In this Latin letter dated March 8, 1961, John XXIII addresses Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon, on the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination. He heaps praise on his loyalty to the Apostolic See, his governance of the patriarchate, his promotion of liturgy, seminaries, and Catholic Action, and recalls with special satisfaction the monument to Christ the King in Lisbon and the national consecration of Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. As a “gift,” he grants the patriarch the faculty to impart, in his name, a plenary indulgence on an appointed day to the faithful present, and concludes with his “apostolic blessing.”
Conciliar Flattery as a Program of Subversion: The Case of Admodum gavisi
Epistolary Incense before the Revolt: Context of an Apparently Harmless Letter
This short letter is not an isolated courtesy note. It is a revealing fragment of the larger project inaugurated by John XXIII, the first in the line of post-1958 usurpers, whose election marked the opening of the *conciliar sect* and the systematic undermining of the integral Catholic order.
Several pre-1958 doctrinal landmarks frame the only legitimate reading of such a document:
– Pius XI in Quas primas teaches that peace and order are possible only when individuals and states openly recognize and submit to the social Kingship of Christ: the Church must proclaim that Christ’s reign is public, juridical, and binding on nations.
– Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum condemns religious indifferentism, state supremacy over the Church, liberalism, and the Masonic war against the Church.
– St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi unmasks Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies,” explicitly condemning the evolution of dogma, historicism, democratization of doctrine, and subordination of revealed truth to modern thought.
Against this immutable doctrinal backdrop, the sugary eulogy of Admodum gavisi must be read as a tactical text: a pious-smelling instrument of the same Modernist dialectic that would shortly erupt at “Vatican II.” What is presented as paternal benevolence is in fact part of the apparatus that neutralized hierarchs, accommodated liberal regimes, and emptied public devotions of their militant, doctrinal content.
Factual Level: Selective Praise and Strategic Omissions
The letter appears factual and harmless: congratulations, acknowledgment of pastoral labors, mention of visible works, and the grant of an indulgence. The poison lies not in explicit heresy but in calculated omissions and the instrumentalization of sacred themes.
Key factual points and what they reveal:
1. Celebration of uncritical loyalty to John XXIII and the “Apostolic See”
John XXIII praises Cerejeira as one “most devoted” to himself and to the Roman See. Yet by 1961:
– John XXIII had already announced and set in motion the so-called “ecumenical council” that would enthrone religious liberty, collegiality, and false ecumenism against Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
– His program and entourage were publicly known for aggiornamento, dialogue with the modern world, and openness to condemned ideas.
Thus, the praised “attachment” is not fidelity to the perennial Magisterium as summarized, for example, in the Syllabus or Quas primas, but adhesion to a man whose agenda stood in objective rupture with it.
Factually, the letter functions as a reward-sign: obedience to the coming revolution is crowned with papal-sounding benedictions and spiritual privileges.
2. Applause for Catholic Action as an instrument of controlled laicization
The letter commends Cerejeira’s role in founding and promoting Catholic Action in Portugal.
Before 1958, Catholic Action could be understood orthodoxly as lay collaboration under hierarchy in defending the reign of Christ. But in practice, especially in the mid-20th century:
– It became a major vehicle for horizontal activism, politicization, and infiltration of liberal and proto-modernist currents.
– Under the conciliar sect, it morphed into antechamber structures dissolving the distinction between clergy and laity, encouraging democratization of the Church and sociological “engagement” detached from dogma and sacramental life.
John XXIII’s warm emphasis on this point reveals the direction: reward the networks that will carry the conciliar slogans into parishes and public life, not as a bulwark against liberalism but as its ecclesiastical disguise.
3. Emphasizing external works while remaining silent on integral doctrine
The letter notes:
– Care for the “splendour” of worship.
– Building and enlarging seminaries.
– The monument to Christ the King.
– The national consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
– Granting of a plenary indulgence.
