinator of public Church affairs and the Second Vatican Council—for his upcoming eightieth birthday. It extols his diligence, loyalty, and merits in diplomatic and curial service, invoking God’s blessings upon him.
This brief Latin letter of John XXIII to Cardinal Efrem Forni, marking five lustra as bishop and ten as priest, is a courtly congratulation: it thanks God for graces, praises Forni’s diplomatic service to the Apostolic See (notably in Ecuador, Belgium, Luxembourg), commends his prudence and constancy, recalls his elevation to the cardinalate, and ends with a blessing and wish for renewed zeal for God’s glory and the good of souls.
John XXIII’s Latin letter “Quamvis nullum” (20 January 1963) congratulates Tatsuho Doi on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his episcopal consecration as Archbishop of Tokyo, praises his pastoral zeal and the growth of Catholicism in Japan, extols his elevation as the first Japanese “cardinal,” invokes biblical language about grace and divine assistance, encourages the construction of a new principal church, and grants a plenary indulgence linked to his jubilee celebration. Beneath its pious phrasing, this text is a calculated piece of conciliar propaganda, employing traditional formulas to legitimize an illegitimate hierarchy and a naturalistic, statist vision of the “Church” utterly severed from the integral reign of Christ the King and the pre-1958 Magisterium.
John XXIII’s Latin letter “Franciscalis familia” (16 January 1963) addresses Basil Heiser, Minister General of the Conventual Franciscans, on the 7th centenary of the translation of the relics of St Anthony of Padua. The text praises St Anthony’s holiness, veneration, miracles, the incorrupt tongue, exhorts the Franciscan family to imitate his prayer, preaching, and charity, and links these celebrations with the then-ongoing Second Vatican Council, expressing the hope that, aided by St Anthony’s intercession, the Council will yield abundant fruits for the Church.
This Latin letter of John XXIII to Joseph Pizzardo, marking twenty-five years of his presence in the “College of Cardinals” and praising his curial and seminary-related labours, is a brief panegyric that congratulates a loyal functionary of the emerging conciliar regime and seals his role as an instrument of its designs — and thus already reveals the spiritual emptiness and institutional corruption of the nascent neo-church it serves.
On October 18, 1962, John XXIII issued a brief Latin letter to Cardinal André Jullien on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. In a few lines, he praises Jullien’s legal expertise, prudence, diligence in the Roman Rota, and personal virtues such as piety, modesty, and affability, and then imparts an Apostolic Blessing, invoking God as the giver of every good and perfect gift. The text is short, apparently harmless, and purely congratulatory — yet precisely in this saccharine banality, issued on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, one sees the **cold substitution of supernatural Catholic mission with a self-referential cult of bureaucratic merit within the conciliar apparatus**.
The letter attributed to John XXIII (“Ioannes PP. XXIII”) appoints Cardinal Cento as legate to the celebrations in Ávila marking four centuries since St Teresa of Jesus began the Discalced Carmelite reform, praises Teresa’s contemplative and penitential ideal, extols cloistered prayer as eminent apostolate, and links Teresian spirituality to hopes for abundant fruits from the then-upcoming Second Vatican Council. It clothes the conciliar revolution with borrowed Teresian authority, instrumentalizing a great Doctor of the Church as a pious veil for the incipient neo-church.
John XXIII’s Latin letter to Joseph Urtasun for the Avignon commemorations superficially praises Innocent VI and Urban V as exemplary pontiffs, celebrates their Avignon sojourn as providentially useful for peace and ecclesiastical discipline, and culminates in an exhortation to esteem the papal office and unite spiritually with Rome, especially in view of the impending Second Vatican Council, depicted as a source of grace for the whole human family. Its polished rhetoric, however, functions as a veneer to legitimize the conciliar revolution and the authority of a manifest modernist usurper by parasitically invoking genuine pre-modern papal figures and the traditional theology of the papacy that he is simultaneously preparing to subvert.
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.
Sexaginta annos is a short Latin congratulatory note in which antipope John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli) flatters Benedetto Aloisi Masella on the sixtieth anniversary of his priestly ordination, praising his long diplomatic and curial service (notably in Chile, Brazil, and the Roman Curia), commending his zeal and diligence, and imparting an “Apostolic Blessing” on him and those present at the jubilee celebration.
