This Latin letter of John XXIII, addressed to Gregory Peter Agagianian for the 40th anniversary of Pius XI’s motu proprio Romanorum Pontificum, praises the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith, recalls Roncalli’s own involvement in its Italian branch, extols centralized collection and distribution of mission funds under the “Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith,” and urges bishops and faithful worldwide to support the “Pontifical Mission Societies” through prayer, organization, and financial contributions, especially in view of the upcoming Vatican II. It wraps missionary language around an essentially bureaucratic, centralizing program ordered to the conciliar revolution rather than to the explicit proclamation of the unique necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation.
John XXIII’s Missionary Program as Engine of the Conciliar Revolution
Instrumentum perfidiae: A Missionary Exhortation Harnessed to a False “Council”
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith rooted in the Magisterium prior to 1958, this letter is not a harmless devotional reminder. It is a calculated piece of pre-conciliar engineering: a pious veil concealing the reorientation of Catholic missionary zeal into the service of the nascent conciliar sect.
Key facts that must be stressed:
– John XXIII (Roncalli) presents himself as faithful continuer of Benedict XV and Pius XI in promoting missions, yet he consciously ties the missionary cause to the then-imminent Vatican II, anticipated as a global event for the “whole world,” without a single explicit warning against the very errors solemnly condemned in the Syllabus of Errors and in Lamentabili sane exitu.
– He repeatedly extols administrative “discipline,” financial centralization, and structures (“Pontifical Mission Societies”) while almost completely silencing:
– the necessity of conversion to the one true Church;
– the danger of false religions;
– the reality of heresy, apostasy, and Modernism as mortal threats.
– He praises indigenous churches’ self-financing and organization in terms easily co-opted by national churches and democratized ecclesiology, foreshadowing the conciliar fragmentation and “inculturation.”
The fundamental thesis must thus be stated with full clarity: this letter is one of the many soft weapons whereby Roncalli rebrands missionary Catholicism into a philanthropic, managerial, and conciliar apparatus—preparing the mutilation of doctrine at Vatican II under the guise of zeal for the “Kingdom of God.”
Factual Level: Pious Narrative in Service of a Programmatic Shift
1. Roncalli’s self-portrait and historical framing
He recalls with satisfaction his role (1921–1925) in the Italian branch of the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, presenting it as “sowing seeds” in the furrows opened by Benedict XV and Pius XI:
“we committed seeds to the furrows which two pontifical acts had drawn.”
This autobiographical element is not innocent: it is meant to legitimize his authority as architect of missionary policy, while he is in fact already the planner of a radical council that will deform the Church’s doctrine on missions (Ad Gentes), religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), and false religions (Nostra Aetate).
Verifiable point:
– The text itself (AAS 54 [1962], 429–434) indeed links the anniversary of Romanorum Pontificum with the approaching “Second Vatican Council,” as a motive for renewed missionary enthusiasm. There is no parallel reiteration of the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla salus in the unambiguous, pre-conciliar sense.
2. Praise of Pauline Jaricot and the centralization of funds
Roncalli recounts the origins of the Work of the Propagation of the Faith in Pauline Jaricot’s initiative, and its evolution into a Pontifical Work, with collections worldwide entrusted to the central authority:
“the pennies gathered in all nations by all the faithful are collected into a single fund destined for the Missions, and this money is committed to Our and the Sacred Congregation’s power and judgment alone.”
On the natural level, nothing in central assistance is wrong. But notice:
– He exalts the mechanism and financial discipline as the “most apt” instrument, while remaining essentially silent about the content of the faith to be propagated.
– He speaks of “universal mission needs,” “development,” “stability,” but avoids any concrete confession that the goal is the incorporation of infidels and heretics exclusively into the Catholic Church, out of which there is no salvation (cf. Council of Florence, Decree Cantate Domino; Council of Trent; pre-1958 catechisms).
This selective emphasis is a factual symptom: logistics are named, dogma is blurred.
3. The Vatican II factor
He explicitly presents the upcoming council as a source of “great and sweet benefits” for the missions:
“this event even now foretells great and joyful benefits for the whole world, also regarding the Missions.”
