In this homily of 12 April 1959, delivered in the Vatican Basilica at the canonization of Carlo da Sezze and Joaquina de Vedruna, John XXIII exalts their lives as proof that sanctity is accessible in every state. He sketches Carlo’s humble Franciscan piety and austerities, his Eucharistic devotion, and Joaquina’s transition from noble married life and motherhood to founding a congregation dedicated to girls’ education and care of the sick, proposing both as models for religious, families, and widows, while concluding with a petition that their intercession aid his pontificate, foster universal unity under “one fold and one shepherd,” and advance temporal prosperity ordered to eternal happiness.
This apparently edifying discourse is in fact a programmatic text of the conciliar revolution, instrumentalizing genuine ascetic motifs to legitimize an illegitimate “pontificate,” to prepare a humanistic, irenic, and horizontal pseudo‑church, and to shift the very notion of sanctity from the reign of Christ the King and doctrinal integrity to sentimental activism and institutional self-approval.
The Canonization Homily as Manifesto of a New Religion
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this text is not an innocuous hagiographical exhortation; it is a calculated act of usurpation.
John XXIII appears here not merely as a private preacher but as claiming to act as Supreme Pontiff in a public liturgical act of canonization. Yet unchanging doctrine teaches that a manifest heretic cannot hold the papacy nor exercise jurisdiction in the Church of Christ: *non potest esse caput qui non est membrum* (“he cannot be head who is not a member”). This is not a novelty of “rigorists” but the constant doctrine explicated by, among others, St. Robert Bellarmine and affirmed in canonical doctrine before 1958: a public defection from the faith vacates office *ipso facto* (1917 CIC can. 188.4). The same pre-conciliar Magisterium, from Pius IX’s *Syllabus* to St. Pius X’s *Pascendi* and the condemnation of Modernism in *Lamentabili*, brands as intolerable the very principles that would soon define the “Second Vatican Council” convoked by this man: religious liberty, ecumenism, doctrinal evolution, democratization of authority, and reconciliation with “modern civilization.”
Hence, when such a figure performs an act that, in Catholic theology, demands the full exercise of papal infallibility (solemn canonization), we are not witnessing the voice of the Spouse of Christ, but the voice of an intruder speaking in the temple. The homily studied here is one early symptom: the language, emphases, and omissions quietly invert the Catholic doctrine of sanctity and of the Church’s mission.
Manipulated Facts: Selective Hagiography in the Service of a New Ecclesiology
At the factual level, many individual elements appear orthodox or even edifying: references to penance, Eucharistic devotion, Marian consecration, generous charity, the education of youth, service to the poor. But they are woven into a framework that subtly serves another altar.
Key manipulative moves:
1. Canonization as self-legitimization.
– The entire discourse presupposes that the speaker is true Roman Pontiff and that his liturgical act is an unquestionable exercise of the Church’s sanctifying authority. By presenting two edifying figures, he clothes his own authority in borrowed holiness. This is ideological: a man already oriented towards aggiornamento, collegiality, and reconciliation with condemned errors uses canonization as a pious façade for his new program.
– Pre-1958 doctrine insists that the Church’s saints are luminous witnesses to the integral faith, to the rights of Christ the King, to the condemnation of error. Yet here, their examples are stripped of militant doctrinal context and repurposed to support a vague, irenic ideal: “unum sit ovile unusque pastor” is invoked without explicit affirmation that the “one fold” is exclusively the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation, and that “one shepherd” is Christ ruling through a true Pontiff teaching the perennial doctrine, not a future ecumenical amalgam.
2. Silence on the dogmatic war against Modernism.
– In 1959, the Church (in truth, the conciliar sect in formation) faced the full, unrevoked weight of St. Pius X’s anti-modernist legislation and the doctrinal clarity of Pius XI and Pius XII. Any genuine Catholic homily preparing a major council would recall:
– the condemnation of “religious liberty” and state neutrality in the *Syllabus* (errors 55, 77–80),
– the insistence in *Quas Primas* that peace is possible only in the public kingship of Christ, against laicism and secularism,
– the excommunication attached to Modernist propositions rejected in *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi*.
– This homily mentions none of these. The saints are not presented as defenders of dogma against the errors of their time, but as emotive symbols who can be easily assimilated into a soon-to-be-announced “opening to the world.”
