Venerable Brother Clemente Micara is congratulated by John XXIII on reaching his eightieth year. The letter briefly recounts Micara’s curial and diplomatic career, praises his loyalty to the Roman See and diligence in various offices, commends his rebuilding work in the war-damaged diocese of Velletri and his functioning as Vicar of Rome, and ends with a paternal blessing and wishes for divine assistance. In its apparent harmlessness and sugary rhetoric, this text perfectly reveals the self-referential, purely human horizon of the new regime that had already begun to displace the Catholic Church.
Elegiac Flattery as Manifesto of an Earthly, Self-Referential “Church”
Autoreferential Panegyric Detached from the Supernatural Mission
Already in its structure the letter functions as a small, crystalline specimen of the conciliar revolution in embryo.
John XXIII addresses Micara with cascading compliments for bureaucratic efficiency, diplomatic usefulness, and institutional loyalty:
“We know well with what lively and See-of-Peter-devoted good will you have laboured in pontifical legations… for these merits Our Predecessor admitted you into the College of Cardinals and entrusted to you offices of great moment in the Roman Curia.”
Every criterion of evaluation is horizontal:
– career,
– administration,
– construction of church buildings,
– governance of Roman affairs.
Nowhere does the text recall:
– the salvation of souls (*salus animarum suprema lex* – “the salvation of souls is the supreme law”),
– the need to preserve the purity of the Catholic faith against modern errors,
– the horror of sin, the judgement of God, Heaven and Hell,
– the absolute kingship of Christ over rulers and nations as demanded by Pius XI in *Quas primas* (“Peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ”),
– the duty to combat the sects and Masonic plots denounced by Pius IX in the *Syllabus* and his allocutions,
– the intrinsic link between episcopal office and doctrinal militancy against heresy.
Instead, this micro-document glorifies a functionary of an already mutating structure for his service to that structure itself. The “Church” here is treated as a self-sufficient institution whose internal promotions and buildings are the main content of pastoral joy. The supernatural order is reduced to a thin decorative glaze at the end (“heavenly help,” “Apostolic Blessing”) which in no way qualifies or judges the ethos celebrated.
This is not innocent. It is the mentality of a *societas perfecta* evacuated of dogmatic intransigence and re-inhabited by a paramasonic humanitarian bureaucracy.
The Factual Plane: What Is Praised, and What Is Systematically Silenced
1. Diplomatic career and curial posts:
– The letter meticulously lists Micara’s roles: legations, nunciature in Belgium, positions in Roman dicasteries, Vicar of Rome.
– Each is praised as if faithful execution of internal policy were the summum of episcopal virtue.
– No examination whether these offices were used to defend the Faith against Liberalism, Modernism, Communism, or to uphold the condemnations of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X.
2. Rebuilding “temples” and “sacred buildings”:
– The text extols the reconstruction of churches and seminary after wartime destruction.
– It remains rigorously silent about formation in those seminaries: do they transmit the anti-modernist doctrine of *Lamentabili sane exitu* and *Pascendi*, or are they already factories of aggiornamento?
– Buildings are elevated above doctrine; stone above dogma.
3. Vicariate of Rome:
– Micara is commended as one who with “piety, prudence and zeal” handles “daily affairs of great weight.”
– But what “affairs”? Discipline of clergy according to the Oath against Modernism (still formally in force in 1959), or its tacit burial? Defence of Rome as center of unchanging orthodoxy, or preparation for opening the city to the ecumenical, laicist, interreligious spectacle later executed by the conciliar sect?
– The letter artfully refuses to specify. This omissive strategy is not accidental; it protects a project.
Most decisive is the negative space: there is absolutely no mention of:
– The modernist crisis already condemned by St. Pius X.
– The errors of religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality already circulating among theologians whom the pre-1958 Magisterium had opposed.
– The Masonic and secular assault on the public rights of Christ and His Church, denounced forcefully in the *Syllabus of Errors* and subsequent papal teachings.
– The exclusive necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation; no trace of the militant proscription of indifferentism.
The result is a portrait of an episcopal elite whose “virtues” are measured by their usefulness to a politico-religious apparatus, not by their fidelity to *integral* Catholic doctrine. This silence about the essentials, as Pius X taught, is itself an index of Modernism; those who wish to subvert dogma rarely do so by frontal declaration, but by systematic omission and by shifting the center of gravity from supernatural truth to institutional management.
