The document “Salutiferos Cruciatus” of John XXIII (1 July 1959) purports to grant solemn apostolic approval to the revised Rule and Constitutions of the Congregation of the Passion (Passionists), adapting them “to the conditions of our times” after the 1917 Code, through a process of aggiornamento mandated, examined, and finally ratified by the Roman authorities. It praises St. Paul of the Cross, invokes the merits of the institute, recounts previous papal confirmations of its legislation (Benedict XIV, Clement XIV, Pius VI), and then, by the alleged “plenitude of Apostolic power,” abrogates all prior norms not contained in the newly conformed text.
This brief text, issued on the eve of the conciliar revolution, is a concentrated manifesto of juridical usurpation, theological naturalism, and the programmatic dissolution of religious life under the pretext of “adapting to our age.”
Programmatic Subversion of a Traditional Institute under a Pseudo-Apostolic Seal
Historical Continuity Feigned to Mask a Break in Authority
On the factual level, the structure of the letter is carefully crafted:
– It recalls how St. Paul of the Cross founded the Congregation to lead souls to meditate on the Passion, expiate sins, and convert pagans to the divinely revealed truth.
– It lists successive pre-1958 papal approvals:
– Benedict XIV (1741, 1746),
– Clement XIV,
– Pius VI (1775).
– It notes adaptations after the 1917 Code and recognitions in 1928 and 1930.
– It then describes a 1952 general council decision to revise the Rule “to correspond to what our age demands” in harmony with “the desires and prescriptions of the Apostolic See.”
– Finally, John XXIII “approves and confirms” the updated Constitutions, grants them “Apostolic sanction,” and abrogates anything contrary.
Formally, the letter behaves as a standard pre-conciliar approbation. Substantively, several elements betray the emerging conciliar sect.
1. The decisive clause:
“Regulas et Constitutiones… ad huius aetatis rationem accommodatas…”
– “the Rules and Constitutions adapted to the conditions of this age” –
is the hermeneutical key. The “age” becomes a norm.
2. The abrogation formula:
“hisce simul Litteris… abrogamus… ea omnia, quae iisdem Regulis et Constitutionibus… non continentur”
– “we abrogate everything not contained in these approved Rules” –
replaces historically concrete, ascetically strict, and divinely assisted norms with a plastic text explicitly shaped by “the demands of our times.”
3. The text leverages the real authority of pre-1958 pontiffs to legitimize a post-1958 usurper’s intervention. It weaves Benedict XIV, Clement XIV, and Pius VI into a narrative culminating in John XXIII, as though he stands in an identical theological and juridical line. This is the core deceit.
From the perspective of the integral Catholic faith, the decisive question is not stylistic continuity, but whether a manifest revolutionary—John XXIII—can validly exercise authority over a religious institute dedicated to the Passion and to the proclamation of the exclusive Kingship of Christ.
– Prior to 1958, the Magisterium had already anathematized the very principles John XXIII would shortly embody: liberalism, false religious freedom, reconciliation with “modern civilization” understood as emancipation from Christ (Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, prop. 77–80).
– A man who publicly initiates and promotes a council that will enthrone many of these condemned errors, legitimize religious liberty and false ecumenism, and dissolve confessional states, stands in open rupture with that Magisterium.
By the perennial doctrine reiterated by St. Robert Bellarmine and classical canonists, a manifest heretic cannot hold the papal office (*non potest esse caput qui non est membrum* – he cannot be head who is not a member). A revolutionary who prepares the systematic negation of Quanta Cura, the Syllabus, Quas Primas, and Lamentabili cannot be presumed a Catholic sovereign pontiff approving religious constitutions; he is an intruder using the forms of authority to neutralize its substance.
Thus the entire legal act, while syntactically impeccable, is the act of an antipope over a Catholic institute: a pseudo-apostolic weapon forged precisely to begin bending that institute toward conciliarism.
The Poisoned Phrase: “Adapted to the Conditions of Our Age”
The linguistic and theological fulcrum of the document is the formula:
“ad huius aetatis rationem accommodatas” – “adapted to the conditions (or character) of this age.”