3. Reduction of sanctity to moral exemplarism and social service.
– The description of Carlo:
– Emphasis on storytelling to peasants, kindness, affective charity, and mystical sentiment (the Eucharistic ray wounding his heart).
– His harsh corporal penances are narrated, but without doctrinal articulation against contemporary laxism or errors; they become a picturesque Franciscan flourish, easily neutralized.
– The description of Joaquina:
– Focus on education, healthcare for the poor, and peaceful endurance of hardships like imprisonment and exile.
– The founding of an institute dedicated to girls’ education and the sick is presented as the central charism.
– What is missing? A clear insistence that sanctity is inseparable from full doctrinal orthodoxy, submission to the perennial Magisterium, rejection of religious indifferentism, and public confession of the unique, exclusive truth of the Catholic Church. By cutting away the militant, confessional dimension and highlighting “service” and “peace,” the homily anticipates the neo-church’s cult of humanitarianism.
4. The concluding intercession request:
– John XXIII asks these “saints” to obtain success for his “consilia et incepta, iam catholico orbi nuntiata.”
– Historically, those “plans” mean the calling of the council that will unleash religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, and liturgical revolution.
– The saints are thus invoked to bless the dismantling of the very doctrines by which prior Popes condemned such novelties.
Here the ultimate factual inversion emerges: sanctity is exploited to canonically perfume a project that Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII had doctrinally excluded.
Soft Rhetoric, Hard Subversion: The Language of Conciliar Sentimentalism
The linguistic texture of the homily is a window into the emerging apostasy.
1. Sentimental piety instead of dogmatic clarity.
– Abundant references to joy, serenity, “heavenly peace,” and edifying example abound.
– Nearly absent are words that defined the pre-1958 Magisterium’s pastoral tone: *error*, *heresy*, *condemnation*, *false religions*, *hell*, *judgment*, *penalty*, *Satan*, *Modernism*.
– The saints’ ascesis is neutralized into spiritual romanticism rather than presented as war against sin and doctrinal deviation.
2. Horizontalized “peace” and “prosperity.”
– The conclusion prays:
– that Christians, united in fraternal love, may be one fold and one shepherd;
– that all peoples, “pacatis animis” and with affairs ordered “ordine, iustitia caritateque,” may attain prosperity as a prelude of eternal happiness.
– On their face, these wishes seem harmless. But in context:
– There is no explicit assertion that civil societies must recognize the social kingship of Christ as taught by Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, where he condemns laicism and insists that states must publicly honor Christ and obey His law.
– The language aligns with a naturalistic, UN-style vocabulary: peace through ordered relations, justice, charity—without confronting the rebellion of nations against Christ and His Church. This is precisely what *Quas Primas* identifies as the root of modern evils: excluding Christ and His law from public life.
– The homily’s “peace” is dangerously compatible with liberal pluralism. It prepares the conceptual ground for later appeals to “religious liberty” and “dialogue” condemned by the *Syllabus* (79–80).
3. The rhetorical eclipse of militancy.
– Saints in authentic Catholic homiletics are soldiers: confessors of truth, martyrs in desire or in fact, enemies of heresy, defenders of the papacy in its true sense, and champions of the reign of Christ the King.
– Here they are portrayed almost exclusively as:
– gentle,
– serving,
– patient under trials,
– promoters of education and healthcare.
– This is not false per se, but the omission of their role as living refutation of modern errors is itself a lie by silence. *Qui tacet consentire videtur* (he who is silent is seen to consent). The rhetorical strategy is clear: de-fang Catholic sanctity so it can be co-opted by a religion of benevolent humanitarianism.
Theological Perversion: Sanctity Without the Social Kingship of Christ
At the theological core, the homily betrays the foundational points of pre-1958 doctrine.
1. The missing kingship of Christ.
– According to Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, the primary remedy to modern evils is the public and social reign of Christ the King:
– States must officially recognize the true Church;
– civil laws must conform to divine and natural law;
– religious indifferentism and state neutrality are condemned as mortal plagues.
– In this homily:
– Christ is mentioned devotionally (Eucharistic adoration, peace of Christ);
– but His kingship over nations, governments, and legal orders is not proclaimed.
