The brief Latin letter attributed to John XXIII “to” Bishop Beniamino Ubaldi of Gubbio, published in the official structures occupying the Vatican, commemorates the eighth centenary of the death of St. Ubaldus. It congratulates the local clergy and faithful on their devotion, praises the saint as pastor, defender of liberty, and promoter of concord, and encourages the anniversary celebrations as an occasion for religious renewal. Beneath this apparently pious surface stands the quiet program of the conciliar revolution: instrumentalizing an authentic medieval bishop-saint as a decorative prelude to the dismantling of the very Church and social order he embodied.
Liturgical Flattery as Prelude to Revolution
This text must be read in situ: the year is 1960, on the eve of the pseudo-council that John XXIII had already convoked. The letter is a model specimen of how the emerging conciliar sect cloaked its subversion under innocuous commemorations and sentimental devotions.
Several structural features are decisive:
– It is promulgated under the usurper John XXIII, the first link in the line of antipopes beginning 1958.
– It appears in the official bulletin of the same paramasonic apparatus that would soon promulgate the new religion.
– It employs Catholic vocabulary shorn of the doctrinal clarity that defined pre-1958 papal teaching.
The text is short, but its omissions and rhetoric reveal more than its compliments. It is precisely in such “harmless” pieces that the new agenda advances. Corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst).
Selective Memory: A Saint Emptied of Militant Catholicism
On the factual level, the letter recalls true elements of St. Ubaldus’s life:
– his pastoral charity,
– his zeal in eradicating vice,
– his work for concord,
– his role in averting temporal disaster for Gubbio.
But notice what is systematically absent:
– No explicit exaltation of St. Ubaldus as defender of the social reign of Christ the King.
– No mention of his witness as bishop subordinated to, and energized by, the full juridical and dogmatic authority of the pre-modern papacy.
– No application of his example against the errors condemned by the integral Magisterium: liberalism, indifferentism, laicism, revolutionary violence, and secret societies.
Instead, the saint is reduced to a vague symbol of “renewal,” “charity,” and “peace,” neutralized for use in a coming irenic, naturalistic, and democratic pseudo-ecclesiology.
Authentic pre-1958 teaching, such as Pius XI in Quas primas (1925), insists that peace and social order are fruits of the public recognition of Christ’s Kingship and the rights of His Church; where this is denied, society collapses. Here, the usurper commends St. Ubaldus without drawing the inevitable conclusion: that modern states must submit to Christ and His Church, that Gubbio and all nations are bound to acknowledge the unique truth of the Catholic religion and reject sects and Masonic conspiracies. Silence here is not accidental; it is programmatic.
Soft Rhetoric, Hard Omission: The Linguistic Strategy of Neutralization
The linguistic character of this letter is a paradigm of the new style that would culminate in the conciliar documents:
– honeyed encouragement,
– sentimental references to “piety” and “devotion,”
– vagueness wherever conflict with the modern world should be named.
Key phrases:
– “Nos autem, quibus tam gravibus Ecclesiae temporibus nihil antiquius et suavius est, quam ut religionis ardor magis magisque in populo excitetur…”
The English sense: “We, for whom in such grave times nothing is dearer and more pleasant than that religious fervor be more and more aroused in the people…”
What appears Catholic becomes suspect once we ask: what is meant by “grave times” and “religious fervor”? Authentic pontiffs from Pius IX to Pius XII identified the gravest evils as:
– liberalism and the separation of Church and State (condemned in the Syllabus of Errors, esp. 55),
– rationalism, modernism, and dogmatic relativism (cf. Lamentabili sane exitu, Pascendi),
– socialism, communism, and Freemasonry as the organized “synagogue of Satan” waging war on the Church,
– the secularist cult of human rights divorced from divine law.
Here, John XXIII names none of these. “Grave times” are acknowledged, but the true doctrinal causes are left unspoken. Instead, there is generic zeal, generic renewal, generic encouragement. This is classic modernist method: retain religious-sounding words, evacuate precise doctrinal content, and make them serviceable to a new synthesis.
– “christianae vitae renovatio” – “renewal of Christian life”
This expression is pivotal. Pius X used “restoration of all things in Christ” (Instaurare omnia in Christo) in a sharply doctrinal, anti-modernist sense. In the 1960 letter, “renewal” is detached from its doctrinal anchors. We are not told:
– renewal in strict adherence to defined dogma;
– renewal in rejection of condemned errors;
– renewal in submission to the full juridical authority and discipline of the Church;
– renewal through fervent participation in the Most Holy Sacrifice, worthy reception of the sacraments, and life in the state of grace.
