In this brief Latin letter dated 14 January 1959, John XXIII congratulates Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo and the Pontifical Theological Roman Academy for organizing a solemn commemoration of the nineteenth centenary of the Epistle to the Romans. He praises the Epistle as the summit of Pauline doctrine and Christian theology, invokes Chrysostom, recalls Phoebe bringing the letter to Rome, and expresses the wish that this anniversary deepen theological study and Christian virtue among Romans and the faithful; he ends with an “apostolic blessing.” This seemingly pious note is in reality a polished veil for the nascent conciliar revolution, baptizing its future subversion with Pauline vocabulary while betraying the very doctrine of St Paul and the pre-conciliar Magisterium he pretends to honor.
Pauline Language as a Mask for the Conciliar Subversion
The Calculated Use of St Paul to Legitimize a New Religion
From the perspective of the integral Catholic faith, the first and gravest problem appears in the signer: John XXIII, first in the line of usurpers inaugurated in 1958, whose entire tenure prepared the overthrow of the social and doctrinal reign of Christ the King solemnly taught by Pius XI in Quas primas and the systematic demolition of the anti-liberal, anti-modernist bulwark erected by Pius IX and St Pius X.
The letter feigns continuity with the perennial Magisterium by invoking St Paul and St John Chrysostom, while carefully avoiding every concrete application of Pauline doctrine that would unmask the conciliar agenda:
– St Paul thunders against false gospels and demands separation from those who preach another doctrine (Gal 1:8-9; 2 Thess 3:6; Rom 16:17). The occupier of Rome here empties Paul into innocuous academism and sentimental “humility,” perfectly compatible with ecumenism, religious liberty, and the cult of man that his successors in the conciliar sect would enthrone.
– The Epistle to the Romans is the classical locus of the doctrine of original sin, justification, grace, predestination, and the absolute gratuity of salvation in Christ, presupposing the objective necessity of the true Church and the supernatural order. The letter does not mention sin, grace, the Cross, propitiatory sacrifice, the authority of the true Church, nor the condemnation of error. Such silence is the loudest confession.
This is not an accidental omission. It is a programmatic reduction of St Paul to an aesthetic ornament. The usurper uses the Apostle as a symbolic seal to christen the very theological currents that had been condemned as Modernismus, “the synthesis of all heresies” (St Pius X, Pascendi, 1907; confirmed and armed with excommunication in the decree renewing Lamentabili sane exitu provided in the file). The Epistle that fortifies the foundations of dogma is invoked by one whose subsequent acts would dissolve dogma into “pastoral” relativism.
Factual Level: What Is Said — and What Is Treacherously Omitted
The letter can be dissected into several key affirmations:
1. Praise for the academic initiative:
– He commends the Academy for celebrating nineteen centuries since the Epistle to the Romans.
– He notes that political events (“unexpected and grave events”) delayed the observance.
2. Exaltation of the Epistle:
– He cites Chrysostom: Paul’s epistles as “mines and springs” of the Spirit.
– He calls Romans the “epitome” of Pauline doctrine and the “foundation” of Christian theology.
3. Appeal to Romans as privileged recipients:
– He recalls Phoebe bringing the Epistle to Rome as a “treasure of inestimable price.”
– He desires that Roman theologians deepen its doctrine and that the faithful receive an adapted exposition.
4. Moral exhortation:
– He concludes with a mild appeal to humility and charity, citing Rom 12:15-16, and confers his “apostolic blessing.”
On the surface, nothing explicitly heterodox is stated. But the integral Catholic evaluation cannot remain on the surface. Silentium gravissimarum rerum (silence about the most serious matters) becomes itself testimony. The omission of the essential doctrinal content of Romans in favor of safe, sentimental moralism betrays an intention radically opposed to the anti-modernist, anti-liberal, dogmatically armed papacy that preceded 1958.
Note the omissions, each theologically damning:
– No mention that Romans establishes doctrinal finality against error and personal opinion.
– No mention of the necessity to submit intellect and will to revealed truth and to the perennial teaching of the Church.
– No reference to the condemnation of heresies; no echo of Rom 16:17 (“mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine… and avoid them”).
– No word on justification by grace in opposition to naturalism and self-sufficient humanism.
