In this Latin letter dated December 16, 1960, John XXIII solemnly designates St Isidore the Farmer as “heavenly Patron of all agricultural workers of the Spanish nation,” cloaking the act in pious citations of Augustine and Cicero, praising rural life and labor, and invoking divine assistance so that Spanish peasants might harmonize work with religious piety.

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Beneath this seemingly harmless devotional gesture stands the already unleashed architect of the conciliar revolution, instrumentalizing a genuine saint and Catholic agrarian ethos to decorate the advance of the conciliar sect with a thin veneer of “traditional” sentimentality.

Sanctity as Cosmetic Ornament of the Conciliar Usurpation

At the factual level, the document appears modest:

– It extols agriculture using Augustine’s phrase that farming is the “most innocent of arts” and Cicero’s praise of rustic life.
– It notes contemporary threats of “false doctrines” and materialism.
– It proposes St Isidore as exemplar: humble, obedient, hard-working, prayerful.
– It, by alleged “Apostolic authority,” proclaims him Patron of all agricultural workers in Spain.

No Catholic who knows the life of St Isidore, a pre-1958 canonized saint, contests his exemplary role. The issue is the actor and the instrumentalization.

The author is John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli), the first in the line of usurpers condemned in advance by the perennial doctrine he pretended to wield. The letter’s structure is telling:

– It wraps itself in the forms of authentic apostolic legislation (“Ad perpetuam rei memoriam… certa scientia… de plenitudine Apostolicae potestatis”).
– It presumes as fact the validity of an “apostolic” power already internally subverted by Modernism.
– It uses a devotional act not as a consequence of doctrinal clarity, but as a sentimental adornment masking a simultaneous preparation of the most destructive council in history.

From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, an act issuing from a manifestly modernist regime has no binding force in foro conscientiae as “pontifical.” What remains is a historical testimony: how the conciliar revolution camouflages its apostasy behind the language, saints, and symbols of the very Tradition it is dismantling.

Selective Traditionalism: Pious Phrases Weaponized Against the Faithful

John XXIII couches his brief decree in traditional-sounding themes:

– Praise of agrarian virtue.
– Warning against “pravarae doctrinae” and materialism.
– Exhortation that peasants order their lives according to religion.
– Invocation of a popular Spanish saint.

But the context of 1960 is decisive. While this text extols rustic virtue, the same usurper:

– Was finalizing preparations for Vatican II, whose documents would enthrone:
– *Religious liberty* in direct contradiction to the Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX, 1864, condemns the thesis that everyone is free to profess any religion, and that the State must be indifferent to the true Church).
– *Ecumenism* that equates the unique Church of Christ with heretical communities, contrary to the dogmatic teaching of the Councils of Florence and Trent and the constant Magisterium.
– A pastoral and doctrinal *modernization* condemned by St Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane exitu, which stigmatize precisely the evolutionism, historicism, and relativism that penetrated Vatican II.

Thus, while Roncalli’s letter laments errors “where many reduce all things to matter,” his entire regime is opening the floodgates to the naturalistic, anthropocentric “cult of man” later shamelessly proclaimed by his successor in the same conciliar line. The dissonance is not accidental—it is the methodology of Modernism: retain the shell, empty the substance.

The traditional terms here are not false; they are hijacked. This is the technique of the *synagoga Satanae* exposed by Pius IX in the Syllabus and by St Pius X: Modernists infiltrate Catholic language, only to reverse its inner meaning.

Language of Authority without the Substance of Orthodoxy

The linguistic form of the letter is impeccably Roman:

– Invocation: Ad perpetuam rei memoriam.
– Appeal to Fathers and classical authorities.
– Legal formulas: certa scientia, matura deliberatione, plenitudine Apostolicae potestatis.
– Clauses: all contrary acts declared “irritum et inane”.

