The letter issued on 16 December 1959 by antipope John XXIII to Maurilio Fossati, presented as a paternal exhortation on the centenary of the death of St. Joseph Cafasso, briefly praises the saint’s priestly virtues, his role in forming clergy, his charity toward prisoners and those condemned to death, and encourages the flourishing of diocesan priestly associations under episcopal guidance, proposing Cafasso as a model for priests in “calamitous times” so that “the law and love of Christ” may sustain individuals and society. Behind a veneer of Catholic piety, this text functions as a subtle inaugural manifesto of the conciliar revolution: appropriating a genuine pre-conciliar saint to legitimize a nascent paramasonic neo-church whose principles contradict the very priestly spirit Cafasso embodied.

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Appropriating a True Saint to Baptize the Conciliar Usurpation

The source is an official document of the conciliar sect, signed by John XXIII, the first usurper in the line condemned by unimpeachable pre-1958 doctrine as incompatible with the Catholic understanding of dogma, liturgy, and ecclesial authority.

Already exordium reveals the maneuver: the text cloaks itself in the language of authentic pre-conciliar devotion to sanctity and priestly holiness, in order to stage a transfer of symbolic capital from an unquestionably Catholic confessor (Joseph Cafasso, d. 1860) to an ecclesial project emerging in 1959 that would, within a few years, systematically dismantle the doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary order that produced Cafasso.

Key elements:

– Praise for Cafasso’s zeal, asceticism, orthodoxy, formation of clergy, and ministry to condemned prisoners.
– Promotion of priestly associations “under the guidance and patronage of the Bishops” as instruments for clergy holiness and pastoral efficiency.
– Invocation of “calamitous times” and the hope that renewed devotion to Cafasso will hasten an age in which “Christ’s law and love” will permeate individuals and social life.

These elements, taken superficially, appear sound. Yet when read in the context of 1959—on the eve of the “aggiornamento,” the calling of the Second Vatican Council, and the ensuing destruction of the Most Holy Sacrifice and Catholic state—they become theologically and strategically suspect. The text is an example of what St. Pius X unmasked as Modernist tactics: retaining words, while overturning their content; invoking saints of Tradition as a façade for an inversion of their spirit.

From Catholic Confessor to Mascot of the Neo-Church

At the factual level, the letter offers a selective, sanitized profile of St. Joseph Cafasso.

It notes, in paraphrase:

“He shone by religion, tireless work, doctrine; a pure gem of the Turin clergy; his teaching and deeds are an incentive to follow better things with undaunted heart and sincere conscience.”

It highlights:

– His diligence in priestly formation.
– His wise counsel.
– His charity towards the imprisoned and those condemned to death.
– His role in promoting the Ecclesiastical College that bore fruit in Turin and Piedmont.

All this is true as far as it goes. But the letter carefully omits what made Cafasso an authentic fruit of the integral Roman Church:

– His formation and ministry entirely rooted in the traditional Roman Rite, with its sacrificial, propitiatory theology that the neo-church would soon profane and replace.
– His fidelity to the precise, dogmatic moral doctrine so hated by Modernism: clear teaching on sin, hell, judgment, restitution, and the necessity of confession.
– His belonging to that nineteenth-century Catholic restoration condemned by liberalism and masonry, not a forerunner of democratic humanitarianism.

The omission is not accidental. A genuine Catholic portrait of Cafasso would condemn in advance the entire conciliar programme. Thus the text abstracts his virtues from their doctrinal and liturgical matrix and repackages him as a harmless exemplar of “pastoral charity,” usable for a “Church of accompaniment” that abandons dogmatic clarity and the rights of Christ the King.

This calculated silence is itself a mark of rupture. As Pius IX taught in the Syllabus, the Church has both the right and duty to assert her doctrinal and social Kingship against Liberalism (Syllabus, 15–18, 55, 77–80). Cafasso lived and acted within that framework. The 1959 letter erases it in favour of generic language about “Christ’s law and love” compatible with the later cult of human rights and religious pluralism.

