John XXIII’s Latin letter “Franciscalis familia” (16 January 1963) addresses Basil Heiser, Minister General of the Conventual Franciscans, on the 7th centenary of the translation of the relics of St Anthony of Padua. The text praises St Anthony’s holiness, veneration, miracles, the incorrupt tongue, exhorts the Franciscan family to imitate his prayer, preaching, and charity, and links these celebrations with the then-ongoing Second Vatican Council, expressing the hope that, aided by St Anthony’s intercession, the Council will yield abundant fruits for the Church.
Commemorating St Anthony to Conceal the Conciliar Subversion
The seemingly pious letter is in fact a revealing specimen of the conciliar sect’s method: exploitation of authentic pre-conciliar saints, liturgical memory, and Latin rhetoric to baptize its own apostasy, to sanctify the neo-church’s aggiornamento, and to redirect genuine Catholic devotion toward the poisoned well of the Second Vatican Council.
Instrumentalizing a Pre-Conciliar Saint for a Neo-Conciliar Agenda
The letter’s outward structure is classical: invocation of St Anthony, recollection of the 1263 translation, mention of the incorrupt tongue, exhortation to prayer, preaching, and charity. Yet precisely here we see the core perversion: the usurper John XXIII, architect of the revolutionary council, wraps himself in the halo of a Franciscan Doctor to smuggle his own project as a natural continuation of the Church’s tradition.
Key elements:
– Anthony is presented as:
– “lumen eximium” of the Order
– “deprecator populi christiani”
– “Ecclesiae Doctor potentissimus verbo”
– Model of prayer, preaching, and charity
All this is objectively true about St Anthony. But the text weaponizes these truths against their own supernatural matrix:
1. It praises Anthony’s tongue as an instrument of the Holy Ghost, yet omits Anthony’s hard, dogmatic preaching: condemnation of heresy, insistence on confession, reparation, sin, hell, the duties of rulers and peoples toward the true Church of Christ.
2. It invokes his intercession precisely to support the most destructive enterprise against the Faith since the Protestant revolt: the Second Vatican Council, openly announced as an aggiornamento and “pastoral” reconfiguration of the Church.
When the same document that venerates an incorrupt tongue simultaneously promotes a council that would enthrone religious liberty, false ecumenism, collegiality, and the cult of man, this is not continuity; it is sacrilegious appropriation. It is an example of *simulata pietas* (feigned piety) used to cloak *impietas*.
From the perspective of integral Catholic doctrine, this contradiction unmasks the letter’s essence: a devotional facade disguising doctrinal subversion.
Naturalistic Rhetoric and the Eclipse of the Supernatural
The text uses traditional vocabulary—prayer, charity, blessing—but subtly recasts their orientation.
Consider the central exhortations:
– To imitate Anthony’s “unctio” and “speculatio”
– To be an “actuosum fermentum” so that “populi… oculos ad Deum… attollant, et in unam communitatem… coalescant”
– To cultivate “verus… amor boni… mutuum fraternumque auxilium,” through which adversities are resolved, “spiritus asperiores mitescunt, pax optata componitur”
On the surface, this seems orthodox. Yet what is missing is decisive:
– No mention of the absolute necessity of the *una, sancta, catholica et apostolica Ecclesia* as the only ark of salvation.
– No insistence that peace is possible only under the public reign of Christ the King and the social kingship of Our Lord, as taught infallibly and magisterially (cf. Pius XI, *Quas Primas*: peace will not shine upon nations “so long as individuals and states refuse to submit to the rule of our Savior”).
– No warning against the very errors condemned by Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, St Pius X: indifferentism, liberalism, the separation of Church and State, naturalistic humanitarianism, the usurpation of ecclesiastical rights, the masonic sects (cf. *Mirari vos*, *Quanta cura*, *Syllabus*, *Humanum genus*, *Pascendi*, *Lamentabili*).
– No unambiguous affirmation that all charity must be ordered to the supernatural end, to conversion to the Catholic faith, to the state of grace, to preparation for judgment and eternity.
Instead, the language of charity and unity is abstracted into a horizontal vision:
– The Franciscan family is urged to be a leaven so that all peoples “coalesce into one community” offering “perpetual homage” to their Author. This is dangerously compatible with the later conciliar and post-conciliar “human family” rhetoric, interreligious fraternity, and globalist pseudo-spirituality, which Pius IX and Leo XIII effectively unmask as the program of the sects.
This is classic conciliar technique: supernatural words, naturalistic content. *Charitas* is severed from *veritas*; unity is detached from the one true Faith; “peace” is invoked without the Kingship of Christ and without explicit repudiation of condemned errors. Such omissions are not neutral; *silentium dogmatis est proditio* (silence about dogma is betrayal).
The Misuse of St Anthony’s Tongue Against His Own Doctrine
The letter dwells on the incorruption of St Anthony’s tongue:
“O blessed tongue, that always blessed the Lord and made others bless Him…”
It emphasizes that the tongue was “instrumentum fuerat Spiritus Sancti” preserved from corruption. Yet John XXIII, who convoked the very council that would undermine dogma, dares to associate his aggiornamento with that same tongue.