All are, taken in themselves, legitimate or at least potentially good. Yet:
– No reference is made to defending the faith against Modernism, liberalism, Communism’s errors against the Kingship of Christ, or the Masonic subversion explicitly denounced by Pius IX.
– No mention of guarding the sacraments, catechism, or doctrine from the creeping novelties that would shortly devour them.
– The consecration of the nation and the monument are praised only as ceremonial achievements, not as a call to enforce the rights of Christ the King in law and public institutions, as Pius XI demanded.
The pattern is factual: external devotions are embraced precisely while their doctrinal teeth are extracted.
4. Indulgence as a currency of compliance
John XXIII grants the patriarch faculty to impart a plenary indulgence “in Our name and with Our authority.”
Given that his claim to papal authority is void, the indulgence is juridically meaningless; but within the conciliar system its function is obvious: it sacralizes hierarchical alignment with the new regime, making sentimental piety the seal of submission to its program.
Linguistic Level: Soft Tyranny in Paternal Rhetoric
The tone of the letter is saturated with deferential, sentimental language: “Dilecte Fili Noster,” “with great joy,” “love-filled homage,” “most generous,” “sweet and sincere consolation.” This rhetoric is not accidental. It is a signature of Modernist method:
– Replace crisp doctrinal clarity with affective, atmospheric phrasing.
– Cover strategic realignments with a fog of benevolence.
– Avoid polemical precision against error; use expansive, diplomatic language that can accommodate contradictory tendencies.
Some symptoms in the vocabulary:
1. Total absence of militant theological terms
Notice what is not there:
– No direct invocation of *extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*.
– No reminder of the duty of states to recognize Christ’s Kingship in law (explicitly required in Quas primas).
– No mention of hell, judgment, sin, heresy, or Modernism.
– No call to resist secularism, Freemasonry, or socialist errors, all explicitly condemned by Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X.
Silence about supernatural judgment and doctrinal warfare is the gravest linguistic marker of apostasy. The letter speaks of pastoral diligence, seminary expansion, and national piety without placing them under the exigencies of salvation, grace, and orthodoxy.
2. Diplomatic, bureaucratic holiness
John XXIII praises Cerejeira in the idiom of a secular honor system:
– “good reputation of a vigilant shepherd”
– “prudence of counsels”
– “zeal”
– “diligent care”
He enumerates achievements (monument, consecration, Catholic Action) like decorations in a civil career evaluation. The supernatural order is invoked, but as a warm glow around administration – not as a burning, absolute measure in view of eternity.
This is the language of a *paramasonic structure* that must appear devout while carefully avoiding any word that would indict liberal regimes or its own impending revolution.
3. Appropriation of the language of Christ’s Kingship to disguise its denial
The mention of the monument to Christ the King and the consecration to the Immaculate Heart is framed as a pleasing ornament:
– No insistence, as in Pius XI, that rulers and laws must obey Christ or face divine judgment.
– No condemnation of separation of Church and State, expressly rejected by Pius IX.
– No demand for Catholic confessional identity of Portugal in its constitution and governance.
Thus, a devout vocabulary is used to empty the very doctrines it names. This is linguistic Modernism: keep the words, invert or evacuate their content.
Theological Level: The Letter as an Anti-Quas primas Pastoral
Measured by the sole legitimate standard—integral Catholic doctrine before 1958—the letter stands convicted not by what it affirms, but by what it systematically refuses to affirm.
1. Public Reign of Christ the King Reduced to Symbolic Gestures
Pius XI in Quas primas teaches, in substance:
– True peace and order require that both individuals and states recognize and obey Christ’s Kingship.
– The Church must demand that rulers shape laws, education, and public life according to the law of Christ.
– Secularism and laicism are denounced as a plague that must be opposed, not accommodated.
In contrast, this letter:
– Praises a monument to Christ the King and a national consecration without insisting on concrete juridical consequences.
– Treats these acts as occasions of joy and “devotion,” not as solemn obligations binding the nation’s laws to Christ.