– No application of Romans to condemn the contemporary apostasy, liberalism, socialism, and Masonic infiltration which Pius IX and Leo XIII denounced and which St Pius X traced and struck as Modernism.
– No affirmation of the Kingship of Christ over nations, laws, and societies, which flows from the Pauline proclamation of Christ’s universal dominion (cf. Rom 14:9; Col 1:16-18), magnificently expressed in Quas primas.
– No warning against false interpretation of Scripture, despite the clear pre-1958 condemnations (Lamentabili sane exitu, Pascendi) and despite appealing precisely to an academic milieu that was already, in fact, saturated with historical-critical rationalism.
Instead, the letter centers on “erudite judgment,” “theologians’ intellects,” “adapted interpretation,” and decorous celebration. This displacement from dogmatic militancy to academic commemoration is the mark of the new, conciliar mentality: the faith is an object of scholarly, historical admiration, not a divinely revealed, exclusive, binding rule demanding the extirpation of error.
Linguistic Level: Soft Rhetoric as Symptom of Theological Corruption
The vocabulary is revealing:
– Frequent use of “esteem” (existimationi nostrae), “solemn celebration,” “eruditorum iudicio” (“judgment of scholars”), “aptly,” “desire,” “encouragement,” “acumen,” “refinement.”
– Doctrinally charged terms—*heresy*, *error*, *condemnation*, *anathema*, *Magisterium*, *Tradition*, *obligation*, *obedience to defined dogma*—are conspicuously absent.
– The only moral accent is on a soft, horizontal charity: “Gaudere cum gaudentibus, flere cum flentibus…”, truncated from its dogmatic context, which in Romans presupposes one faith, one moral order, one Mystical Body.
This is the rhetoric of the emerging neo-church: deft, sentimental, urbane, allergic to the sharp, juridical, and dogmatic language that characterizes authentic papal teaching from Trent through Pius XII. The style is not a neutral aesthetic. It bespeaks a new religion in which:
– Truth is not asserted as absolute and exclusive, but “celebrated” as literary beauty.
– The authority of the See is reduced to polite encouragement rather than binding command.
– The supernatural combat of the Church is replaced with “academic” observances and cultural anniversaries.
Against the anti-liberal vigor of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which anathematizes the idea that the Church should abstain from judging philosophies or be reconciled with liberal “progress” (cf. condemned propositions 11–12, 80), such pastel verbiage is a practical repudiation. Pius IX declares that it is false that the Roman Pontiff ought to come to terms with liberalism and modern civilization; John XXIII, in this letter and more programmatically in his later acts, configures his teaching function precisely as such an accommodation, starting from the displacement of doctrinal clarity by academic courtesies.
Theological Level: Romans Weaponized Against Romans
The Epistle to the Romans is not a vague hymn to “values.” It is the granite of dogma. An integral Catholic reading sees there:
– The universality of original sin and condemnation (Rom 3:23; 5:12).
– Justification by grace through the merits of Christ, excluding works of the Mosaic law (Rom 3–5), defined dogmatically at Trent.
– The necessity of living according to the Spirit, mortifying the flesh (Rom 8).
– The absolute sovereignty of God in predestination (Rom 9–11), incompatible with humanistic flattening.
– The duty of submission to legitimate authority (Rom 13), not as revolutionary democracy, but as power received from God and bound to His law.
– The demand for doctrinal unity and separation from those who introduce errors (Rom 16:17).
Pre-1958 Magisterium draws from Romans its condemnation of:
– Naturalism and rationalism (Syllabus, I–II).
– Indifferentism and ecumenism understood as equality of religions (Syllabus, III, 15–18).
– Separation of Church and State and the dethronement of Christ the King (Syllabus, VI, 55; Pius XI, Quas primas).
– Modernist relativization of dogma (St Pius X, Lamentabili propositions 58–65).
The letter under review mentions none of this. Instead, it urges that:
“the minds of theologians be spurred and sharpened to explain more deeply what the Apostle taught there and to adapt this doctrine to the understanding of the faithful.”
