The brief Latin letter “Haud minus paterni animi votis,” dated 9 January 1961 and signed by John XXIII, is addressed to Jaime de Barros Câmara on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal consecration. It offers paternal congratulations, enumerates his posts (bishop of Mossoró, archbishop of Belém do Pará, archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, ordinariate for Eastern-rite faithful in Brazil, military vicar, president of the Brazilian episcopal conference), praises his pastoral initiatives (visitations, missions, Eucharistic congress of 1955, support for parish schools), and grants him faculty to impart a blessing with a plenary indulgence in the “pope’s” name on a chosen day. The entire text is a polished exercise in institutional self-congratulation, concealing beneath devotional language a new ecclesial program: substitution of the supernatural Roman Catholic order by the conciliatory, bureaucratic, anthropocentric project that would soon be codified by the conciliar revolution under the same usurper.
Episcopal Flattery as a Manifesto of the Neo-Church
From Petrine Vigilance to Celebratory Panegyric
At the factual level, the document appears innocuous: a courteous congratulation for “five lustra” of episcopal dignity. Yet precisely in such texts the *mens* of the conciliar sect manifests itself with disarming clarity.
Key elements of the letter:
– Laudatory listing of offices and functions:
– Administration of Mossoró and Belém do Pará.
– Long tenure in Rio de Janeiro.
– Jurisdiction over Eastern-rite Catholics in Brazil.
– Military vicariate.
– Presidency of the Brazilian bishops’ conference.
– Praise for:
– Canonical visitations.
– Preaching missions.
– Formation of seminarians and religious.
– Organization of the 1955 International Eucharistic Congress.
– Initiative to support or found parish schools via “collaticia stips” (collected offerings).
– Grant:
– Faculty to impart a blessing with plenary indulgence, explicitly “in Our Name and by Our authority”.
On the surface: a routine papal-style epistle. In reality: a distilled expression of the new ecclesiology, where:
– the episcopal figure is validated primarily by functional multiplicity, institutional roles, and public events;
– episcopal conferences are normalized as central organs;
– Eucharistic devotion is reduced to mass events and sentimental remembrance;
– indulgences are dispensed as decorative ornaments tied to anniversary marketing rather than as grave instruments ordered to conversion, contrition, and liberation from temporal punishment due to sin.
The entire letter is an example of how the conciliar project replaces the vigilant, dogmatically armed Papacy of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII with a smooth apparatus of congratulatory communiqués, inflating a hierarchy that in doctrine and praxis had already begun to drift toward the condemned principles of liberalism and false religious liberty.
Language of Sentiment, Silence about Truth: A Symptom of Doctrinal Decay
A linguistic analysis exposes the spiritual anemia.
The letter is saturated with:
– “paternal” sentiments,
– “candida gaudia,”
– “egregiae Nostrae voluntatis nuntia,”
– bureaucratic catalogues of offices.
Yet it is strikingly silent about:
– the necessity of persevering in the *integral Catholic faith*;
– the peril of heresy and Modernism;
– the obligation to defend the rights of Christ the King in public life;
– the horror of communism and masonic subversion ravaging Latin America at that time;
– the final judgment, the danger of damnation, the gravity of the episcopal office as *onus tremens* (tremendous burden).
Instead of recalling that a bishop will answer to Christ for every soul lost through negligence, the text reduces the anniversary to an occasion for institutional applause and indulgenced festivity.
This soft, affective rhetoric is not accidental. It signals:
– the passage from the robust doctrinal idiom of Pius X’s Pascendi and the Holy Office’s Lamentabili sane exitu—which anathematized precisely the cult of novelty and historical relativism—to a diplomatic vocabulary incapable of condemning concrete errors;
– the eclipse of the supernatural horizon: no emphasis on *status gratiae*, no call to penance, no warning against the secularist and socialist aggressions already condemned by the Syllabus Errorum of Pius IX.
When the Successor of Peter ceases to speak as guardian of dogma and begins to speak as ceremonial notary of careers and congresses, the apostasy has already advanced.