This is not a mere omission; it is the theological mutation characteristic of the conciliar sect: the Kingship of Christ is transformed from a binding social doctrine into a sentimental emblem compatible with liberal and pluralist regimes.
2. No Front against Modernism and Liberalism
By 1961, the doctrinal and disciplinary condemnations of Modernism were fully established:
– Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi condemned precisely the reduction of dogma to religious feeling, historicist reinterpretation, and adaptation to modern culture.
– Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XII repeatedly exposed Freemasonry and liberalism as mortal enemies of Christ’s reign and the Church.
Yet John XXIII’s letter:
– Does not exhort the patriarch to defend seminarians from Modernist teaching.
– Does not warn against laicist infiltration of Catholic Action.
– Does not recall the binding character of anti-liberal papal teaching.
– Does not even allude to the spiritual battle against errors already raging throughout Europe.
Qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen to consent). The silence, from one claiming supreme pastoral responsibility, concerning the very errors his predecessors branded as deadly, is itself a doctrinal betrayal.
3. Spiritual Goods Instrumentalized apart from True Authority
The letter grants the patriarch faculty to bestow a plenary indulgence “in Our name.”
Catholic doctrine (before 1958) on indulgences:
– They presuppose true jurisdiction, which flows from Christ through the one true Pontiff and the visible hierarchy.
– They are ordered to the remission of temporal punishment for those in a state of grace, in the context of true sacraments and orthodox faith.
In the context of John XXIII’s manifest program of reversal:
– The claimed jurisdiction is compromised by adherence to principles opposed to prior solemn magisterial teaching.
– The indulgence becomes a pseudo-spiritual endorsement of a Modernist power structure, detached from the integral faith it is bound to serve.
What is offered as a spiritual gift is, in reality, a counterfeit currency of the conciliar apparatus.
4. Elevation of “Catholic Action” as Proto-Democratization of the Church
The commendation of Catholic Action in this letter is theologically revealing:
– Authentic Catholic lay collaboration is subordinate, doctrinally formed, and oriented to defending the objective reign of Christ and His Church.
– Under the conciliar sect, however, such organizations became laboratories for horizontal governance, opinion polling, and replacement of doctrinal militancy with “dialogue” and activism.
By singling out Catholic Action as a crowning achievement, John XXIII implicitly blesses the shift from vertical, dogmatic authority to participatory, sociological structures, preparing the atmosphere of collegiality and synodal jargon that would later engulf the neo-church.
Symptomatic Level: How Admodum gavisi Manifests the Conciliar Revolution
Seen in the continuum of events, this letter is a symptom of four convergent tendencies of post-1958 post-conciliarism:
1. Devotional Shells without Dogmatic Core
– Consecrations, statues, monuments, indulgences, beautiful ceremonies: all are maintained.
– But their necessary connection to:
– the unique truth of the Catholic faith,
– the condemnation of heresy,
– the exclusive salvific mission of the Church,
– and the obligation of states to submit to Christ,
is carefully not stated.
This directly contradicts Pius XI’s demand that the feast and doctrine of Christ the King explicitly condemn secular apostasy and shape public law. The new regime cherishes the form while denying the force.
2. Praise of Hierarchs as Long as They Serve the New Program
The letter exemplifies a pattern deployed widely:
– Hierarchs are caressed, not commanded.
– They are congratulated for outward success and docility, not for defending unpopular dogmatic truths.
– No mention is made of resisting liberal governments or Masonic influences; instead, sentimental bonds to the “pope” are exalted.
This is how the *structures occupying the Vatican* ensured that local prelates would not obstruct the council and reforms: with incense, not thunder.
3. Suppression of the Church Militant in Favour of a Church of Compliments
Pre-1958 documents frequently speak in terms of combat:
– Church Militant versus “synagogue of Satan.”
– Condemnations of errors by name.
– Warning of eternal loss for adherents of condemned systems.
Admodum gavisi replaces this with the vocabulary of polite celebration and administrative success. Even when Christ the King is evoked, it is done in a way that avoids any clash with liberal-democratic mythology and with the secular state.