This juridical majesty becomes a mask, because the decisive criterion is not style but doctrine. The Church has always taught:

– Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur (the first see is judged by no one) applies only to a true Roman Pontiff, not to one who publicly promotes condemned errors.
– As St Robert Bellarmine, Cajetan, John of St Thomas, and the classical canonists stress (cf. synthesized in the document “Defense of Sedevacantism” provided), a manifest heretic cannot retain or obtain the papal office: *a non-Christian cannot be head of the Church*; a *manifest heretic ceases to be a member*.
– Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code states that public defection from the faith empties an ecclesiastical office by the law itself.

Roncalli’s programmatic Modernism, his ecumenical and indifferentist orientation, his preparation of the council that would contradict the Syllabus and Quas Primas, placed him outside the continuity of the papal magisterium.

Therefore, the solemn ingredients in this letter are juridically hollow. The misuse of papal formulas by a usurper is not a trivial technicality: it is sacrilegious simulation. By surrounding a devotional decree with full canonical solemnity, he normalizes his counterfeit authority, training souls to accept as Catholic, without examination, whatever flows from the new regime.

This is why the letter deserves polemical unmasking: its crime is not the choice of a patron, but the abuse of the form of the papacy to lend legitimacy to the conciliar project.

Natural Virtue Affirmed, Supernatural Kingship Silenced

The text’s central concern is agriculture and rural workers in Spain. It:

– Praises their labor and “natural and just” right to its fruits.
– Wishes them to align work with piety.
– Provides a heavenly Patron to shield them.

All good on the surface. The deadly omission is more significant than the content.

From Pius XI’s Quas Primas (1925), we know the Catholic doctrine:

– Peace and order depend on the public and social reign of Christ the King.
– States, rulers, laws, and education must submit to Christ and His Church.
– Secularism and laicism are branded as a “plague” that dethrones Our Lord and destroys society.

From Pius IX’s Syllabus:

– It is condemned to assert that the Church must be subject to the civil power;
– condemned to claim the State should be religiously neutral or separate from the Church;
– condemned to celebrate “modern civilization” built on religious indifferentism.

What is conspicuously absent in this 1960 text?

– No clear reaffirmation of Christ’s social Kingship over Spain as a confessional Catholic nation.
– No recall that the State is obliged to recognize the true Church and repress public heresy.
– No reference to the Syllabus, Quas Primas, or the obligation of legislation and economy to submit to divine law.
– No condemnation of liberalism, socialism, Freemasonry by name, though Pius IX linked agrarian and social devastation directly to these satanic sects.
– No Christocentric, Eucharistic, sacrificial center—only generic “religion” and “piety.”

Instead, the letter speaks in vague terms of “pravarae doctrinae placita” (false doctrines) and materialism, as if the problem were merely ideological fashion, not organized anti-Christian conspiracy and State apostasy already denounced many times by pre-1958 popes. The noble doctrine of the social Kingship of Christ is reduced to a sentimental halo around “good peasants who pray.”

This silence is betrayal. Silentium de iis quae maxima sunt crimen est (silence about what is greatest is a crime). When Pius XI gave Christ the King to the Church, he did so to combat secularism explicitly, calling for Catholic confessional states. Roncalli, on the eve of Vatican II, dares not repeat this integral teaching because his entire conciliar project tends toward its negation.

Thus:

– The supernatural order is not denied, but marginalized.
– The public rights of Christ the King are not denied, but suspended into oblivion.
– The peasants are given a patron, but not the doctrine that would defend their families and land against the very liberal and Masonic forces the conciliar sect will soon embrace.

Devotion Detached from Dogma: Modernist Pastoral Tactics

The letter is a paradigm of Modernist pastoral manipulation:

1. Romanticize a safe, apolitical image: the humble, praying peasant.
2. Propose a popular saint, widely venerated, tied to land and work.
3. Mention “false doctrines” only in abstract, never naming liberalism, socialism, false religions, or the anti-Catholic sects condemned by prior popes.
4. Avoid any sharp doctrinal or disciplinary demands that would expose conflict with the modern world.
5. Enshrine the act with maximum juridical pomp, normalizing the usurper’s authority.

