At first glance, the constitution “Rivi Nigri” of 16 January 1960, issued by the usurper John XXIII, appears to be a routine territorial reorganisation: from the Archdiocese of Ribeirão Preto (Rivi Nigri) a group of municipalities is detached to erect a new diocese of São João da Boa Vista (“S. Ioannis in Brasilia”), with its see, cathedral status, chapter, seminary, and financial endowment juridically regulated according to the 1917 Code. It presents itself as pastoral solicitude, claiming imitation of Christ who “traversed towns and villages” and invoking the good of souls as the pretext for multiplying diocesan structures.
This apparently innocuous administrative act is in reality a pristine specimen of the conciliar revolution in embryo: a parasitic appropriation of Catholic canonical forms by a nascent neo-church, using the language of Tradition to consolidate its own counterfeit authority and prepare the demolition of the public reign of Christ the King, the integrity of doctrine, and the divine constitution of the Church.
Usurped Authority Cloaked in Catholic Forms
The entire document rests on the tacit premise that John XXIII is Roman Pontiff and that the paramasonic structure he heads is identical with the Mystical Body of Christ. This premise is the fundamental falsehood that poisons every subsequent clause.
The text repeatedly invokes:
“de Nostra summa potestate sequentia decernimus” – “by Our supreme power We decree the following”
and binds bishops, clergy, and faithful under penalties for non-compliance, as if this “supreme power” were that of a true successor of Peter.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this is intolerable for several converging reasons:
– A manifest modernist, ecumenist, and promoter of the “aggiornamento” condemned in substance by St. Pius X in Pascendi and by Pius IX in the Syllabus, cannot at the same time be the divinely assisted guardian of the deposit of faith. As pre-conciliar theology consistently affirms, *non potest esse caput Ecclesiae qui non est membrum* (he who is not a member of the Church cannot be its head), a point sharpened by Bellarmine and others.
– Modernism, identified by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi as the “synthesis of all heresies,” is precisely the doctrinal matrix of the so‑called aggiornamento inaugurated by John XXIII. To enthrone such principles is to step outside the Church’s indefectible magisterium.
– Once adherence to condemned propositions becomes the practical programme of a claimant to the Papacy, the presumption of papal authority is shattered. The edicts of such a claimant, even when mimicking traditional canonical acts, have no binding force before God.
Thus, from the outset, the constitution’s self-presentation as an act of “the Holy Church descending to human needs” is a fraud: we are dealing with the conciliar sect masquerading as the Church while de facto preparing the exact revolution later codified at Vatican II: decentralisation, bureaucratic territorial tinkering, and pastoralist rhetoric as a substitute for defending the faith against liberalism, naturalism, socialism, Freemasonry, and religious indifferentism condemned by Pius IX and St. Pius X.
Administrative Expansion without Supernatural Content
On the factual level, the act:
– Lists municipalities to be severed from the Archdiocese of Ribeirão Preto.
– Defines diocesan boundaries according to civil law: “terminandae finibus… ad legis civilis normam”.
– Establishes:
– the episcopal see in São João da Boa Vista;
– the cathedral in the church of St. John the Baptist;
– a chapter of canons (to be detailed later under separate letters);
– diocesan consultors, if needed;
– the diocesan mensa (endowment) via curial revenues, offerings, partition of archdiocesan goods per can. 1500 CIC 1917, and state subsidy;
– a minor seminary, and sending chosen alumni to the Pontifical Brazilian College in Rome;
– norms for curial records transfer and vacant see governance.
Superficially, everything is canonically tidy, draped in the venerable 1917 Code and traditional structures. But precisely here lies the deceit.
Subtle Submission of the Sacred to the Secular Power
One striking element, entirely consistent with the later conciliar agenda, is the docile alignment of ecclesiastical circumscription with civil legislation:
“terminandae finibus… ad legis civilis normam” – the new diocese is bounded “according to the norm of civil law.”
Pre-conciliar doctrine (e.g. Pius IX in the Syllabus, especially propositions 39, 55, 77–80) explicitly rejects the thesis that the state is the source of rights, or that the Church’s constitution depends on civil norms. While for practical clarity the Church may take civil subdivisions into account, she never derives her authority or essential configuration from the state.
