The document under consideration is an apostolic constitution of John XXIII, dated March 7, 1959, by which he purports to establish in the metropolitan church of Botucatu (Brazil) a collegiate chapter of canons. It sets the number and ranks of canons, regulates their liturgical obligations, assigns distinctive vesture, and provides that with the chapter’s erection the diocesan consultors cease in office; it delegates execution to the nuncio and wraps all in the usual solemn language of binding force and canonical penalties.
What appears, at first glance, as a minor act of hierarchical administration is in fact a revealing fragment of the developing program of the conciliar revolution, cloaked in traditional forms yet preparing the stage for the usurpation and neutralization of true ecclesiastical structures.
Simulated Tradition as a Tool of Subversion
This constitution stands at a decisive historical threshold: less than a year into the reign of John XXIII, on the eve of the catastrophic aggiornamento, still clothed in the trappings of pre-1958 canonical and liturgical language. The text is externally orthodox and juridical; precisely for that reason it is the more insidious.
On the surface, the document:
– Appeals to the externus Dei honor (external honor of God) and the splendour of temples and ceremonies.
– Erects a chapter with dignities (Archpriest, Archdeacon) and six canons, including a theologian and a penitentiary.
– Regulates their choir obligation, in fact drastically reducing it.
– Grants privileges of insignia.
– Subjects rights, duties, and privileges to then-existing canon law.
– Suppresses diocesan consultors in consequence of the new chapter.
Taken in isolation, such measures resemble traditional papal acts from the era of Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X or Pius XI. Yet the context and inner logic of the conciliar sect reveal a radically different function: these juridical gestures help consolidate an administrative facade that will soon be used to propagate Modernism and displace the true authority of the Church.
The most serious problem is not what is affirmed ceremonially, but what is systematically omitted: no reference to the crisis of faith, no warning against liberalism, laicism, indifferentism, Masonry, or Modernism condemned by the solemn Magisterium; no insistence on doctrinal vigilance; no explicit subordination of this new structure to the *social Kingship of Christ* and the integral combat against the world’s apostasy, as demanded by Pius XI in *Quas primas* and by Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors*. The text is a pure exercise in ecclesiastical bureaucracy, an aesthetic and institutional gesture emptied of militant supernatural purpose.
Canonical Ornament without Doctrinal Militant Spirit
At the factual level, the constitution:
– Creates a collegiate chapter meant to solemnize liturgy.
– Assigns ranks, including a canon theologian and a canon penitentiary.
– Allows cumulative benefices until endowments suffice.
– Greatly mitigates the obligation of choir: divina officia, Canonicorum propria, semel tantum in mense – one capitular exercise a month, the rest left to internal statutes.
– Regulates choir dress in minute detail.
– Declares diocesan consultors’ office extinct.
– Clothes the whole in strong language of perpetuity and penalties.
The contrast is glaring. Genuine Catholic tradition erects chapters as stable centers of:
– Daily solemn celebration of the *Most Holy Sacrifice*.
– Choral recitation of the Divine Office.
– Doctrinal supervision (canon theologian) and sacramental seriousness (penitentiary), firmly ordered to the defense of faith and morals.
– Real participation in the governance of the diocese with supernatural responsibility.
Here, while the outer shell is retained, the obligations are relaxed to the point of caricature: one capitular office per month as sufficient expression of canonical life. The constitution confers titles, vestments, and juridical status while tolerating near-total minimalization of the proper liturgical function. It is a juridical dressing-up of a structure increasingly emptied of its supernatural rigor.
This reduction is not accidental. It corresponds to the mentality condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and *Pascendi*, wherein the external forms of the Church are preserved temporarily while the inner doctrinal and spiritual substance is being transformed. The chapter becomes a decorative senate for a modernist hierarchy, not a bulwark of orthodox worship and doctrine.
Language of Continuity as Mask of Impending Rupture
At the linguistic level, the constitution employs a deliberately reassuring, traditional idiom:
– John XXIII styles himself Servus servorum Dei.
– It speaks of increasing the external honor and glory of God through liturgical splendor.
– It invokes canonical norms, apostolic power, solemn perpetuity, and penalties for disobedience.
Yet precisely this rhetorical orthodoxy functions as camouflage.
Key symptoms:
1. Bureaucratic sacralism:
The text is saturated with legal formulae, seals, chancery notes, and strict prohibitions against infringing the act, while remaining entirely silent about the doctrinal and moral war being waged against the Church in the modern world. This imbalance is telling: vast zeal for juridical minutiae, negligible zeal for the explicit assertion of non-negotiable dogma in the face of rampant errors.