Compare this to integral Catholic practice before 1958:

– When Pius IX or Leo XIII, or Pius X spoke of social questions, they explicitly:
– Condemned socialism, communism, secret societies;
– Affirmed the rights of the Church over education, marriage, and public law;
– Tied any patronage or devotion to clear doctrinal assertions and moral imperatives.
– Lamentabili and Pascendi condemn the attempt to separate “pastoral” from “dogmatic,” or to cloak new doctrine in traditional phrases.

Here, Roncalli uses St Isidore not to mobilize Spain for Christ the King and against secular apostasy, but to sentimentalize Catholicism as a cultural ornament of the rural class—a religion of “good feelings,” fully compatible with the liberal-democratic, religiously pluralist order that Vatican II would bless.

This is theological bankruptcy: devotion severed from confession, piety without creed, saints harnessed to a program that subverts the faith they lived.

Spain and the Programmed Dismantling of a Catholic Nation

The letter is addressed specifically to Spain, then still in a formally Catholic order. Instead of reaffirming:

– The duty of the Spanish State to recognize the one true Church (as taught by Pius XI and Pius IX),
– The need to resist secularization, Protestant penetration, Masonic plotting,

it reduces the pontifical voice to a mild exhortation that peasants align their labor with piety.

The omission is thunderous:

– No insistence that Spanish laws conform to divine and natural law.
– No warning against the liberal-parliamentary and socialist currents striving to dethrone Christ.
– No defense of the rights of the Church over education, marriage, land legislation.
– No invocation of the Syllabus and Quas Primas as bulwarks of Spanish Catholic identity.

The conciliar sect that Roncalli inaugurates will later:

– Abandon the confessional ideal.
– Promote “religious freedom” in direct opposition to prior magisterium.
– Legitimize “dialogue” with sects and false religions.
– Disarm Catholic nations morally and juridically, preparing their surrender to laicism and globalist ideologies.

In that light, this Apostolic Letter is not an isolated devotional trifle; it is part of a strategy: keep the people attached to saccharine devotions while the doctrinal and juridical spine of Christendom is being broken.

False Shepherd’s Signature: Authority Simulated, Not Exercised

The document ends with decisive formulas:

– It “confirms, constitutes, declares” St Isidore Patron.
– Grants “all liturgical honors and privileges” proper to patrons of groups.
– Declares all contrary acts null and void.
– Claims perpetual validity.

These are the gestures of a true Pope. But *auctoritas in veritate fundatur* (authority is founded in truth). If the one signing:

– Prepares a council that contradicts solemn prior condemnations;
– Promotes doctrinal novelties condemned by St Pius X;
– Accepts and propagates the principles that Pius IX had branded as errors 15–18, 55, 77–80 in the Syllabus;

then his personal claim to the papal office collapses under the very criteria of the traditional theologians he pretends to succeed.

Thus:

– The choice of St Isidore remains objectively good, in continuity with authentic tradition.
– Yet the claimed “Apostolic authority” of Roncalli remains that of a usurper.
– This contrast exposes the Modernist tactic: authentic Catholic elements are retained only to legitimate a counterfeit magisterium.

Modernist Reduction of the Supernatural to Moral Example

An additional symptom: St Isidore is presented chiefly as:

– Humble, simple.
– Diligent in rural work.
– Prayerful and obedient.
– Charitable.

All true; but the emphasis fits the neo-church’s consistent reduction:

– Saints become primarily social or moral exemplars, accessible to natural reason and humanitarian sensibility.
– The supernatural elements—miracles, penances, the centrality of the Most Holy Sacrifice, the fear of hell, the need for state of grace, combat against heresy—are muted or omitted, lest they scandalize the modern mentality.