This is the embryo of the “cult of man” later confessed by the conciliar sect: religious language harnessed to humanistic reconciliation with the world.
4. Preparation for Systemic Apostasy
The timing is crucial: 1961, on the threshold of the council that would be called the “New Pentecost” of the neo-church.
This letter:
– Confirms Cerejeira in unconditional attachment to John XXIII.
– Rewards his alignment by spiritual favors.
– Frames his pastoral style in the categories of external “renewal” favored by the coming revolution.
When the council unleashed false ecumenism, religious liberty, and the dismantling of the confessional state, such pre-consecrated loyalty would guarantee that local hierarchs would not resist in the name of Pius IX or Pius XI.
Exposure of Spiritual Bankruptcy: The Theology of Silence and Sentiment
The gravest indictment of this letter, judged by unchanging Catholic doctrine, is its theological emptiness where it should be most precise and virile.
– It mentions Christ the King, but does not command nations to obey Him.
– It mentions consecration to the Immaculate Heart, but does not call for public penance, reform of laws, or repudiation of errors.
– It praises seminaries, but is silent on guarding them from Modernism, the very disease solemnly condemned only a few decades earlier.
– It grants indulgences, but bypasses any robust exhortation to *state of grace*, true contrition, or avoidance of occasions of sin.
– It speaks of pastoral diligence, but omits the shepherd’s essential duty to protect against wolves—heretics, liberals, and Masonic agents who, as Pius IX explicitly taught, are waging war on the Church.
This is not accidental restraint; it is a programmatic transvaluation.
Where Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI spoke as fathers and judges, condemning error and demanding the reign of Christ, John XXIII speaks as a benevolent manager of a religious association, content with harmony, prestige, and monuments. The supernatural order is acknowledged, but domesticated and emptied of its conflict with the spirit of the world.
Such a stance, once generalized, leads inevitably to:
– acceptance of religious liberty (condemned in the Syllabus);
– embrace of false ecumenism and dialogue with heresy and infidelity;
– dissolution of Catholic identity into sentimental humanism;
– practical denial of the necessity of the true Church and of the social Kingship of Christ.
Admodum gavisi is thus a small but crystalline manifestation of the same apostate logic that has produced in our days the *neo-church*, the “Church of the New Advent,” a *paramasonic structure* that preserves ceremonies and words while betraying their meaning.
Conclusion: A Courteous Seal on the Road to Ruin
Under the light of pre-1958 Catholic doctrine, this letter must be recognized for what it truly is:
– not a radiant act of pastoral charity,
– but a polished fragment of the Modernist reconfiguration of ecclesiastical mentality.
Its theological and spiritual bankruptcy is revealed by:
– its refusal to speak the hard words of faith against the reigning errors of the age;
– its reduction of Christ’s Kingship to decorative piety;
– its exploitation of genuine devotions and indulgences as ornaments of an authority already being used against the prior Magisterium;
– its function as reinforcement of unquestioning loyalty to a project that would demolish catechesis, liturgy, and morals on a global scale.
The true Catholic response is not to admire such texts, but to unmask them with the weapons furnished by the authentic Magisterium: to hear again Pius IX’s condemnation of liberalism, Pius X’s denunciation of Modernism, and Pius XI’s command that nations submit publicly to Christ the King. Against the sweet language of accommodation, we must restore the virile clarity of the Church Militant, confessing that Jesus Christus, Rex noster, leges Ecclesiae et gentium regere debet (Jesus Christ our King must rule the laws of the Church and of the nations), and that any structure which refuses this in practice while flattering it in words unmasks itself as an instrument of the apostasy foretold.
Source:
Admodum gavisi – Ad Emmanuelem Tit. Ss. Marcellini et Petri S. R. E. Presb. Cardinalem Gongalves Cerejeira, Patriarcham Lisbonensem, quinquagesimum a suscepto sacerdotio annum implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025