– Instead, the prayer for temporal prosperity is placed upon vague “order, justice, charity” without grounding them in explicit subordination to Christ’s law and the authority of His Church over states. This naturalistic tone contradicts the anti-liberal teaching summarized in the *Syllabus* (esp. 39–41, 55–56, 77–80).
2. Canonization as doctrinal act – manipulated.
– Pre-conciliar theology understands canonization as a protected act of the papal Magisterium concerning a matter intimately connected to the faith (the cult of saints).
– For such an act to be trustworthy, it must be an exercise of the authority of a true Pope professing the integral faith.
– When a man like John XXIII:
– praises and intends to “reconcile” the Church with modern liberties,
– prepares a council to enshrine religious freedom and ecumenical “dialogue,”
– refuses to wield the condemnation of Modernism as St. Pius X commanded,
– uses saints as mascots for his intent,
then the act is detached from the conditions of Catholic infallibility. It belongs to a nascent parallel structure—the conciliar sect—attempting to usurp the marks of the true Church.
3. Sacrificial and Eucharistic theology obscured.
– Carlo’s Eucharistic devotion is described as sentimental contemplation of the Host, culminating in a private mystical wound.
– Nowhere is the Eucharist explicitly proclaimed as:
– propitiatory Sacrifice for sins (Trent, Session XXII),
– the heart of the Church’s public cult in which Christ, Priest and Victim, exercises His royal dominion.
– This silence is significant, coming from the lips of the architect of the liturgical “reform” that would shortly devastate the Most Holy Sacrifice and replace it, in conciliar structures, with a human-centered assembly. The homily’s Eucharistic vocabulary is safely uncontroversial, paving the way for later sacramental profanation by first emptying language of precision.
4. Eschatological and soteriological dilution.
– Authentic Catholic preaching on saints:
– underscores hell, judgment, necessity of grace, narrow way, danger of error.
– Here:
– eternal happiness is vaguely invoked;
– there is no warning of damnation for those who reject the Church or embrace condemned errors;
– no denunciation of forces attacking Church and society (Freemasonry, secularism, socialism), which Pius IX and Leo XIII repeatedly identified by name.
– Instead, the discourse breathes a universalist optimism: if only we have fraternal love and social order, prosperity will lead us toward eternal happiness. This skates perilously close to the modernist reduction of supernatural destiny to natural progress—a thesis explicitly condemned in *Lamentabili* (e.g., props. 58–65).
Symptom of the Conciliar Disease: From Catholic Church to Neo-Church
This homily is an early textual fossil of the metamorphosis from the Catholic Church’s visible structures into the conciliar sect, the “Church of the New Advent,” occupying the Vatican.
1. Continuity of style, rupture of substance.
– The text conserves:
– Latin language,
– quotations from Scripture and Francis de Sales,
– mention of penance and religious life.
– Yet it strategically omits:
– any clash with modern ideologies,
– any explicit reaffirmation of condemned doctrines against liberalism and religious pluralism.
– This is the classic modernist method already unmasked by St. Pius X in *Pascendi*: maintain forms, empty them of prior content, fill with new meaning. *Lamentabili* condemns the idea that dogmas are mutable expressions of religious experience; yet here, the language is prepared to allow precisely that evolution in practice.
2. “One fold, one shepherd” hijacked.
– The invocation *“unum sit ovile unusque pastor”* is orthodox when understood, as always taught, to signify:
– the unique Catholic Church as the only true fold;
– the Roman Pontiff, successor of Peter, as vicarious visible shepherd under Christ.
– However, in the mouth of the one who will launch ecumenism, it is a cipher:
– not a call to convert schismatics and heretics into the one true Church,
– but a prelude to “unity” through dialogue, mutual recognition, and doctrinal compromise.
– Pius IX already condemned the notion that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion” (Syllabus, 18). Any use of “one fold” that does not explicitly exclude such relativism, in this historical moment, is culpably ambiguous.
3. Naturalistic peace and prosperity.
– The prayer that nations, with pacified minds and orderly arrangements, might progress to prosperity as precursor of eternal happiness masks the fundamental Catholic order:
– First: submission of nations to Christ the King and His law.
– Then: authentic peace as fruit of justice grounded in truth.
– Pius XI taught that attempts to build peace while excluding Christ’s rights are doomed. The homily reverses the order: peace, order, prosperity first; Christ’s sovereignty is implicitly assumed, not proclaimed; the result is a concept that easily morphs into religiously neutral humanism.