Linguistic Cloaking: Piety as a Vehicle of Subversion

The rhetorical texture is that of traditional ecclesiastical Latin, but the semantics are displaced. Several features deserve notice:

1. Emphasis on “associations,” “initiatives,” “pastoral” structures:
– The text warmly commends ecclesiastical associations and organized priestly groups under episcopal direction, seeing in them “auxilia magni pretii” (helps of great price).
– This organizing impulse anticipates the bureaucratic, synodal, committee-driven neo-church, where pastoral structures become instruments for disseminating aggiornamento, not for guarding Tradition.

2. Vague invocation of “calamitous times”:
– It refers to “calamitous times” without naming the principal calamity denounced by St. Pius X: Modernismus, “omnium haeresum collectum” (Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies; cf. Pascendi and Lamentabili sane exitu).
– The silence on Modernism is damning. In the very years when the errors condemned in 1907 were being enthroned in seminaries and faculties, this letter pretends that the remedy lies simply in devotions and associations, not in doctrinal militancy.

3. Naturalistic-inflected social language:
– It suggests that honouring Cafasso will help hasten an age where “Christ’s law and love” preserve and purify social life like a “salutary medicine.”
– Detached from explicit affirmation of the necessity of the Church’s public authority, the Social Kingship of Christ (as articulated by Pius XI in Quas primas), and the condemnation of religious indifferentism (Pius IX, Syllabus 15–18, 77–80), such phrases can be—and later were—recycled to support laicist “values” discourse rather than the confession of the only true Faith.

This is precisely the Modernist method condemned by St. Pius X: using “edifying” language while emptying it of dogmatic density, preparing the faithful to accept a mutation of doctrine under cover of continuity.

Theological Evasion: Holiness Without Dogma, Priesthood Without Sacrifice

At the theological level, the gravest problem is what the letter refuses to say.

An authentic pre-1958 ecclesiastical exhortation on a priest-saint would necessarily emphasize:

– The absolute centrality of the *Most Holy Sacrifice* as propitiatory, God-centered worship, the heart of priestly identity.
– The necessity of Catholic dogma as defined, immutable, irreformable.
– The Four Last Things: judgment, heaven, hell, and the urgency of salvation.
– The unique, exclusive mediation of the Catholic Church for individual and social order.

Instead, we find:

– Generic language of “sanctity” and “virtues.”
– No doctrinal content.
– No explicit confession of the Holy Sacrifice as sacrifice, no polemic against error, no reference to the enemies of the Church so clearly named by Pius IX and St. Pius X (rationalists, liberals, masons, Modernists).

This absence is not neutrality; it is betrayal.

St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu condemned the notion that dogmas are mutable, that the Magisterium cannot fix the sense of Scripture, that faith is reduced to practical values. Yet here, the usurper presents Cafasso’s sanctity as essentially a moral and pastoral inspiration, detached from the dogmatic and liturgical structures that Modernism was already demolishing.

This is the theology of the conciliar sect in embryo:

– Holiness as sociological and psychological quality.
– Priesthood as pastoral function within “associations.”
– The Church as a spiritual NGO promoting “Christ’s love” without dogmatic intolerance.

Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief). To praise a priest of the true Roman Rite without binding his sanctity to that Rite and that doctrine is to prepare the faithful to accept a new rite and new doctrine while still venerating old saints. This is a deceit of the highest order.

Systemic Symptom: Saint-Washing the Conciliar Revolution

The letter must be read as part of a broader strategy:

– Take pre-conciliar saints formed entirely by the Tridentine Mass, anti-liberal papal teaching, and rigorous moral theology.
– Isolate certain “pastoral” or “social” traits (charity to prisoners, gentleness, accompaniment).
– Present these traits in abstraction from their doctrinal ground.
– Use them to suggest that the coming aggiornamento is a natural flowering of the same spirit.