Neutralization of the Social Kingship of Christ
The letter praises the 1955 International Eucharistic Congress in Rio as a “durable encouragement” to Eucharistic worship. Yet even here, there is a characteristic displacement:
– There is no reiteration of the truth, solemnly taught by Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, that peace and order in nations are impossible unless rulers and laws submit publicly to Christ the King and His Church.
– There is no admonition that a Eucharistic Congress must be a rallying point against liberal, socialist, and masonic domination of society.
– The Eucharist is treated primarily as a devotional nucleus for collective enthusiasm, rather than as the *Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary* that demands reparation for public sins and rebellion of nations against God.
This silence, in the context of mid-20th-century Brazil—penetrated by socialism, freemasonry, and religious indifferentism—is damning. According to Pius XI, the plague of laicism and the dethronement of Christ in public life is the root of modern calamities. In this letter, that combat disappears, replaced by ecclesiastical event-management.
Thus, the new program: Eucharistic spectacle without doctrinal militancy, pastoral activism without confession of the absolute right of Christ over states, benign compliments instead of prophetic denunciation of the world’s revolt—exactly the tendencies earlier popes had condemned.
Episcopal Conferences and Functionalism: Proto-Synodal Revolution
A central passage exalts that the recipient, as president of the Brazilian episcopal conference, aids his colleagues with “wisdom of counsel.” This is not a neutral detail; it is programmatic.
Pre-1958 doctrine recognizes:
– Bishops as successors of the Apostles in their dioceses;
– The Roman Pontiff as supreme, personal, monarchical authority.
But the conciliar sect progressively replaces this vertical architecture with:
– horizontal collegial structures;
– permanent episcopal conferences as quasi-legislative and doctrinal centers.
By praising the conference presidency instead of recalling the bishop to personal, grave responsibility before Christ, the letter aligns with the coming reconfiguration in which:
– authority is diffused and anonymized;
– no one is clearly responsible for doctrinal deviations;
– national bodies become laboratories of adaptation to worldly ideologies, especially democracy and religious pluralism condemned in the *Syllabus* and other documents.
This is an ecclesiological shift directly opposed to the perennial magisterium, which always rejected the notion that the Church is a federation of national synods subject to civil or popular pressures.
The Misuse of Indulgences: Ornament, not Conversion
The letter’s culminating gesture is the concession:
“id tibi facultatis facimus, ut, quo volueris die, adstantibus christifidelibus nomine Nostro Nostraque auctoritate benedicas, plenaria Indulgentia proposita.”
(“We grant you the faculty that, on whatever day you wish, you may, with the faithful present, bless in Our Name and by Our authority, with a plenary indulgence proposed.”)
This formula exposes another degradation:
– Indulgences in the Catholic tradition are a grave treasure of the Church’s power of the keys, intimately tied to:
– detestation of sin;
– sacramental confession;
– true contrition;
– works of penance and charity.
– Here, the indulgence is attached generically to the anniversary celebration and a papal-style blessing, presented with no reminder of:
– the conditions for gaining it;
– the supernatural logic of satisfaction for temporal punishment;
– the need to flee mortal sin and modernist errors.
The lack of doctrinal framing converts indulgence into a spiritual “bonus” validating the jubilee mood—an instrument of affective loyalty to the usurper, instead of a call to deep conversion.
Such treatment hollows out the doctrine of indulgences, aligning with the broader post-1958 pattern: what was once a sharp weapon against sin and temporal effects becomes a decorative favor; what was once ordered to the Cross is now locked into the psychology of celebration.
Systematic Omissions: The Loudest Accusation
The most serious indictment of this letter lies not in what is said, but in what, in such a context, is deliberately omitted.
In 1961:
– Communism enslaved entire nations, spreading atheism and persecution.
– Freemasonry and secret societies—explicitly unmasked by Pius IX and Leo XIII as the “synagogue of Satan” warring against the Church—were embedded in political and cultural elites.
– Modernist errors condemned by St. Pius X were resurfacing in seminaries, universities, and episcopates.
– Latin America was becoming terrain for revolutionary theology and political agitation.