Here, however, the wording blends without distinction the supernatural jurisdiction of the Church into civil categories as though this were axiomatic and innocuous. This anticipates and embodies the liberal principle that the Church must harmonise herself with the secular order, not subdue it to the reign of Christ.
Pius XI in Quas Primas condemned precisely this laicist naturalism, teaching that peace and order are impossible until states publicly recognise and submit to Christ the King. Yet in this constitution there is no demand upon civil powers to respect the liberty and sovereignty of the Church, no assertion of Christ’s social kingship; there is only administrative docility. The silence is systematic and therefore accusatory.
Pastoral Rhetoric Hiding the Absence of the Gospel Demands
The opening invokes Christ:
“In similitudinem Christi, hominum Servatoris, qui… pagos et oppida… peragravit”;
the Church is said to “descend to the needs of men” so that they may enjoy the word of God more abundantly.
On the linguistic level, this rhetoric is sentimental and horizontal. What is missing?
– No mention of:
– the need for repentance and conversion;
– the danger of heresy or indifferentism;
– the obligation to reject naturalism, socialism, Freemasonry;
– the Four Last Things (death, judgment, heaven, hell);
– the Most Holy Sacrifice as propitiation for sin;
– the necessity to maintain intact the 1917 Code and the traditional Roman Rite against innovations.
Instead, there is a managerial, technocratic tone: boundaries, incomes, consultors, canonical niches. It is the voice of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy, not of a supernatural authority warning souls against damnation and error.
Such silence is not neutral. In the decades immediately preceding 1960, the popes had identified the principal enemy: modernism, laicism, the masonic sects subverting Christian society (cf. Pius IX and Pius X as provided). Yet here, in the very act of reorganising pastoral structures in a country ravaged by liberalism and advancing socialism, the author says nothing of solemn obligations to resist these forces or to defend Catholic doctrine against the tidal wave of secular humanism.
This is symptomatic: we are in the ideological transition from the combative magisterium of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII to the conciliatory naturalism of the “Church of the New Advent.”
Theological Vacuum: “New Dioceses” for a Neo-Church
On the theological level, the core perversion is this: structures organically belonging to the Catholic Church are commandeered to serve a different religion.
Key elements:
1. The constitution invokes the 1917 Code (e.g. can. 1500 on patrimonial division), yet the same usurper will soon inaugurate the council that demolishes the doctrinal and disciplinary edifice presupposed by that code.
2. The erection of new dioceses is a serious act of the supreme authority ordered to the cura animarum (care of souls). But where the claimed “supreme authority” is deployed to:
– promote religious liberty in the condemned sense;
– prepare the cult of man;
– undermine the doctrine of the one true Church outside of which there is no salvation;
– relativise the Social Kingship of Christ;
the same act becomes a juridical simulation.
The theological axiom stands: *Ecclesia est societas perfecta et divina institutione constituta* (the Church is a perfect society founded by divine institution). Its constitution is not malleable to modernist experimentation. An authority that systematically betrays this foundation is not Christ’s vicar but an intruder.
Therefore:
– The “Diocese of São João da Boa Vista” as erected in this act is not a simple continuation of the Catholic diocesan structure but an early administrative node of the conciliar sect that will, post-1962, propagate a new rite, new catechesis, and new ecumenical ideology.
– The external continuity (Latin text, use of “Servus servorum Dei,” references to canons) is weaponised as camouflage. This is the paramasonic genius: to preserve the shell while replacing the substance.
Instrumentalising the Seminary and Clergy for Apostasy
The constitution commands the bishop to found at least a minor seminary, and to send the best candidates to the Pontifical Brazilian College in Rome:
“optimi quique ex ipsis seligantur, qui Romam, in Pontificium Collegium Pianum Brasilianum mittantur”.
Under a true pontificate, such a prescription secures doctrinal and liturgical fidelity. In 1960, under John XXIII, it becomes a mechanism of ideological capture:
– Candidates are sent precisely into the Roman environment that will soon be suffused with Vatican II’s modernist schemas.