From the unchanging Catholic teaching:
– A tongue is “blessed” in God’s eyes because it proclaims:
– The integral Catholic Faith without compromise.
– The exclusive necessity of the Church for salvation.
– Condemnation of heresy, false religions, and public sin.
– The demands of divine justice and the reality of hell.
The Doctors and Popes before 1958 never hesitated: to dilute doctrine is spiritual murder. St Pius X in *Pascendi* and *Lamentabili* condemns the very modernist principles that would be laundered at Vatican II: relativization of dogma, subordination of doctrine to history, reduction of the supernatural to immanent experience, reform of structures, the Church adapting herself to the modern world.
Thus there is a brutal irony: the incorrupt tongue of Anthony is used as a decorative seal on the very process designed to silence that same doctrine. The letter praises Anthony as Doctor, but does not echo his doctrine; it canonizes his language while betraying its content. This is a refined form of sacrilege.
Appeal to the Fourth Lateran Council to Legitimize the Second Vatican Council
The text draws a parallel:
– Anthony lived in the age following the Fourth Lateran Council.
– His “actuosa pastoralis opera” is said to correspond to its decrees.
– The Franciscan family is urged, by analogy, to support the Second Vatican Council with prayer and sacrifices, so that “fructus progignantur plurimi atque laetissimi”.
This is a calculated rhetorical move: to portray Vatican II as the legitimate heir of Lateran IV.
But integral Catholic doctrine and historical fact contradict this propaganda:
– Lateran IV (1215) solemnly defined:
– The Trinity and Incarnation in precise dogmatic terms.
– The real presence and transubstantiation (canon 1).
– The necessity of the Church, the hierarchy, and the sacraments.
– The condemnation of heresies and strict measures against heretics.
– The duty of Christian princes to defend the faith.
– It presupposed and reinforced:
– The unity of Christendom under Christ and His Vicar.
– The objective falsity of non-Catholic religions.
– The union of faith and public life.
By contrast, the conciliar project—already transparently indicated by John XXIII’s speeches and preparatory acts (e.g. rhetoric about opening the windows, rejecting “prophets of doom,” seeking “unity” beyond doctrinal clarity)—sought:
– To replace the doctrinal militancy of Lateran IV, Trent, and Vatican I with “pastoral” ambiguity.
– To promote religious freedom in the sense condemned by Pius IX (*Syllabus*, prop. 77–80).
– To open towards ecumenism, indifferentism, and theological pluralism.
To cloak such a council with the memory of Lateran IV and the sanctity of St Anthony is intellectual fraud. *Abusus non tollit usum* (abuse does not destroy right use); but here the abuse is systematic: a counterfeit council demands historical and hagiographical cosmetics to appear Catholic.
Therefore, the invocation of Lateran IV is not continuity but counterfeit; it is a pseudo-apostolic succession of ideas, intended to sedate the faithful while their inheritance is stolen.
Franciscan Identity Deformed into Humanitarian Activism
The letter exhorts the Franciscan family to:
– Be a “vivax actuosumque fermentum” among peoples.
– Promote charity as “verus amor boni… dulce vinculum animorum… mutuum fraternumque auxilium” that dissolves adversities, softens harsh spirits, and composes the desired peace.
Again, what is absent is decisive:
– No charge to combat doctrinal error with Anthony’s vigor.
– No explicit demand to preach against heresy, Freemasonry, liberalism, modernism, communism, or secular apostasy.
– No invocation of the Franciscan tradition of penance, public expiation, and radical separation from the spirit of the world as a necessary antidote to modern corruption.
– No insistence that true peace only follows conversion to Christ’s one Church and submission of societies to His law (cf. *Quas Primas*; *Syllabus* n. 55 condemning state-Church separation).
Instead, the Franciscan vocation is diluted into:
– Generic leaven in the “world community.”
– Provider of horizontal fraternity and social reconciliation.
– Spiritualized NGO function, perfectly in line with the later post-conciliar “social” Franciscanism, emptied of doctrinal intransigence, comfortable within religious pluralism and political secularism.
This deflection is not an oversight; it is programmatic. The conciliar sect needs historical Orders as vehicles for the new religion: externally Franciscan, internally modernist. The letter is a blueprint for this manipulation.
Conciliar Optimism as a Mask for Doctrinal Revolution
A central passage explicitly welds St Anthony’s cult to Vatican II:
– The celebrations occur while “Concilium agitur Oecumenicum Vaticanum Secundum.”
– The writer expresses confidence that, through prayers and acceptance of difficulties, the Franciscan family will help produce from this council “fructus… plurimi atque laetissimi.”
From the perspective of pre-1958 Catholic doctrine, such optimism is untenable and exposes the inversion at work.
The very errors against which the pre-conciliar Magisterium had thundered—Modernism (St Pius X, *Pascendi*, *Lamentabili*), liberalism and indifferentism (Gregory XVI, Pius IX), masonic naturalism and separation of Church and State (Pius IX, Leo XIII), collegial weakening of papal primacy (Vatican I)—would be “pastorally” accommodated or linguistically softened in Vatican II’s documents and implemented in post-conciliar practice.