Linguistic Symptoms of Institutional Self-Idolatry
The vocabulary chosen by John XXIII is revealing:
– *“Merited praise,” “public signs of devotion,” “benevolent estimation,” “undoubted testimonies”* — a purely humanistic lexicon of honour.
– Emphasis on *“useful labours for the cause of the Church”* understood as diplomatic missions and curial government, without any reference to the doctrinal battles against the world, flesh, and devil.
– The formula *“Petri Sedi dedita voluntas”* (a will devoted to the See of Peter) is used not in the sense of fidelity to immutable dogma, but as loyalty to the reigning person and his policies. The criterion of orthodoxy is displaced from *fides catholica* to personalistic obedience to the current regime.
This rhetoric signals a shift from the Church as divinely constituted guardian of Revelation to the Church as self-referential institution which blesses its own servants for efficiently running its machinery, regardless of whether that machinery is being redirected toward capitulation to the world.
Such language stands in sharp contrast with:
– Gregory XVI’s and Pius IX’s fiery denunciations of Liberalism and religious indifferentism.
– St. Pius X’s blunt exposure of Modernists as enemies within.
Their letters to bishops did not merely flatter; they demanded doctrinal courage, condemned named errors, and recalled the terror of divine judgment. The sweet, conflict-free prose of this 1959 letter is characteristic of a power that has already chosen to coexist with error.
Theological Bankruptcy: Episcopal Office Without Confession of the Integral Faith
Officium sine fide est cadaver (an office without faith is a corpse). The authenticity of an episcopal ministry is measured by:
– Defense of the entirety of revealed truth.
– Explicit adherence to previous condemnations of error.
– Zealous effort to lead souls away from sin toward sanctifying grace through the Most Holy Sacrifice and the sacraments instituted by Christ.
Measured by the standard of pre-1958 teaching, this letter’s theology is gravely deficient:
1. No mention of the integral doctrine:
– The document never recalls that bishops, by divine law, must guard the deposit (*depositum custodi*).
– Not a syllable on the obligation to profess and enforce the condemnations of the *Syllabus*, *Lamentabili*, *Pascendi*, *Quas primas*, or the anti-Masonic bulls, although all remain in full force.
– Instead, we find a sacralisation of career: cardinalate, curial offices, vicarial authority are presented as proof of excellence in and of themselves.
2. Naturalization of “merit”:
– Merit is attributed for “labours” that are never qualified by relation to dogma.
– The supernatural category of merit (cooperation with grace under the law of Christ) is replaced in practice by institutional usefulness.
– This is a subtle but real adoption of a naturalistic criterion condemned by Pius IX and Pius X: treating the Church as a human society whose laws and rewards are autonomous from divine Revelation.
3. Instrumentalization of blessings:
– The Apostolic Blessing at the end functions as a ceremonial seal placed on a purely horizontal eulogy.
– The blessing is not preceded by any admonition to persevere in the true Faith, to resist error, to abhor modern innovations.
– Thus the blessing becomes a rubber stamp for the new ecclesial politics: an abuse of sacred authority to canonize administrative mediocrity and to anesthetize consciences.
4. Implicit ecclesiology:
– The Church is presented as a stable structure rewarding internal loyalty; there is no sense of her eschatological struggle against the world.
– There is total absence of the doctrine of the Church as militant, persecuted, and irreconcilable with the principles of the Revolution.
– In effect, the letter witnesses to a practical ecclesiology in which harmony with modern states and environments is presupposed, contrary to the sober condemnation of “modern civilization” as incompatible with Catholic truth (Syllabus, prop. 80).
This is why, from the perspective of unchanging Catholic theology, John XXIII’s panegyric is theologically bankrupt: it conceives of hierarchy without dogmatic combat, privilege without confession, honour without crucified fidelity.
Symptomatic Revelation: The Conciliar Sect in Germinal Form
Seen in historical and doctrinal continuity, this letter is not an isolated courtesy; it is a sign.
1. Continuity of persons, rupture of spirit:
– Many of those lauded for their curial expertise under John XXIII and his circle would act as human instruments of the impending council and its implementation.
– When such men are praised, not for their defence of the anti-modernist Magisterium, but for adaptive diplomacy and administrative building, it reveals what virtues the new regime values.
2. The method of the revolution:
– First stage: calm, irenic, flattering texts that never contradict prior doctrine openly but omit it entirely, shifting emphasis to humanistic, “pastoral,” diplomatic, and architectural concerns.