4. The emerging cult of institutional self-preservation.
– The speaker asks the “saints” to obtain what is necessary “ad suscepta consilia et incepta … ad exitum felicem deducenda.”
– Notice the self-referential logic: sanctity is marshalled not first for the salvation of souls in the integral faith, but for the success of the leadership’s announced projects.
– This anticipates the neo-church’s later practice: pseudo-canonizations that retroactively bless every revolutionary step, from ecumenism to interreligious idolatry, culminating in the abomination of desolation in liturgy and doctrine.
– Canonization becomes propaganda, no longer the Church’s acknowledgment of God’s work in souls who defend and embody immutable truth.
The Silence that Accuses: What Is Not Said Condemns What Is Meant
The gravest indictment against this text lies in its omissions—each one a denial louder than many words.
1. No mention of:
– the absolute necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation;
– the unique truth of the Catholic Church against all other religions;
– the mortal danger of modernist theology and liberal Catholicism;
– the duty of civil rulers to recognize and serve Christ the King;
– the anti-Christian conspiracy of Freemasonry and its role in secular persecution;
– hell and the possibility of eternal damnation even for the respectable and religious;
– the Syllabus, *Pascendi*, *Lamentabili*—all living magisterial norms in 1959.
2. No warning that:
– sentimental “peace” detached from Christ’s law is a deception;
– “unity” without conversion is a betrayal of Christ’s command to teach all nations;
– social works without doctrinal fidelity become instruments of naturalism.
This silence is not accidental. It is the disciplined silence of a project that seeks to move from a confessional, militant Church to a dialogical, horizontal, and syncretic structure, while still draped in the vesture of Catholic forms.
Integral Catholic Response: Rejecting the Neo-Canonization Cult
From the standpoint of unchanging pre-1958 doctrine:
– A manifest modernist usurping the See cannot bind the Church with his “canonizations”; they are acts of a parallel religious authority, devoid of the charism promised to Peter.
– The figures of Carlo da Sezze and Joaquina de Vedruna, considered historically, may have lived lives of genuine virtue within the true Church; their personal sanctity or lack thereof is known perfectly to God.
– However, their elevation in 1959 by a non-Catholic authority and inserted into the post-1958 calendar serves:
– to fabricate a pseudo-tradition backing the conciliar sect;
– to accustom the faithful to accept as “infallible” teachings and acts proceeding from modernist premises.
– Consequently:
– The cult of such “canonizations” within the conciliar structures does not bind Catholics who adhere to the integral faith.
– Their use as symbols of an irenic, non-confessional, socially activist pseudo-holiness must be firmly rejected.
Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, and their predecessors arm us against this deception:
– The Church cannot contradict herself; doctrines condemned in 1864, 1907, 1925 do not become legitimate in 1962 or 2025.
– A hierarchy that embraces such contradictions manifests its separation from the Catholic Church, regardless of buildings, titles, or claim to succession.
– Sanctity divorced from the public rights of Christ the King, from doctrinal militancy, and from the hatred of error is not Catholic sanctity but moralistic theatre.
Conclusion: From Saints of Christ to Icons of the Neo-Church
This homily, cloaked in Latin devoutness, is a theological Trojan horse. It:
– reallocates the meaning of sanctity,
– anesthetizes the faithful against the condemnations of Modernism,
– replaces the social kingship of Christ with an anodyne peace program,
– turns canonization into a rubber stamp for revolutionary “consilia et incepta.”
True Catholics, clinging to the pre-1958 Magisterium, must:
– discern the rhetoric for what it is: an early chapter in the construction of the conciliar sect;
– refuse to grant doctrinal or cultic submission to “canonizations” promulgated by usurpers;
– return to the immutable doctrine: peace only in the reign of Christ the King, unity only in the one true Church, sanctity only in full adherence to the perennial faith and rejection of all modernist novelties.
Anything less is complicity in the ongoing profanation of the name of “saint” and a surrender to the cult of the neo-church, where sentiment replaces truth and human plans supplant the sovereign dominion of Our Lord Jesus Christ over His one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.
Source:
In Sollemni Canonizatione Beati Caroli a Setia, Confessoris, et Beatae Ioachimae De Vedruna Viduae de Mas (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025