2. Aestheticism detached from combat:
The document lingers on vesture—talars, violet fringes, mozzettas, red trimmings—while saying nothing of:
– The duty to defend the faith against Rationalism, Indifferentism, Liberalism, condemned in the *Syllabus* (especially propositions 15–18, 55, 77–80).
– The obligation publicly to assert the one true Church of Christ and the Kingship of Our Lord over civil society, as insisted by *Quas primas*.
This is not innocent silence; it signals the transition from a militant supernatural Church to a clerical caste concerned with its own ceremonial self-image while preparing docile structures for the conciliar deformation.
3. Inflated claims of authority without demonstration of Catholicity:
The constitution threatens canonical penalties for those who would disregard its provisions, in continuity in form with true papal acts. But the looming question—ignored, never confronted—is whether the author is in fact teaching and governing in the same doctrinal sense as Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI. There is no reaffirmation of the very condemnations that define the irreformable stance of the Church against the modern errors. The language of authority is weaponized to protect institutional reshaping, not the deposit of faith.
Simulata sanctitas, duplex iniquitas (feigned holiness, double iniquity): traditional phrases are invoked to consecrate the scaffolding of a future revolution.
Ecclesiology without the Kingship of Christ
From the theological vantage, the document’s most damning trait is its practical naturalism. It organizes a collegiate body in the local hierarchy:
– Without one word about the *public* Kingship of Christ over nations.
– Without the slightest indication that this chapter must be a center of resistance to secularization, laicism, socialism, or masonic plotting, clearly identified and condemned by Pius IX and his successors.
– Without any mention of the salvation of souls (*salus animarum suprema lex*), of the state of grace, judgment, hell, or the necessity of integral Catholic faith.
Instead, its guiding principle is administrative and aesthetic: to augment external worship through institutionalized clergy groups. This inversion is profound.
Pius XI in *Quas primas* teaches in substance that peace and order depend on the recognition of Christ’s universal reign and that both individuals and states are bound to submit to His law and the authority of His Church. Pius IX’s *Syllabus* rejects the separation of Church and State, indifferentism, and the supremacy of civil authority in sacred matters. St. Pius X in *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* unmasks Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies, precisely because it dissolves supernatural dogma into historical and sociological forms.
Yet in 1959, in a Latin America already penetrated by liberalism and Marxist currents, John XXIII issues a canonical ornament for Botucatu:
– No command to the new canons to uphold the condemned theses against religious liberty errors.
– No solemn recall that non-Catholic religions are false and cannot save.
– No exhortation that this collegiate body defend the integrity of the *Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary* against profanation, sacrilege, or liturgical minimalism.
In short: a structure, but no mission; ceremony, but no militant confession; robes, but no cross.
Instrumentalization of Chapters for Conciliar Governance
Symptomatically, the constitution explicitly announces that:
Canonicorum ergo Collegio constituto, eo ipso Consultores dioecesani a munere cessabunt.
Once the chapter is created, the diocesan consultors automatically cease. In classical canon law, both consultors and chapters have roles; here, the swap is more than administrative. A collegiate body, strongly bound by custom, liturgy, and stable canonical status, will soon serve under a hierarchy that embraces the Second Vatican Council and its novelties: false ecumenism, collegiality misunderstood, religious liberty repudiated by Pius IX, and the cult of man.
Thus:
– The chapter members, invested with solemn insignia and juridical dignity, become a local “senate” to legitimize and implement the conciliar changes.
– Their external traditionalism disarms the faithful, who see cappa, rochet, mozetta, and imagine continuity, while the same dignitaries later acquiesce to the replacement of the authentic Roman Rite with a fabricated assembly-rite, the dilution of doctrine, and the surrender to the world.
What is presented as strengthening the cathedral’s liturgical life is in practice the consolidation of a docile, ornamented structure whose supernatural purpose has been tacitly redefined. The real rupture is theological, not sartorial; the chapter is made to live under an emerging pseudo-magisterium.
The integral Catholic faith before 1958 insists that:
– A manifest heretic cannot hold jurisdiction (*Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice*; canon 188 §4 CIC 1917).
– The Church cannot reconcile herself with liberalism and modern civilization understood as emancipation from Christ the King (*Syllabus*, prop. 80 condemned).
– Authority in the Church exists only to guard and transmit the unchanged deposit, not to innovate dogmas, rites, or ecclesiology.