Precisely: the missionary movement is being hitched in advance to an assembly which, in fact (as the post-1965 reality confirms), will:
– relativize the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church;
– rehabilitate “dialogue” with false religions;
– undermine the imperative of explicit conversion.
From the standpoint of pre-1958 doctrine, to present this future council as unambiguously positive for missions, without even a conditional safeguard of orthodoxy, is already an objective betrayal of pastoral vigilance.
Linguistic Level: Bureaucratic Piety Masking Doctrinal Evasion
The rhetoric of the letter is studiously irenic, administrative, and sentimental, marked by four key traits:
1. Sentimental softening
Frequent use of language about “joy,” “tranquillity of soul,” “pleasant memory,” “sweet fruits,” “generous response” gives a sugary tone. This style contrasts sharply with pre-1958 papal language toward errors and false religions, which is lucid, juridical, and armed with clear condemnations (e.g., Pius IX, Syllabus; Leo XIII, Humanum Genus; Pius X, Pascendi).
2. Managerial and technocratic vocabulary
Roncalli emphasizes “discipline,” “organization,” “central councils,” “study circles,” “structures,” financial “methods,” and coordinated governance. The supernatural content—state of grace, sanctifying grace, objective guilt of infidelity, necessity of baptism, propitiatory character of the Most Holy Sacrifice—is marginalized.
This is the language of a paramasonic structure: the faith is reduced de facto to a global NGO program: fundraising, awareness, and “support for missions” framed more as development assistance than as the militant assertion of Christ’s kingship over nations.
3. Ambiguous universalism
He invokes 1 Tim 2:4:
“God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
But he never finishes the Catholic syllogism:
– God wills all to be saved.
– Christ established one visible Church, indefectible, with Peter’s primacy.
– Therefore all are bound to enter this Church, and states must recognize it publicly (Quas Primas; Syllabus, prop. 15–18 condemned).
Instead, the language remains generically inclusive, perfectly compatible with the future conciliar distortion of “universal salvific will” into a practical indifferentism.
4. Silence as rhetoric
What is not said speaks louder than what is said:
– No warning against Modernism—even though St. Pius X had condemned Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi; confirmed by the 1910 Oath against Modernism).
– No mention of the Syllabus of Errors; no frontal opposition to liberalism, laicism, or the masonic sects, despite their global assault on the Church (explicitly diagnosed by Pius IX as “synagogue of Satan” in the Syllabus commentary and related allocutions).
– No instruction that missions must oppose false cults, denounce idols, and demand submission of peoples and rulers to Christ the King, as Pius XI teaches: peace only in the reign of Christ, and rulers must publicly honor Him (Quas Primas).
This polite omission is the rhetoric of betrayal: *tacere cum debeas loqui est consentire* (to be silent when one must speak is to consent).
Theological Level: Systematic Evasion of Integral Doctrine
Now to confront the content directly with pre-1958 doctrine.
1. The true missionary mandate
The Catholic Church has always taught:
– Christ is King of individuals and societies; rulers must subject laws and institutions to His law (Quas Primas).
– The Catholic Church is the one ark of salvation; outside her there is no salvation rightly understood (*extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*), as defined and applied by the Council of Florence and consistently taught before the conciliar revolution.
– Missions exist to:
– Convert infidels, heretics, and schismatics.
– Establish the Church’s worship and jurisdiction.
– Bring souls into sacramental life, away from false sects.
In this letter:
– John XXIII speaks of “propagation of the faith” and “Kingdom of God” in language that can be interpreted in a purely interior or sociological sense.
– He omits explicit insistence that “Kingdom of God” means the visible Catholic Church with her dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy, as Pius XI made clear: the Church is Christ’s Kingdom on earth, and the liturgy is the rule of faith (Quas Primas).
This omission is not accidental; it is consistent with Roncalli’s project to prepare a council which will re-describe the Church as “People of God,” blur boundaries, and open to ecumenism.
2. The public reign of Christ vs. the conciliar “mission”
Pre-1958 Magisterium:
– Pius IX’s Syllabus condemns the separation of Church and State (prop. 55), religious indifferentism, and the idea that Protestantism is a form of true Christianity (prop. 18).