“Adapt” is the poisoned word. Not “propose integrally,” not “defend against errors,” not “impose as rule of faith,” but to “adapt” — precisely the modernist strategy condemned by St Pius X: to subject immutable dogma to the categories, sensibilities, and “needs” of modern man. The same condemned course runs through the propositions of Lamentabili sane exitu:
– that dogmas are merely “interpretations of religious facts” (prop. 22),
– that truth evolves with human consciousness (prop. 58–60),
– that Scripture must be re-read through historical criticism freed from supernatural presuppositions (prop. 9–14).
When an occupant of the Roman See, already ideologically aligned with “aggiornamento,” instructs theologians, not to defend the fixed sense of Romans, but to refine and adapt it, he invites precisely that “development” which the anti-modernist Magisterium branded as corruption. Quod lex damnavit, mos sollemniter instaurat. He praises the Epistle as “foundation” while, in practice, sawing through it.
Even more revealing is what he does not say regarding the role of Rome:
– He recalls that Romans were the first addressed by this Epistle, via Phoebe, as if to flatter the local and academic audience.
– He omits that the Epistle to the Romans is one of the Scriptural pillars used by the Fathers and Councils to affirm the unique authority of the Roman Church in faith and morals.
– He studiously avoids invoking the Syllabus, Pascendi, or any anti-liberal teaching, although their doctrinal content is drawn in large part from Pauline theology.
Thus the letter is a controlled environment in which St Paul is allowed to speak only as a classical author, not as the living voice that condemns the very liberal-modernist project that John XXIII was about to unleash formally in his convocation of the Second Vatican Council.
Symptomatic Level: Prototype of the Conciliar Revolution’s Method
This text, though short, exhibits in embryo the method by which the “conciliar sect” and its subsequent antipopes would operate:
1. Invocation of Tradition without its substance:
– The usurper eagerly cites Chrysostom and Paul, just as later documents of the Church of the New Advent would quote Fathers and Councils while inverting their meaning.
– This is the “hermeneutic of continuity” in embryonic form: apparent continuity in language masking rupture in doctrine.
2. Replacement of dogmatic imperatives with “pastoral” exhortations:
– Authentic papal teaching before 1958 lays down canons, anathematizes errors, quotes precise dogmatic definitions, reminds of penalties.
– Here we find a “blessing” encouraging theologians to be industrious, without any warning against the very snares the pre-1958 papacy had relentlessly denounced.
3. Academicization of Revelation:
– The subject of the letter is an academic commemoration organized by a Roman Theological Academy already compromised by the historical-critical method.
– The Pope’s function is reduced to endorsing a learned colloquium.
– But St Pius X explicitly condemned the idea that theology and exegesis may emancipate themselves from ecclesiastical authority and that critics may revise the sense of Scripture (cf. Lamentabili, propositions 1–4, 9–14, all condemned). Yet John XXIII entrusts Romans precisely to that world, flattering it instead of subjecting it.
4. Moral reductionism:
– Focusing on “humility,” “rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep,” torn from the dogmatic foundation that makes these exhortations specifically Christian (life in sanctifying grace, membership in the one true Mystical Body).
– This anticipates the post-conciliar reduction of Catholicism to social empathy, dialogue, and humanitarianism devoid of doctrinal militancy.
5. Preparation for ecumenism:
– By not reaffirming the necessity of the Catholic faith and Church as taught by Pius IX (errors 15–18, 21 of the Syllabus) and by presenting Pauline teaching in a form easily adaptable to non-Catholic sensibilities, the letter situates Romans as a “common” heritage, a platform for dialogue rather than a sword which divides truth from error.
– This neutered Paul is the patron of the later ecumenical and interreligious betrayal, in direct contempt of his command: “Avoid them.”
In sum, from the vantage of the unchanging pre-1958 Magisterium, this letter is less notable for what it says than for what it systematically refuses to say. And that silence, at the dawn of John XXIII’s regime, is the outline of the coming apostasy.
Contradiction with Pre-Conciliar Magisterium: A Synthetic Indictment
Measured strictly by the standard imposed in the Syllabus, Quas primas, and Lamentabili sane exitu, this letter stands condemned not by explicit heresy, but by its functional repudiation of duties intrinsic to the Roman Pontiff:
1. Duty to guard Scripture from modernist exegesis:
– St Pius X anathematizes those who reduce inspiration, deny inerrancy, and historicize away miracles and dogmas.