Here the language reveals the infection.
1. The traditional norm:
– Catholic doctrine is immutable. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, condemns as modernist the proposition that dogmas and ecclesiastical institutions must be adapted to “modern needs” through an internal evolution of consciousness.
– Religious rules can be prudentially refined, but always as applications of fixed supernatural principles: primacy of divine law, penitential spirit, separation from the world, evangelization ad gentes, defense against errors.
2. The conciliar norm:
– “Our age” becomes a quasi-transcendent category dictating what forms of life are acceptable. This is pure historicism: *tempus magister veritatis* (time as master of truth), condemned by Pius IX and Pius X.
– Once “aetas” is treated as a determinant of religious identity, everything becomes negotiable: enclosure, austerity, preaching, missionary objectives, even the clarity of doctrinal witness.
The document never states explicitly which adaptations were made. This silence is itself damning. A truly Catholic promulgation would emphasize:
– Safeguarding strict poverty, penance, and contemplative spirit.
– Maintaining doctrinal militancy against modern errors, in the spirit of St. Paul of the Cross.
– Preserving the apostolate of preaching the Cross as the only remedy for sin and unbelief, including the conversion of heretics and pagans to the one true Church.
Instead, we read vague assurances that:
“primary and quasi-foundational elements” and what “necessarily follows” from the founder’s charism are preserved and even “made more efficacious.”
But:
– No mention of the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation.
– No mention of modernist doctrines ravaging the Church, against which Passionists should fight.
– No mention of the public Kingship of Christ and the duty to oppose secularism, though this institute is consecrated to the Passion that founded that Kingship.
– No warning against laicism, indifferentism, Freemasonry, socialism, all solemnly condemned in the Syllabus and in Quas Primas.
– No insistence that their mission is intrinsically anti-modernist, since the Passion unmasks the lie of autonomous man.
This silence about the concrete enemies of God, precisely in 1959, is not accidental. It signals alignment with the very tendencies denounced by the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
Veneration of the Passion Detached from Militancy against Error
At the start, the letter states that St. Paul of the Cross founded the Congregation:
“ut pie meditarentur [cruciatus]… ad eluenda admissa et ad virtutis viam sequendam… atque etiam ut ethnicos ad veritatem traducerent, quae divinitus nobis affulsit”
– “that they might piously meditate the saving sufferings [of Christ] to obtain the cleansing of sins and follow the path of virtue, and also to lead pagans to the truth that has shone upon us by divine gift.”
This is classically Catholic language: Passion, expiation, conversion of pagans to revealed truth. However, when the letter reaches the decisive aggiornamento, this supernatural clarity evaporates.
Instead of reaffirming:
– the Cross as judgment on all false religions,
– the duty to preach exclusive Catholic truth,
– the inseparability of Passion, Sacrifice, and the Most Holy Sacrifice of the altar,
the document shifts to bureaucratic generalities about governance, formation, and legal conformity.
Here lies a crucial modernist tactic:
– retain pious vocabulary at the surface;
– evacuate its concrete doctrinal consequences;
– imprison supernatural terms within an administrative discourse.
The Passion of Christ, in pre-1958 doctrine, is intrinsically:
– expiatory,
– propitiatory,
– unique,
– foundation of the Catholic Church as the one ark of salvation,
– the condemnation of liberalism, indifferentism, and religious syncretism.
Pius XI in Quas Primas insists that peace and order are possible only through the public reign of Christ the King, fruit of His Passion; states sin gravely by excluding Him. Yet in this letter:
– No word about the social reign of Christ.
– No exhortation that Passionists combat secular states that banish crucifixes and deny Christ’s law.
– No denunciation of those “pests” (Pius IX: socialism, communism, secret societies) that wage war on the Cross.
Such omissions in 1959, when these evils were triumphant, signify complicity. The Cross is reduced to an interior, sentimental object instead of a banner of combat. This is already the conciliar spirit: a deracinated piety serving as a decorative façade for coexistence with apostasy.