By refusing to specify, the text renders “renewal” available to the impending conciliar inversion: “renewal” as doctrinal dilution, liturgical vandalism, democratization, ecumenism, and accommodation to the world—precisely what Pius IX and Pius X had anathematized.
Theological Emptiness: Pious Words Without Catholic Content
Measured against the pre-1958 Magisterium, the theological content of this letter is strikingly anemic.
Consider what a true Catholic letter for such a centenary, written in continuity with Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, should have contained:
– Clear affirmation that St. Ubaldus’s sanctity flowed from his fidelity to the one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.
– An exhortation to imitate his obedience to the divine and ecclesiastical law, not the spirit of the age.
– An explicit condemnation of the modern errors ravaging Italy and Europe: secularism, communism, Freemasonry, liberal democracy hostile to Christ, divorce, impiety, and moral license.
– A strong reminder that civil authorities must honour Christ publicly and protect the Church, in line with Quas primas and the Syllabus, not reduce religion to private sentiment.
– An insistence on the necessity of the state of grace, frequent confession, and worthy Holy Communion, and on the terror of final judgment and hell for apostates and indifferentists.
Instead, we find:
– No mention of the uniqueness of the Catholic Church.
– No mention of heresy or modernism.
– No mention of the sacraments as necessary means of grace.
– No mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice as the heart of Christian life.
– No mention of death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
– No call to resist the anti-Christian legislation and Masonic plots so lucidly exposed by pre-1958 pontiffs.
This silence concerning supernatural essentials, combined with warm praise of “devotion,” is not a minor editorial weakness; it is the gravest indictment. Qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen to consent). To speak of “grave times” while refusing to name the doctrinal enemy is to disarm the faithful.
Lamentabili and Pascendi had condemned as modernist those who:
– deny the Church’s right and duty to judge doctrine and condemn error,
– reduce dogmas to historical or practical symbols,
– subject faith to historical relativism and “evolution.”
The methodology of this 1960 letter—careful avoidance of conflict with modern errors, sentimental piety, undefined “renewal”—is the soft face of the same rebellion those documents foresaw and anathematized.
From Integral Sanctity to Horizontal Humanism
The letter highlights St. Ubaldus as:
– “incomparable pastor and father,”
– “most zealous reconciler of peace and concord,”
– defender of “liberty”.
But these terms, left unqualified, are ripe for modernist distortion.
In pre-conciliar doctrine:
– “Peace” is the tranquillity of order under the rule of Christ and obedience to His law.
– “Concord” means unity of minds in the truth of the Catholic faith.
– “Liberty” means freedom from sin and from the tyranny of error, not freedom to establish false religions or overthrow Christian society.
Pius IX condemned the notion that the Church should reconcile herself with liberalism and modern civilization understood as emancipation from her authority (Syllabus, prop. 80). Pius XI denounced laicist “peace” without Christ as illusory; true peace is only in the kingdom of Christ.
The 1960 text never specifies whether Ubaldus’s “peace,” “concord,” and “liberty” are to be understood in this Catholic sense. The omission is the opening through which the conciliar sect would soon reinterpret saints as proto-humanitarians, patrons of “dialogue,” “religious liberty,” and “fraternity” severed from objective dogma. The saint becomes a mascot for a horizontal agenda.
This is how theological bankruptcy manifests: the very vocabulary of holiness is hollowed out and made to serve the cult of man.
Instrumentalizing True Saints for a Counterfeit Church
On the symptomatic level, this letter shows the mechanism by which the conciliar sect parasitically feeds on the prestige of the true Church it is destroying.
Key steps visible here:
1. Invoke an undoubtedly holy, pre-modern bishop like St. Ubaldus.
2. Praise his virtues in very general terms, avoiding dogmatic specifics.
3. Connect his cult with the idea of “renewal” in “grave times.”
4. Leave “renewal” undefined so that, once the pseudo-council advances its program, the faithful will instinctively associate the new religion with their loved saints.
Thus, authentic saints are made the unwitting “patrons” of a process which, in fact, annihilates:
– the pre-conciliar Mass,
– the traditional sacramental rites,
– the confessional Catholic State,
– the integrity of doctrine on the Church, other religions, marriage, and morals.
The conciliar sect thereby seeks a false legitimacy: it wraps itself in the banners of saints formed in the very theology it repudiates. It is a tactic seen also in the systematic abuse of earlier pontifical texts by later usurpers, citing fragments while reversing their meaning.
This is radically opposed to the integral Catholic principle that lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief). When the “law of prayer” is re-written (as will soon happen with the new rites) and the “law of belief” relativized, invoking St. Ubaldus or any saint becomes a lie: their true faith and worship are no longer present in the new system.