– Leo XIII insists that states must profess the true religion and that liberty for all cults as equal is pernicious.
– Pius XI in Quas Primas: Christ must reign over constitutions, laws, schools, politics.
Roncalli’s letter:
– Never once exhorts Catholic nations to restore confessional constitutions.
– Never invokes the duty of temporal rulers to support the missions as Catholic, not generic, works.
– Frames missionary action as primarily the responsibility of “all the faithful,” “lay organisations,” “diocesan and parochial groups,” with no demand on states to submit to Christ and His Church.
This is an unmistakable doctrinal “lowering of gaze” from the supernatural and political kingship of Christ to a horizontal philanthropy. The era’s condemned liberal thesis (Syllabus, prop. 77–80) is silently rehabilitated.
3. Missing denunciation of Freemasonry and modern errors
Given the context of the 20th century:
– Popes had already unmasked Freemasonry and similar sects as principal enemies of the Church (Pius IX, Leo XIII).
– St. Pius X explicitly connected Modernist errors with doctrinal subversion and the attempt to re-invent dogma.
Roncalli:
– Commends financial and structural collaboration linking all nations around “Pontifical Works” overseen by the very structures he is preparing to subvert.
– Does not warn missionaries or donors against collaboration with anti-Christian governments, masonic organizations, or secular agencies.
– Leaves a wide doctrinal vacuum in which the “missionary” label can later be filled with conciliar slogans of “dialogue,” “development,” “human promotion,” and “inculturation” divorced from conversion.
By integral Catholic standards, this silence is gravely culpable. *Qui tacet consentire videtur* (he who is silent seems to consent). When the visible occupant of Rome omits the condemned errors precisely where they are relevant, he lends himself as mouthpiece of their advance.
4. The Mystical Body vs. the conciliar NGO
Pius XII, in Mystici Corporis (1943), clearly defined:
– The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, a visible, hierarchical society, outside of which no one is saved who remains separated knowingly and culpably.
– The mission of the Church is supernatural and sacramental.
Roncalli’s letter:
– Relegates sacramental and doctrinal precision to the background.
– Elevates “Pontifical Mission Societies” as the privileged, quasi-exclusive channels of missionary action.
– Idealizes structural centralization while Vatican II is about to:
– change the liturgy into a protestantized rite;
– subject doctrine to “pastoral” relativization;
– introduce religious liberty and ecumenism contrary to previous condemnations.
Thus the same machinery extolled in this letter becomes, in fact, the logistical arm of the great apostasy.
Symptomatic Level: This Letter as Fruit and Catalyst of the Conciliar Apostasy
1. Continuity in words, rupture in reality
Roncalli wraps himself in references to Benedict XV and Pius XI, but:
– omits their hard anti-liberal, anti-modernist accents;
– ignores Pius X’s Pascendi and the anti-Modernist Oath;
– conjoins missionary efforts with a council designed and then executed to neutralize those very condemnations.
This is the classic Modernist tactic exposed by St. Pius X: maintain formulas, alter their content; quote predecessors selectively, omit their anathemas; speak of “development” while in fact subverting.
2. The strategic exaltation of “Pontifical” labels
He repeatedly calls the Works “Pontifical” and stresses their dependence on “Our authority” and the Congregation:
– On the surface: affirmation of papal primacy.
– In fact: concentration of power in hands that are already preparing to deviate.
Once the conciliar revolution is in motion:
– these structures are not neutral;
– they become agencies of the neo-church: promoting inculturation disconnected from dogma, human promotion without conversion, “evangelization” that respects false cults.
3. Preparation for the cult of Humanity
The text’s insistence on:
– universal cooperation,
– awareness of cultures,
– study circles on “origins, institutions, customs and letters of peoples,”
easily slides (as history confirms) into the post-conciliar cult of man: the Church of the New Advent sees herself as servant of world peace, development, and rights, rather than the militant ark of salvation and judge of falsehood.
Pius XI had warned that the plague of laicism arises when states exclude Christ and treat all religions equally, and that only return to Christ’s reign can restore peace (Quas Primas). Roncalli’s letter, however, prepares a missionary ethos that can coexist perfectly with this laicized order, because it never demands its abolition.