Formal Orthodoxy, Material Subversion: The Modernist Method at Work
The rhetoric of “Salutiferos Cruciatus” is quintessentially modernist in method:
1. Appeal to Tradition:
– Rehearsal of earlier approvals.
– Praise for the founder’s sanctity and for the fruits of the institute.
2. Invocation of “Our Times”:
– Necessity to adapt structures and norms to contemporary conditions.
– Reference to “desires and prescriptions” of the “Apostolic See” (i.e., the emerging conciliar leadership).
3. Blanket Approval + General Abrogation:
– Grant “Apostolic sanction” to a new text described only in abstract.
– Abrogate everything not contained therein, without specifying safeguards.
4. Emptied Supernatural Content:
– Passion, expiation, and evangelization are mentioned initially, then recede.
– Mission against error, against false religions, against secularism is absent.
– The supernatural horizon (state of grace, judgment, hell, the need for conversion) is silent.
This pattern mirrors what Pius X condemned:
– Modernists, he observed, work not by frontal contradiction of dogma but by internal transformation, preserving forms and words while shifting meanings and praxis.
“Verba servant, sensus mutant” (they preserve the words, they change the sense).
In this letter:
– “Passion” remains as a word.
– “Rule” and “Constitutions” remain.
– “Apostolic authority” is invoked.
But the decisive center is moved:
– from fidelity to an unchanging supernatural combat,
– to conformity with “our age” and its legal-bureaucratic expectations.
Thus, the institute is not directly told to abandon penance or preaching of the Cross as judgment; it is placed under a constitution remodeled according to “the age” by a man who will summon the council that enthrones precisely what earlier popes condemned. The practical result is the same: the Passionists, like many congregations, will soon dissolve their habits, relax observance, and replace militant preaching with psychological “accompaniment” and ecumenical blandness. This letter is one of the juridical precursors of that process.
Abuse of Papal Forms by an Intruder: Nullity and Usurpation
The letter repeatedly invokes:
“certa scientia ac matura deliberatione Nostra deque Apostolicae potestatis plenitudine”
– “with our certain knowledge and mature deliberation and by the fullness of Apostolic power.”
But:
– The “fullness of Apostolic power” is promised by Christ exclusively to Peter and his legitimate successors teaching and ruling in continuity with the perennial Magisterium.
– When a man uses that formula to initiate or ratify a process leading directly to the subversion of that Magisterium—by opening the way to religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the cult of man—his claim is self-discrediting.
According to the sound theological tradition summarized by Bellarmine, Wernz-Vidal, Billot, and others (see Defense of Sedevacantism file):
– A manifest heretic, or one who publicly prepares and promotes doctrines condemned by previous popes, is not a true pope:
– He is already judged by divine law (*Tit 3:10–11*: condemned by his own judgment).
– He cannot validly exercise papal jurisdiction, because he is not a member of the Church.
Accordingly, the “Apostolic Letters” of John XXIII in 1959, including “Salutiferos Cruciatus,” must be evaluated as acts of a usurping authority. Their binding force on consciences is null, except insofar as they incidentally repeat what was already validly legislated by true pontiffs.
This has two grave implications for the Passionists:
1. The genuine, rigorously Catholic constitutions approved by Benedict XIV, Clement XIV, and Pius VI remain the reference of fidelity to the founder and to the Church. Any adaptation coerced under the authority of an intruder cannot excuse the abandonment of that patrimony.
2. The acceptance of the 1959 adaptation without discernment prepared the Congregation—psychologically, juridically, spiritually—to submit to the even more radical corruptions after Vatican II: liturgical demolition, doctrinal relativism, ecumenical apostasy. The institute that was to guard the memory of the Passion became integrated into an ecclesial environment that publicly denies the exclusive necessity of the Cross and the Church.
The Silent Betrayal: What Is Not Said about the Passion
The gravest accusation against this document is its silence—*tacere proditio est* (to be silent is treason)—on points whose omission in 1959 can only be read as deliberate preparation for apostasy:
– No affirmation that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation, the very truth that gives meaning to the Passionist apostolate.