Thus Joseph Cafasso is subtly turned into a proto-figure of the conciliar “pastoral turn,” just as later the conciliar sect would manipulate figures like “Francis” of Assisi or Thérèse of Lisieux to promote indifferentist pacifism and sentimentalism against the militant confession of the Faith.

But Cafasso—if allowed to speak in the doctrinal voice of his age—would stand with Pius IX and St. Pius X against precisely the liberal, masonic, anthropocentric revolution that John XXIII inaugurated. To employ him as an ornament for that revolution is an act of spiritual usurpation.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The same mechanism is seen in:

– The pseudo-canonizations by antipopes of figures who embodied conciliar apostasy, while enveloping them in a counterfeit of traditional sanctity.
– The instrumentalization of devotions attenuated and purged of their doctrinal sharpness, to support a “Church of the New Advent” that blesses religious liberty, ecumenism, and humanistic globalism condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium.

The letter is an early specimen of this tactic: saint-washing a new religion.

Ecclesiastical Associations as Instruments of Control

The text’s insistence on ecclesiastical associations for priests deserves particular scrutiny.

It says, in substance:

“From these commemorations arises an occasion that priestly associations, under the guidance and auspices of the bishops, may flourish and increase; this will aid priests’ piety and doctrine, and provide the bishops with effective helps.”

At face value, such associations existed nobly in the true Church: societies of priests dedicated to the Sacred Heart, Eucharistic reparation, Marian devotion, missionary work, all solidly grounded in dogma and the true Rite.

However, in the context of 1959 and following:

– Episcopal conferences and bureaucratic structures became vehicles for implementing the conciliar revolution.
– “Priestly associations” often became mechanisms for re-education in Modernist theology, liturgical subversion, and pastoral laxity.
– The reference to “helps for bishops” foreshadows a managerial, technocratic conception of hierarchy aligned with secular organizational models rather than the supernatural paternal authority of true bishops.

The praise of associations, divorced from any doctrinal criterion, becomes an ideological Trojan horse. St. Pius X, in contrast, insisted that any scientific, pastoral, or social initiative is judged by its adherence to the *immutabilis doctrina* (unchangeable doctrine) and condemned “Catholic” democratic tendencies that would relativize dogma under the guise of pastoral effectiveness.

Here, no such principle is stated. The omission again betrays intent.

Silence on Modernism: The Loudest Confession

Most striking is the total absence of the word and concept that dominated the authentic Magisterium in the decades preceding: *Modernism*.

Pius X had:

– Condemned Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies.
– Imposed the anti-Modernist oath.
– Denounced the attempt to “reconcile” the Church with liberalism, religious freedom, historicism, and immanentism.

Pius XI and Pius XII had:

– Reaffirmed the Kingship of Christ against secularism (Quas primas).
– Reiterated the condemnation of indifferentism and false ecumenism.
– Defended the immutable nature of dogma against evolutionary theories.

A genuine successor faithful to them, in 1959, addressing “calamitous times,” praising a nineteenth-century confessor, would necessarily recall:

– The war of secret societies against the Church (as Pius IX so forcefully exposed, including the paramasonic and masonic conspiracies).
– The errors of liberalism and laicism ravaging society.
– The duty of priests to resist these errors, not conform to them.

Instead, the usurper’s letter speaks vaguely of disasters, promises that Cafasso’s memory will help hasten a time when Christ’s law and love protect society, but never identifies the real enemy: the modernist apostasy inside the structures poised to convoke the council that would enthrone those very errors.

Qui tacet consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen to consent). The silence on Modernism, combined with the already-declared orientation of John XXIII towards “opening to the world,” manifests complicity. The letter is an act of rhetorical camouflage.