Silence on Modernism: The Signature of Apostasy
One particular omission is especially revealing: in 1960, the condemned heresy of Modernism is everywhere advancing. Since Pascendi, the duty of every true Roman Pontiff is:
– to unmask Modernists,
– to denounce their infiltration of seminaries, universities, chanceries,
– to insist on the Oath against Modernism,
– to reaffirm, vigorously and concretely, the condemnations of Lamentabili.
Yet in this letter:
– Modernism is not named.
– Its methods are discreetly imitated.
The text speaks of “grave times” without warning that the principal danger is no longer persecution from outside alone, but betrayal from within: those who, in Pius X’s words, “put into operation their designs for the ruination of the Church, not from without, but from within.”
The refusal to sound this alarm is either culpable blindness or complicity. In both cases, it is incompatible with the office it claims. A true successor of Pius X, addressing an Italian diocese in 1960, would have thundered against the enemies of the faith, named them, and commanded vigilance. Here, there is only pastoral decor and liturgical politeness.
This is the theological and spiritual bankruptcy: the office that should be the guardian of dogma becomes the dispenser of harmless encouragements while wolves tear the flock.
The False Consolation of “Apostolic Blessing”
The letter ends with the customary bestowal of “Apostolic Blessing.”
From the perspective of integral Catholic doctrine:
– A valid blessing presupposes a holder of the office instituted by Christ.
– Manifest adherence to condemned errors, or the promotion of structures leading to apostasy, raises precisely the question treated by St. Robert Bellarmine and others: a manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church, because he cannot be a member.
While this brief letter is not itself a catalogue of explicit dogmatic propositions, its context, rhetoric, and omissions fit the consistent pattern of the conciliar usurpers: softening and contradicting prior teaching without formal recantation. This is the “smoke” that precedes the blaze of open doctrinal devastation.
Therefore, the “Apostolic Blessing” here functions as an attempt to place the seal of pseudo-pontifical approval on a pious centenary, using true devotion as a carrier for obedience to a rising counter-church. It is a counterfeit currency drawn on a bank already looted.
What an Authentic Catholic Exhortation Would Demand
To expose the contrast, consider how the same occasion should have been addressed in continuity with the pre-1958 Magisterium:
– Call the faithful of Gubbio to imitate St. Ubaldus by:
– professing the Catholic faith whole and entire, rejecting every novelty and modernist reinterpretation;
– defending the rights of the Church against secular states and anti-Christian laws;
– opposing socialism, communism, liberal “toleration” of error, and secret societies condemned repeatedly by the true popes;
– preserving the Most Holy Sacrifice in its traditional Roman rite, with deep reverence and horror of profanation;
– living in the state of grace through frequent confession, prayer, penance, and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (as taught securely by pre-1958 sources, not by dubious 20th-century “apparitions”).
– Warn clergy:
– not to adulterate doctrine in the name of so-called pastoral adaptation;
– not to dilute preaching into moralism or humanitarianism;
– not to turn St. Ubaldus into a banner for horizontal reform, but to imitate his courage in confronting sin, error, and civil injustice.
– Remind all:
– of death and judgment;
– of the narrow road;
– that true peace and concord without the Kingship of Christ are illusions.
None of this is found in John XXIII’s letter. The contrast is total.
Conclusion: Harmless Phrases Masking a Program of Ruin
This 1960 document is short; its bankruptcy consists precisely in that brevity’s content and silences.
– It uses Catholic forms to introduce a contentless, “safe” piety.
– It strips a holy bishop of his doctrinal edge and social implications.
– It praises “renewal” without defining it according to the anti-modernist Magisterium, thereby preparing minds to welcome the conciliar deformation.
– It omits all reference to the pressing doctrinal and moral battles explicitly described by Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII.
– It functions as a liturgical and devotional tranquilizer while the revolution gathers force.
In this way, the letter stands as a minor but telling monument of the conciliar mentality: benevolent tones, selective tradition, doctrinal silence, and pastoral rhetoric detached from the dogmatic granite of the true Church. Such texts do not feed the flock; they numb it.
A faithful Catholic, honouring St. Ubaldus today, must therefore:
– reject the counterfeit “renewal” inaugurated under John XXIII and pursued by his successors in the conciliar sect;
– cling to the unchanging doctrine and rites of the Church as taught and guarded before 1958;
– expose the sentimental and ambiguous language of such documents as a deliberate instrument of disorientation;
– and implore the intercession of true saints not for accommodation to this world, but for the restoration of the full, public, and uncompromising reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over individuals, families, and nations.
Source:
Alacre pietatis – Ad Beniaminum Ubaldi, episcopum eugubinum, octavo expleto saeculo a Sancti Ubaldi, illius civitatis caelestis patroni, pio obitu (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025