– These young men, stamped with conciliar formation, will return to “pastor” the faithful with the new theology: religious liberty, ecumenism, liturgical revolution, indifferentism, and practical denial of the absolute kingship of Christ.
This is not conjecture; history has verified it. The Brazilian episcopate became one of the most active vectors of liberation theology, false ecumenism, and social modernism. The seedbed was exactly this kind of structure: formally canonical, materially subverted.
Thus the apparently pious solicitude for seminarians is, in context, an investment in future apostasy. It is a quiet but devastating betrayal of what Pius X demanded when he ordered rigorous protection of seminaries from modernist infection.
Economic and Political Entanglement: A Church for Caesar, Not Christ
The mensa episcopalis (episcopal endowment) is to be constituted, inter alia, with:
“dote a rei publicae Moderatoribus danda” – “a dowry to be given by the rulers of the state.”
Pre-conciliar doctrine certainly allows the Church to receive temporal goods, including from the state. However, the context and silence matter:
– No reaffirmation that the Church’s rights are innate and inalienable (cf. Syllabus, theses 19, 26; Pius XI, Quas Primas).
– No warning against state control, no insistence that ecclesiastical liberty must be preserved from political manipulations.
– No assertion that the Church, not the secular power, determines the conditions of her own governance and appointments.
This omission, combined with the civil-boundary language, subtly normalises the liberal thesis that the Church is one coordinated subsystem within a broader secular order. This is the same mentality that will later accept “religious liberty” in the sense condemned by Pius IX (theses 15–18, 77–80), renounce confessional states, and applaud laicist constitutions.
In other words, the constitution shapes a diocese ready-made for the post-1958 conciliar creed: obedient to Caesar, mute about Christ’s public rights.
Misuse of Canon Law: The Empty Shell of Authority
The document heavily leans on the 1917 Code:
– division of ecclesiastical goods per can. 1500;
– consultors “ad normam iuris canonici”;
– procedures for sede vacante, transfer of acts, and so on.
Yet canon law is here invoked by one who simultaneously plants the seeds for its abrogation and replacement by the 1983 Code—a text enshrining ecumenism, collegiality, and religious liberty in direct contradiction with pre-1958 magisterium.
This is juridical schizophrenia:
– Outwardly: scrupulous respect for the letter of true canon law.
– Inwardly: preparation of its abolition and the introduction of a new legal order serving another religion.
Such an operation itself manifests the spirit condemned by St. Pius X: the modernist who remains within structures to “reform” them from within, carefully preserving appearances until the revolution is secured. It is precisely the modus operandi of the paramasonic structure later denounced in various anti-modernist analyses.
Therefore, the canonical fastidiousness of “Rivi Nigri” is not a guarantee of Catholicity, but evidence of its subversive strategy: the wolf wearing the sheep’s wool, reciting the rules of the fold while opening the gates to devour.
The Sinister Absolutising of Obedience to a Counterfeit Magisterium
The closing paragraphs are especially revealing. The text declares:
“Has vero Litteras nunc et in posterum efficaces esse et fore volumus…” – these Letters we will and decree to be effective now and in the future;
and threatens penalties against those who would reject or contest them.
Here, obedience is demanded not to Christ’s authentic vicar but to an authority structurally oriented toward:
– reconciliation with “progress, liberalism and modern civilisation” (explicitly condemned in Syllabus, 80);
– interreligious accommodation and indifferentism;
– the suppression of the integral Catholic faith in favour of an evolving theology.
To cloak such a power with the full imperative of papal obedience is to pervert the virtue of obedience into complicity with error.
In pre-1958 teaching:
– Obedience is ordered to faith; it is not absolute in favour of any human person.
– When a claimant to office destroys, relativises, or contradicts defined doctrine, he cannot bind consciences to his decrees. *Oboedientia non est in his quae contra Deum sunt* (there is no obligation to obey in matters against God).
The constitution thus becomes an instrument of moral blackmail: the faithful are told that to question these acts is to incur the penalties reserved for those who “do not carry out the orders of Supreme Pontiffs,” while, in reality, fidelity to the true papacy requires precisely the rejection of such imposture.