In the letter:

– No call to frequent confession and Holy Communion under the conditions laid down by the traditional Church.
– No word on the horror of mortal sin, usury, dishonesty in trade, contraception, or other concrete sins threatening rural families.
– No mention that unjust agrarian structures, liberal capitalism, or socialist expropriation are offenses against the divine and natural law, as pre-conciliar popes taught.
– Only safe, generic references to aligning life with “religion and piety.”

This is consistent with post-1958 praxis: a religion of “values” detached from the dogmatic and sacramental foundations clarified and defended up to Pius XII.

Conciliar Sect’s Appropriation of Authentic Saints

The elevation of St Isidore as patron by Roncalli fits a broader pattern:

– The conciliar sect eagerly decorates itself with pre-1958 saints, devotions, and aesthetics, while:
– Promoting pseudo-saints after 1958 who embody its novelties (e.g., ecumenism, false mercy, doctrinal evolution).
– Suppressing or neutralizing those elements of older saints that contradict its modernist agenda (e.g., militant anti-heretical zeal, insistence on the one true Church, horror of religious indifferentism).

In this letter:

– A genuinely Catholic saint is invoked.
– His virtues are selected and narrated in a way entirely innocuous to liberal-democratic, religiously pluralist systems.
– No reference is made to the exclusive salvific role of the Catholic Church, nor to the objective falsity of other religions, as constantly taught before 1958.

Thus, the saint is not honored as a witness of integral Catholic order, but as a patron of a depoliticized, “spiritualized” peasantry who no longer threaten the new world order with claims of Christ’s absolute sovereignty.

Systemic Apostasy Revealed in Small Documents

One might object: this is a small apostolic letter about a patron saint; is it not excessive to read it as symptom of apostasy?

This objection misunderstands how the enemies of Christ operate. Pius IX warned that the Masonic and liberal sects proceed gradually, using:

– Laws that appear neutral but erode Catholic prerogatives.
– Language that appears pious but changes meanings.
– Small, symbolic acts to reposition the Church psychologically toward modern errors.

In the same way:

– A devotional act by a usurper, phrased in traditional Latin with patristic citations, habituates Catholics to accept his person and his “magisterium.”
– The omission of strong doctrinal affirmations, in a context that cries out for them, habituates Catholics to a diluted religion.
– The selective silence regarding Christ the King’s rights over states prefigures the conciliar betrayal in Dignitatis Humanae and the whole cult of “human rights” abstracted from the rights of God.

Therefore, this letter is not isolated; it is a small, revealing brick in the edifice of the conciliar revolution, where:

– Forms are preserved;
– substance is subverted;
– saints are appropriated;
– and the usurper’s signature stands where a true Pope should defend Christ’s reign.

Conclusion: Return to the Integral Doctrine Betrayed Here

From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the correct stance is twofold:

– Affirm:
– St Isidore the Farmer as a true Catholic saint and model for rural workers.
– The dignity of agriculture as a vocation closely linked to obedience to God’s law.
– The need for peasants to sanctify work by prayer, sacraments, and submission to the true Church.

– Reject:
– The claim of apostolic authority by John XXIII and his successors in the conciliar sect.
– The use of devotional decrees as a cosmetic mask for the doctrinal and disciplinary revolution against the pre-1958 Magisterium.
– The sentimental, depoliticized portrayal of Catholic life that omits the public Kingship of Christ and the duty of nations to submit to Him.

True honor to St Isidore and to Catholic agriculture demands a return to:

– The doctrinal clarity of the Syllabus of Errors.
– The militant proclamation of Christ the King in Quas Primas.
– The anti-modernist rigor of Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi.
– The canonical principle that manifest heretics and promoters of condemned novelties cannot be heads of the Church.

Only under these principles can the patronage of saints, the labor of peasants, and the ordering of society bear fruit for eternity rather than be co-opted into the conciliar parody of Catholicism.

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Source:
Agri culturam   (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025