This constitution, while not itself a doctrinal manifesto, is signed by the very one who convoked the council that unleashed the doctrinal, liturgical, and moral devastation. Its claims to binding force are therefore inseparable from the question of legitimacy. *Potestas contra finem non est potestas* (power exercised against its end is no true power). A structure raised and then used to facilitate the suppression of the true Mass and the diffusion of Modernism cannot be regarded as a neutral canonical ornament.
Silence about Modernism: The Loudest Accusation
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the most incriminating element of this text is its absolute silence where the pre-1958 Magisterium speaks most clearly and urgently.
Consider:
– St. Pius X’s condemnation of those who relativize dogma, undermine Scripture, deny the permanence of truth, and seek the evolution of Church structures away from divine constitution.
– Pius IX’s identification of Freemasonry and clandestine sects as the driving force of the war against the Church, calling prelates to resist and expose their machinations.
– Pius XI’s emphasis that the rejection of Christ’s social reign is the root of contemporary misery and war.
This apostolic constitution was promulgated in a world already saturated by those condemned errors. Yet:
– No mention of Modernism.
– No warning against ecumenism or indifferentism.
– No explicit profession of the exclusivity of the Catholic Church as the only ark of salvation.
– No insistence that the new canons be defenders of orthodoxy in preaching, catechesis, and sacramental discipline.
– No stress on the terror of sacrilege, the reality of hell, the urgency of penance.
Instead, what is stressed?
– Legal formulas.
– External honors.
– Regulated privileges.
– Procedural exactness for execution of the decree.
This inversion—where juridical and ceremonial concerns eclipse the defense of the faith and the salvation of souls—is not a minor stylistic choice. It is the precise mentality unmasked by St. Pius X: ecclesiastical structures evacuated of their supernatural combativeness, leaving a polished shell ready to host a new, conciliatory, naturalistic religion.
Preparation for the Neo-Church: Decorative Obedience, Real Subversion
Seen in continuity with the subsequent events:
– The same authority that signed this 1959 constitution convoked the council that enthroned religious liberty and false ecumenism against the *Syllabus*.
– The structures solemnly confirmed and ornamented by such acts were soon used to:
– Implement the dismantling of the traditional catechism.
– Introduce the man-centered liturgy.
– Tolerate or promote doctrines condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium.
– Chapters, cathedral clergy, and local “senates” thus often became collaborators in the erosion of the *Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary* and in the diffusion of sacrilegious “Eucharistic” practices.
The contradiction is stark:
– The document threatens penalties for those who would disregard the will of John XXIII regarding the Botucatu canons.
– Yet no thought is given to the far more severe divine penalties for those who will (soon after) trample underfoot the received liturgy, the dogmatic condemnations of errors, and the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church.
This reveals the essence of the conciliar sect’s method:
– Preserve enough external continuity to pacify consciences.
– Redirect structures away from militant Catholicism toward dialoguing, democratized, humanistic religion.
– Use canonical decrees like this one to entrench obedience to persons and offices that will, in short order, betray the very faith those offices exist to defend.
Therefore, this constitution does not stand as a harmless administrative footnote. It is a tile in the mosaic of the paramasonic neo-church: a pseudo-traditional veneer legitimizing a line of authority which, beginning with John XXIII, systematically diverges from the infallible teaching of the pre-1958 Magisterium while appropriating its juridical language.
Conclusion: Canonical Formalism in Service of Apostasy
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine:
– A genuine ecclesiastical act must serve the end of the Church: the glory of God, the salvation of souls, the defense and transmission of the integral deposit of faith.
– Structures such as cathedral chapters are justified only insofar as they intensify orthodox worship, preach sound doctrine, and support the true pastors in resisting error.
This 1959 constitution:
– Speaks of honor and glory of God, but empties the capitular life to a token monthly obligation, thereby desacralizing its core purpose.
– Grants vesture and status without entrusting an explicit, militant doctrinal mandate in an era of unprecedented doctrinal assault.
– Strengthens the administrative arm of a hierarchy marching toward conciliar innovations condemned by the prior Magisterium.
– Elevates obedience to a claimant to papal authority whose subsequent program contradicts the irreformable stance of the Church against Modernism, liberalism, indifferentism, and religious liberty.
The gravest indictment is not the presence of Latin formulas and choir dress, but the chilling absence of supernatural clarity and anti-modernist militancy, replaced by a sterile, self-referential bureaucratic solemnity that prepares souls—quietly, respectably—for the kingdom not of Christ the King, but of the coming religious syncretism.
Source:
Botucatuensis in Metropolitano Templo Botucatuensi Canonicorum Collegium constituitur, die VII m. Martii A.D. 1959, Ioannes PP. XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025