Christ’s Kingship Reduced to Sentiment

The closing aspiration that Cafasso’s cult will help an age where “Christ’s law and love” preserve individuals and communities must be examined against Pius XI’s explicit teaching in Quas primas:

– Pius XI teaches that true peace and order require the public, juridical recognition of Christ’s Kingship by states.
– He condemns secularism, laicist separation, religious pluralism, and the relegation of Christ to private sentiment as a “plague” that must be resisted.
– He affirms that rulers and nations, not only individuals, are bound to submit to Christ and His Church.

The 1959 letter, while echoing a vestige of this language, empties it of its socio-political incisiveness. “Christ’s law and love” become a vague ethical force, not a claim to public, exclusive sovereignty. This anticipates the conciliar sect’s betrayal:

– Embracing religious liberty as a “right” of error.
– Promoting ecumenism with heretics and infidels.
– Substituting “human rights” and “dignity” for the objective rights of Christ the King and His one true Church.

Thus the letter’s rhetoric neatly dovetails with the coming abolition in practice of the Catholic confessional state and the enthronement of the cult of man. Cafasso, a true son of the Syllabus and the Roman Rite, is pressed into service as a mascot for a vision his own pontiffs condemned.

Authentic Priesthood vs. the Conciliar Counterfeit

The text rightly honours Cafasso as:

“Instructor of priests, forming minds with sound doctrine and shaping morals to more perfect sanctity; a consoler of the most afflicted, especially prisoners and the condemned.”

But in 1959–1969 and beyond, under the influence of the conciliar sect:

– “Sound doctrine” was replaced in seminaries by Modernist exegesis condemned in Lamentabili and by existentialist, personalist moralities that excuse sin.
– The priest ceased to be primarily the man of the altar offering the Unbloody Sacrifice, and became a social worker, animator, presider at a meal-symbol.
– Ministry to prisoners and the marginalized was ripped from its supernatural orientation (conversion, confession, preparation for death) and politicized into activism.

By divorcing Cafasso’s charity from his sacrificial, confessional priesthood, the letter lays the groundwork for this inversion. Charity without doctrine becomes humanism; accompaniment without conversion becomes complicity.

In the integral Catholic faith, sanctity is inseparable from adherence to immutable truth and the objective sacramental order. To praise the former while ushering in the destruction of the latter is an act not of paternal care, but of usurpation.

A Document of the Antichurch: Gentle Tone, Mortal Sting

When read according to the immutable pre-1958 Magisterium:

– The letter is not a harmless devotional piece.
– It is a crafted instrument of the conciliar sect to:

– Legitimize an illegitimate “pontificate” by association with a true saint.
– Soft-launch themes of pastoral associationism, social concern, and generic Christ-language that can be severed from dogma.
– Maintain silence on Modernism, masonry, and the doctrinal crisis, signalling a shift from militancy to appeasement.

Against this, the true Catholic conscience recalls:

– Pius IX’s unwavering condemnation of liberalism, indifferentism, and the masonic plot against the Church (Syllabus, allocutions).
– St. Pius X’s declaration that attempts to reconcile the Church with such errors are treason against Christ.
– Pius XI’s insistence that peace is only possible in the Kingdom of Christ, publicly acknowledged and obeyed.
– The principle that “non possumus” (we cannot) bind the Church to novelties contrary to the perennial faith.

Cafasso belongs wholly to that Catholic order. The 1959 letter belongs to its usurpers. No amount of elegant Latin or sentimental praise can mask the chasm.

To defend the honour of St. Joseph Cafasso is precisely to refuse his exploitation by the conciliar neo-church and to reaffirm what his life objectively confesses: the holiness of the pre-1958 Roman Church, her sacraments, her doctrine, her uncompromising war against the world, the flesh, the devil, and their ideological instruments.

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Source:
– Ad Maurilium Tit. S. Marcelli S. R. E. Presbyterum Cardinalem Fossati, Archiepiscopum Taurinensem, ob sollemnes illic celebritates indictas in honorem S. Iosephi Cafasso, saeculo exeunte a pientissi…   (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025