From Territorial Engineering to Doctrinal Collapse: A Symptom of Systemic Apostasy
Symptomatically, “Rivi Nigri” illustrates in miniature the key pathologies of the conciliar sect:
1. Formal continuity without material fidelity:
– Latin, canonical exactitude, episcopal titles, all maintained;
– but used by a man and a system already bent toward Vatican II’s errors.
2. Naturalisation and bureaucratisation of the Church:
– Focus on boundaries, revenues, administrative organs;
– absence of calls to holiness via the Cross, the Most Holy Sacrifice, penance, and doctrinal combat;
– subtle acceptance of the liberal state’s primacy as framework.
3. Formation of clergy as transmission belt of revolution:
– Mandatory linkage of the new diocese’s seminarians to Rome at precisely the dawn of the council;
– ensuring rapid alignment with the new religion.
4. Silencing of the enemies named by pre-1958 pontiffs:
– No reference to the masonic and liberal conspiracies denounced by Pius IX in the appended texts;
– instead, harmonious cooperation with the same secular powers.
All of this confirms: this is not a benign organisational note in the life of the Catholic Church, but a structural adjustment of the emerging “Church of the New Advent,” a step toward the network that will propagate the abomination of desolation: the new rites, new catechism, new dogmas of religious liberty and ecumenism, the cult of man instead of the reign of Christ.
Christ the King versus the Dioceses of the New Advent
Pius XI in Quas Primas insists:
– Peace is possible only in the Kingdom of Christ.
– States, rulers, and peoples have the strict duty to publicly honour and obey Christ the King.
– The Church is obliged to oppose laicism and naturalism, condemning as a “plague” the secularist attempt to dethrone Christ from public life.
This apostolic constitution, while posturing as a pastoral act, refuses to confront these obligations. It erects a diocese that is:
– perfectly shaped to coexist with laicist Brazil;
– perfectly silent on the state’s duty toward the true religion;
– perfectly disposed to absorb, a few years later, the false teaching of religious liberty and ecumenism.
Thus, the new “S. Ioannis in Brasilia” is not placed to be a bastion of the Social Kingship of Christ; it is pre-programmed to be a compliant administration office within the conciliar sect—a section of the global apparatus that has substituted dialogue for doctrine, rights of man for the rights of God, “tolerance” for truth, and syncretistic spectacles for the Most Holy Sacrifice.
Conclusion: Unmasking the Pastoral Illusion
The constitution “Rivi Nigri” is a paradigmatic case of how the conciliar revolution operates:
– It hides under a layer of impeccably “traditional” canonical language.
– It performs a structurally legitimate act (creation of a diocese) with an illegitimate authority and an unspoken, poisoned intention.
– It enlists bishops, priests, and faithful into obedience to an order which, in short order, will demand acquiescence to doctrinal novelties, ecumenism, and liturgical sacrilege.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, one must state with clarity:
– An act rooted in usurped papal authority and ordered to the consolidation of a neo-church separated from pre-1958 doctrine is devoid of true canonical force before God, however solemnly worded.
– The faithful who adhere to the unchanging doctrine of the Church must refuse to be morally bound by such structures where they serve the conciliar system, and instead cleave to bishops and priests who preserve the true faith, sacraments, and Mass.
– The true renewal of dioceses is not achieved by multiplying sees along civil lines under modernist leadership, but by restoring the public and private reign of Christ the King, the integral pre-1958 magisterium, and the authentic Roman Rite as the heart of ecclesial life.
What parades in this text as pastoral solicitude is the quiet administrative face of a deeper treason. Under the pious Latin and references to canonical norms stands not the voice of Peter, but the machinery of that paramasonic structure which has enthroned man in the sanctuary and reduced the visible Church, in most places, to an instrument of apostasy.
Source:
Rivi Nigri, Constitutio Apostolica divisis ab archidioecesi Rivi Nigri quibusdam territoriis, fit ex ipsis nova Ecclesia « S. Joannis in Brasilia », XVI Ianuarii MDCCCCLX, Ioannes PP. XXII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025