Yet the letter:
– utters not a word about combating communism, socialism, liberalism, masonic infiltration;
– does not exhort the archbishop to defend Catholic orthodoxy against Modernism;
– never mentions the duty to exclude false worship, condemned by the *Syllabus* (e.g., proposition 77, 79, 80);
– avoids all reference to *Pascendi*, *Lamentabili*, *Quanta Cura*, *Syllabus Errorum*;
– does not recall the exclusive truth of the Catholic religion and the fate of souls outside the Church;
– says nothing about hell, judgment, the narrow way, or the risk of episcopal and clerical damnation due to infidelity.
This constellation of omissions is incompatible with the office of a true Roman Pontiff, who, as Pius X taught, must wage relentless war against Modernism, the “synthesis of all heresies.” When the occupant of the Roman See reduces his word to diplomatic compliments and carefully avoids confronting dominant errors, he acts not as Vicar of Christ, but as neutral chaplain to the world’s powers and to a self-satisfied hierarchy.
Silence about the supernatural order, dogma, and the enemies of the Church—precisely where speech is gravely demanded—constitutes a tacit repudiation of the very mission instituted by Christ.
Anthropocentric Pastoralism and the Eclipse of Sacrifice
The letter extols pastoral activities—missions, visitations, schools, congresses—yet its internal logic is horizontal:
– Formation appears primarily as moral and cultural elevation (“celsioris virtutis forma cultuque”), not as a militant defense of revealed truth against error.
– Schools are hailed as foundations for a “better age,” but with no insistence that education must be entirely and explicitly Catholic, subordinated to dogma and the Church’s magisterium, as Pius IX demanded against liberal schooling.
– The Eucharistic Congress is remembered as a sweet recollection and an encouragement, not as a proclamation of the absolute centrality of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence in opposition to secular society.
This naturalistic optimism betrays the abandonment of the Catholic principle:
Gratia non destruit, sed elevat et perficit naturam (Grace does not destroy, but elevates and perfects nature).
The hierarchy celebrated here appears as an efficient manager of initiatives rather than a guardian of the *depositum fidei*. The tone aligns with the condemned illusion that social progress, dialogue, and institutional dynamism suffice, without an uncompromising confession of truth and rejection of error.
Haud Minus: An Early Symptom of the Coming Deluge
Consider the symptomatic nature of this epistle in light of pre-1958 doctrine:
– Pius IX and Pius X explicitly unmasked freemasonic and liberal conspiracies seeking to subjugate and corrupt the Church.
– The *Syllabus Errorum* condemned religious indifferentism, separation of Church and state, false freedoms.
– *Lamentabili* and *Pascendi* condemned precisely the historicist, sentimental, and sociological reduction of the faith.
Against this background:
– the absence of doctrinal precision;
– the effusive praise of a hierarchy that would soon collaborate in launching the conciliar revolution;
– the implicit promotion of episcopal conferences and mass events as normative;
– the misuse of indulgences as jubilee tokens;
are not trivialities but signs of a shift from the Church Militant to a paramasonic, conciliatory institution.
This letter is a polished brick in the edifice of the “Church of the New Advent,” whose program culminates in:
– the cult of man;
– religious liberty and ecumenism incompatible with the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church;
– democratization and synodality dissolving the monarchical structure willed by Christ;
– liturgical deformation: the reduction of the *Most Holy Sacrifice* to a communal banquet.
Thus, “Haud minus paterni animi votis” functions as a discreet, but revealing, micro-manifesto: it glorifies a hierarchy comfortable in its positions, fond of congresses, bureaucratic structures, and pastoral initiatives, while utterly silent before the doctrinal and moral cataclysm that had already begun.
Such a voice cannot be that of the authentic Vicar of Christ, disciple of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII; it is the voice of one preparing, with smiling benevolence, the enthronement of the conciliar sect and the eclipse of the visible structures of the true Church.
Source:
Haud minus – Epistula ad Iacobum Tit. Ss. Bonifatii et Alexii S. R. E. Presb. Card. De Barros Càmara, Archiepiscopum S. Sebastiani Fluminis Ianuarii, quinque lustra a suscepta episcopali dignitate imp… (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025