4. The betrayal of souls
By hollowing missionary vocabulary of its integral content, this letter:
– deceives the faithful into financing a future apparatus of doctrinal dilution;
– encourages “generosity” without explaining that true charity demands preaching:
– that false religions are gravely offensive to God;
– that receiving sacraments outside the true Church is sacrilegious or null;
– that men and nations must convert, or perish eternally.
Silence on:
– mortal sin,
– judgment,
– hell,
– necessity of repentance and baptism,
is not pastoral delicacy; it is complicity in damnation.
As Pius X reaffirmed when approving Lamentabili and Pascendi: modernist errors are to be condemned with excommunication; and yet Roncalli’s whole pontificate is marked by the opposite: rehabilitation of those very currents, masked by conservative ornament.
Contrast with Pre-1958 Doctrine: Authoritative Witnesses Against Roncalli’s Program
Without forced quotations, a few non-speculative doctrinal points show the rupture:
– Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors:
– Condemns the notion that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (prop. 15).
– Condemns the equality of all religions and separation of Church and State (props. 55, 77–79).
– Identifies masonic and similar sects as root enemies seeking to destroy the Church.
– Pius X, Lamentabili / Pascendi:
– Unmask the tendency to historicize dogma and to reinterpret revelation by “religious experience.”
– Condemn subordination of theology to modern criticism and relativism, the very spirit later embodied in Vatican II’s approach and in post-conciliar “missions.”
– Pius XI, Quas Primas:
– Teaches that “only in the Kingdom of Christ” can true peace be found.
– Requires that rulers legislate and educate in submission to Christ and His Church.
– Pius XII, Mystici Corporis:
– Defines the Catholic Church uniquely as the Mystical Body; no dualistic “invisible church.”
– Insists on visible membership and sacramental incorporation.
Roncalli’s letter:
– can be read without encountering a single explicit affirmation that contradicts these documents in words;
– but precisely by its systemic omissions and its alignment with Vatican II, it functions as an act of practical repudiation of their integral meaning.
This is Modernism’s perfected art: *non negando sed silendo* (not by denying, but by keeping silent), redirecting the Church’s energies into a different religion bearing the same outward name.
Call to Reclaim the True Mission: Outside the Conciliar Machinery
Given this analysis, several conclusions follow with objective necessity:
– The missionary structures exalted by Roncalli, once absorbed into post-conciliarism, became instrumental in spreading:
– the new religion of religious liberty and ecumenism;
– a humanitarian “gospel” emptied of dogma and kingship of Christ.
– This letter is an early manifesto of that shift:
– praising centralization under authorities already infected with Modernist tendencies;
– divorcing missionary fervour from the explicit demand of conversion to the one Catholic Church;
– weaving the anticipated council into the fabric of mission as if it were the natural flowering of tradition.
Therefore, those who desire to remain faithful to the unchanging Magisterium must:
– Refuse to identify the conciliar apparatus and its “Pontifical Mission Societies” with the true missionary activity of the Catholic Church.
– Support only those missions that:
– preach the integral faith without compromise;
– teach the absolute necessity of incorporation into the Catholic Church;
– reject ecumenical syncretism, religious liberty errors, and the cult of man.
– Re-ground all missionary zeal in:
– the public reign of Christ the King over nations (Quas Primas);
– the condemnations articulated in the Syllabus and in Lamentabili;
– the sacrificial, propitiatory character of the Most Holy Sacrifice, not the fund-raising spectacle of a neo-church NGO.
The only authentic Catholic mission is that which, in continuity with the pre-1958 Magisterium, labors for the subjection of every intellect and nation to Our Lord Jesus Christ and His one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation, and against which the conciliar infection, prepared and promoted by men like Roncalli, has directed all its perfidious strategies.
Source:
Amantissimo Patris – Ad Gregorium Petrum tit. S. Bartholomaei in Insula S. R. E. Presb. Cardinalem Agagianian, S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Praefectum, quadragesimo exacto anno a Litteris Apos… (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025