To ask St Anthony—hammer of heretics, preacher of the true faith—to lend his patronage to such an operation is an implicit blasphemy against his memory. The supernatural fruits of a true council are: clarity of doctrine, condemnation of error, strengthening of discipline, rekindling of the supernatural life. The fruits actually following Vatican II—doctrinal confusion, liturgical devastation, collapse of vocations, moral corruption, public apostasy—demonstrate retrospectively the poisoned nature of that optimism.
The letter thus becomes evidence: the usurping hierarchy had already decided that the council, whatever its content, was a “great grace” and demanded all venerable devotions be aligned to it. It is not magisterium; it is propaganda.
Silence on Condemned Errors: The Gravest Indictment
The most incriminating aspect is not what the letter says, but what it carefully never says. In a time already marked by:
– The advance of socialist, communist, and masonic forces (repeatedly condemned by Pius IX, Leo XIII, St Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII).
– Growing dismantling of confessional states and dethronement of Christ the King, explicitly denounced in *Quas Primas* and the *Syllabus*.
– Penetration of modernism into seminaries, universities, and episcopates, pre-identified by St Pius X as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
the letter:
– Does not reaffirm the binding character of anti-liberal, anti-modernist teachings.
– Does not warn the Franciscans against worldliness, doctrinal compromise, or infiltration.
– Does not call for militant defense of the Holy Mass and sacraments as received and codified, nor for resistance to corrupting innovations.
– Does not mention sin, hell, judgment, nor the danger of eternal loss.
Such systematic silence in an official letter is not pastoral prudence; it is complicity. It reveals a mind-set aligned with those already condemned propositions of *Lamentabili* and *Syllabus*, where doctrine is relativized, ecclesiastical authority is expected to “tolerate” errors and adapt to “modern civilization” (cf. *Syllabus* 80, condemned).
When shepherds habitually omit salvific truths and the concrete enemies of souls, they betray their mandate. Here, a saint is used as a rhetorical ornament to bless that betrayal.
Exploiting Relics While Undermining the Cult They Embody
The letter is built around the memory of the translation of relics and the prodigy of the incorrupt tongue. It encourages pilgrimages, veneration, and expresses “religiosa observantia”.
However, in the broader conciliar context:
– The same revolution would, in practice, diminish Eucharistic and relic devotion, desacralize churches, abandon traditional discipline regarding holy things, and dissolve the sense of the sacred.
– Reliance on saints would be slowly replaced by anthropocentric liturgical creativity, “dialogue,” and interreligious ceremonies.
This is an early specimen of the now-standard pattern: *conservare verba, destruere rem* (to conserve the words, destroy the reality). To speak nobly of relics while preparing a liturgical and doctrinal environment that renders such cult unintelligible and marginal is a deeper profanation than open attack.
Integral Catholic faith venerates relics because:
– They testify to the objective holiness wrought by grace in souls faithful to the integral doctrine and sacraments of the one true Church.
– They spur us to imitation in penance, purity, zeal for the Faith, and confession of the truth unto persecution.
The letter never draws this link to integral doctrine and sacramental life; it reduces relic veneration to an emotive and communal axis, easily assimilated into the vague “people of God” spirituality of the neo-church.
Why This Letter Condemns Itself
Measured by the unchanging pre-1958 magisterium and the witness of St Anthony himself, this document reveals:
– A studied ambiguity: supernatural vocabulary without doctrinal precision.
– A horizontalizing of charity and unity, compatible with condemned liberal and masonic principles.
– An audacious co-opting of a great saint and a dogmatic council (Lateran IV) to sacralize the Second Vatican Council project.
– A programmatic silence on:
– The exclusive necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation.
– The social Kingship of Christ.
– Condemned modernist and liberal errors.
– The reality of hell, judgment, and the grave danger of apostasy.
Far from being a harmless devotional note, it is a strategic piece within the conciliar revolution: it catechizes the Franciscan family—and through them the faithful—to believe that fidelity to St Anthony consists in supporting Vatican II and adopting a worldly, “fraternal,” and “pastoral” stance, emptied of militant orthodoxy.
In this light, the letter stands as a testimony not of the holiness of its signer, but of his role in instrumentalizing tradition to corrode it from within. Those who hold fast to integral Catholic doctrine must therefore:
– Venerate St Anthony according to the perennial Faith, not according to the conciliar sect’s appropriation.
– Reject the abuse of his name and relics to canonize Vatican II.
– Recognize in such texts the refined tactics of that paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican, which utters Catholic-sounding phrases while working systematically against the doctrinal, liturgical, and moral foundations laid by the true Magisterium.
Authentic devotion to St Anthony today demands the opposite of what this letter insinuates: not complicity with the conciliar project, but steadfast adherence to the pre-1958 magisterium, rejection of modernist novelties, and bold preaching of the same hard doctrine that once merited for his tongue the miraculous seal of incorruption.
Source:
Franciscalis Familia – Ad Basilium Heiser, Ordinis Fratrum Minorum Conventualium Ministrum Generalem, septimo volvente saeculo, ex quo sacrae S. Antonii exuviae in Basilicam Patavii eius honori exstru… (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025