– No insistence that meditation on the Passion must lead to separation from the world, hatred of sin, condemnation of error, rejection of liberalism, socialism, and secret societies—as Pius IX and Leo XIII repeatedly taught.
– No reference to the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar as the unbloody renewal of Calvary, despite the institute’s intrinsic connection to sacrificial theology.
– No warning against the growing infiltration of Modernism, condemned as the “synthesis of all heresies” by Pius X, which was already corroding seminaries and religious houses.
This silence is not the discretion of a short technical rescript; it is the calculated absence of the supernatural note that should dominate any true approval of Passionist constitutions on the eve of an unprecedented crisis. It treats religious life as an object of canonical engineering rather than a militia crucis (army of the Cross) established to combat the very worldly spirit that “our age” incarnates.
By disconnecting juridical adaptation from doctrinal militancy, the document feeds the illusion that one can reconfigure religious life according to “the needs of the times” without betraying its essence. The ensuing history of the Congregation—loss of austerity, doctrinal dilution, functional integration into the conciliar sect—confirms the diagnosis.
Symptom of the Conciliar Revolution: From the Passion to the Cult of Man
Viewed symptomatically, “Salutiferos Cruciatus” is an early micro-manifesto of the neo-church:
– It uses pre-conciliar Latin solemnity to consecrate the category of adaptation to “our times.”
– It exploits the real authority of traditional pontiffs to shield a coming rupture.
– It redefines religious identity not by sharpening the supernatural mission in a hostile world, but by conforming to contemporary expectations.
– It prepares institutes dedicated to the Passion of Christ to survive as decorative relics inside a structure shifting toward the glorification of man, religious pluralism, and secular democracy.
Pius XI had warned in Quas Primas that the exclusion of Christ from public life, the enthronement of laicism, and the levelling of Catholicism with false religions would devastate society and the Church. Pius IX, in the Syllabus, condemned the propositions that the Roman Pontiff should reconcile himself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” understood in that anti-Christian sense. Within a few years of “Salutiferos Cruciatus,” the conciliar establishment will do exactly that.
In this perspective, the letter is not an innocent act but a juridical stage in the paramasonic project described by pre-conciliar popes: subjugating Catholic structures by co-opting their legal forms. What Pius IX recognized as the work of the “synagogue of Satan,” operating through sects, now speaks the language of “adaptation,” “renewal,” “our age,” and “prescriptions of the Apostolic See” under John XXIII and his successors.
True Obedience: Fidelity to the Cross against the Neo-Church
The integral Catholic response to this document must be unambiguous:
– Obedience is owed only to legitimate authority teaching and legislating in continuity with the perennial Magisterium.
– When a so-called “pope” employs the forms of papal jurisdiction to inaugurate accommodation to condemned errors, his acts lack binding force.
– Religious institutes, especially those consecrated to the Passion, are bound before God to preserve:
– strict asceticism,
– doctrinal clarity,
– zeal for the conversion of non-Catholics,
– open opposition to liberalism, ecumenism, religious indifferentism, and secularism.
The Passion is not a pious backdrop for interreligious dialogue and democratic coexistence. It is the judgment of God on the world, the destruction of idols, the exclusive foundation of the one true Church. Any “constitution” that subordinates this reality to “the conditions of our times” participates in the betrayal.
“Salutiferos Cruciatus,” by solemnly approving such adaptation under an usurped “Apostolic” authority, stands as a concise testimony to how the conciliar sect began corrupting Catholic religious life from within: quietly, legally, devoutly in tone, yet oriented toward the abdication of the Cross in favour of the world.
The only authentic reform for Passionists and for every remnant of religious life is not further aggiornamento, but a radical return to the integral pre-1958 faith, to the genuine rules approved by true popes, and to the uncompromising proclamation that peace, salvation, and order are possible only under the universal and public reign of Christ crucified and risen.
Source:
Salutiferos cruciatus, Litterae Apostolicae regula et Constitutiones Congregationis Clericorum Excalceatorum Sanctissimae Crucis et Passionis Domini Nostri Iesu Christi adprobantur, I Iulii a. 1959, I… (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025