– John XXIII, addressing precisely those circles, neither recalls these condemnations nor warns against their errors; he instead encourages further “deepening” and “adaptation,” which in that milieu means precisely those condemned operations.
– Such pastoral omission before a known danger is not neutrality but complicity.
2. Duty to assert the exclusive truth of the Catholic Church:
– Pius IX rejects the notion that any religion may be embraced by reason alone and lead to salvation (Syllabus 15–18).
– The Epistle to the Romans is a bulwark of this exclusivity.
– The letter’s treatment of Romans as a timeless moral and theological classic, without any assertion of the unique salvific necessity of the Catholic Church, aligns practically with the indifferentist mentality.
3. Duty to uphold the social reign of Christ the King:
– Pius XI in Quas primas asserts that public order and true peace depend on recognizing Christ’s Kingship in public life and law.
– Romans provides the theological foundation: all powers are subject to God; secular authority must conform to divine law.
– John XXIII, writing barely months before his fateful announcements, speaks as if revelation were a private, interior matter for theologians and spiritual refinement, not the law for nations. This anticipates the later betrayal in favor of religious liberty and separationism championed by the conciliar sect.
4. Duty to condemn and unmask Freemasonry and liberalism:
– The Syllabus and subsequent papal documents clearly identify Masonic and liberal sects as instruments of the “synagogue of Satan.”
– The twentieth-century assault on the Church and society is recognized as their work.
– While the letter briefly alludes to “great, unexpected events” as a reason for postponement, it offers no supernatural reading, no denunciation of the anti-Christian forces ravaging nations and infiltrating seminaries. It is, again, the silence of accommodation.
Therefore, while the prose seems orthodox, the letter marks a decisive posture: the renunciation of the papal office as militant guardian and judge, replaced by the role of benevolent patron of theological culture. This posture, applied across subsequent acts, prepared the abomination of desolation in the temple: the enthronement of a conciliar pseudo-magisterium, a paramasonic neo-ecclesia that would trample underfoot both Romans and its authentic interpreters.
True Catholic Response: Reclaiming Romans from the Conciliar Sect
Faced with such texts, the faithful who adhere to the integral Catholic faith must:
– Recognize that the mere absence of explicit heresy does not equal Catholicity when the context is a systemic revolution against prior dogma. Dolus in silentio.
– Refuse to let the conciliar sect use St Paul as a mascot for its anti-Pauline agenda: ecumenism without conversion, religious liberty without the Kingship of Christ, sentimental morality without dogmatic exclusivity.
– Return to Romans as understood and taught consistently:
– by Trent on justification,
– by Pius IX on the errors of liberalism,
– by Leo XIII and Pius XI on the social reign of Christ,
– by St Pius X on the immutable sense of dogma and the inerrancy of Scripture.
– Expose the moralizing reduction of the Epistle: charity without truth is not Christian love but humanitarianism, which Pius XI and Pius XII denounced as an idol of naturalism.
– Reject the hijacking of institutions (such as the Roman theological academy) that have sold Romans to modernist exegesis; the authentic guardians of the Epistle are those bishops and priests who retain valid orders and profess the full doctrine of the pre-1958 Church, not the pseudo-academic caste of the conciliar structures.
Ultimately, this letter is a soft prelude to hard apostasy. It baptizes with Pauline and patristic incense the very milieu that will soon attempt to reinterpret, dilute, and neutralize Romans in favor of the Masonic triad of “liberty, equality, fraternity” disguised as “human dignity, dialogue, and religious freedom.” The only adequate Catholic reaction is to strip off the rhetorical veil and see clearly: here speaks not Peter confirming his brethren in the same faith as Pius IX and St Pius X, but an early voice of a paramasonic “New Advent” that dares to quote Paul while preparing to crucify his doctrine anew.
Source:
Existimationi Nostrae – Ad Iosephum S. R. E. Card. Pizzardo, Episcopum Albanensem et S. Consilii Seminariis Studiorumque Universitatibus praepositi praefectum, undevicesimo revoluto saeculo, ex quo S…. (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025