– Second stage: re-interpretation of dogma through “pastoral” praxis, as if the Church had always been what these men now enact.
– Third stage: explicit new doctrines—religious freedom, collegiality, ecumenism—disguised as developments, enforced through the same machinery that earlier letters had canonized.
This letter belongs unmistakably to the first stage. Its excessive sweetness, its almost courtly adulation of a high official, and its studied silence about the doctrinal battles mandated by earlier popes are not accidents but signals of a deliberate redirection.
3. Betrayal of the Kingship of Christ:
– Pius XI in *Quas Primas* demanded the public, social recognition of Christ’s reign, warning that laicism is a “plague” that must be fought vigorously. He linked liturgy, hierarchy, and law to the duty of subordinating states to Christ.
– Here, the Bishop of Rome praises a Vicar of Rome with no reference to Christ’s public rights, as if church governance in the Eternal City were only about buildings and administration.
– This is precisely the mentality that would soon bow before the idols of religious liberty and interreligious dialogue.
4. Complicity with the “synagogue of Satan” denounced by Pius IX:
– Pius IX explicitly unmasked the Masonic sects that sought to infiltrate and neutralize the Church, lamenting that if secular leaders had heeded papal warnings, the plague would have been contained.
– The docile eulogy of 1959 shows a hierarchy that not only refuses to name this enemy but integrates its own men according to criteria of worldly efficiency and diplomatic tact—qualities beloved by secret societies that aim at a tame, domesticated religion serving global humanism.
Thus this apparently innocuous letter, weighed in the balance of pre-1958 doctrine, is a small but pure manifestation of systemic apostasy: an episcopate measured by obedience to a new, man-centered project, while the true Church is quietly displaced by a conciliar structure soon to institutionalize the condemned errors.
The Gravity of Omission: Silence as Condemnation of the New Regime
Qui tacet consentire videtur (“He who is silent is seen to consent”). In Catholic theology, a bishop, especially in Rome, cannot remain neutral toward error without betraying his office. To celebrate an ecclesiastical leader without reference to doctrinal integrity in a time already thick with modernist subversion is itself a sign of consent.
This letter:
– Does not urge perseverance in the anti-modernist oath.
– Does not exhort fidelity to the *Syllabus* against religious liberty and indifferentism.
– Does not recall the duty to resist the sects, secret societies, and political ideologies condemned by prior popes.
– Does not speak of sanctifying grace, the interior life, mortification, or the primacy of the Most Holy Sacrifice over activism.
– Does not hint at the Cross.
The silence is not pious discretion; it is doctrinal abdication. By crowning such a silence with “Apostolic Benediction,” John XXIII lends the prestige of the Roman See to a practice of episcopal life that is, in substance, disloyal to the prior papal Magisterium.
From the standpoint of unchanging Catholic theology, this constitutes a revelation: the one issuing such letters and the system he promotes cannot be recognized as the same authority that solemnly promulgated *Quanta Cura*, the *Syllabus*, *Pascendi*, and *Quas Primas*. The spirit, content, and priorities are irreconcilable. *Non potest simul esse et non esse* (it cannot both be and not be): either the pre-1958 Magisterium erred gravely in its condemnations, or those who methodically ignore and reverse them have placed themselves outside the continuity of the Church.
Since the indefectible Church cannot contradict herself in faith and morals, the conclusion forced by Catholic principles is that such documents of flattery and omission, signed by one acclaimed as “Pope” yet repudiating in practice the integral prior doctrine, expose not the benign face of the same Church, but the face of a new, human construct occupying her visible structures.
Conclusion: A Harmless-Looking Seal on a Devastating Mutation
In isolation, this letter could be mistaken for a routine congratulatory note. In the light of:
– the binding condemnations of Pius IX and St. Pius X,
– the demands of Pius XI for the public kingship of Christ,
– the pre-1958 doctrine on episcopal duty and Modernism,
it must be read as a small but eloquent confession.
By praising merely institutional merits, by elevating curial bureaucracy and construction projects as principal ecclesial accomplishments, and by refusing any reminder of the hard, anti-modernist obligations of the episcopate, John XXIII’s “Octogesimum mox” manifests the programmatic reduction of the Church’s supernatural mission to a gentle, self-congratulatory human association. It is a diminutive monument to the theological and spiritual bankruptcy that would shortly bear its full, poisoned fruit in the conciliar revolution and the ensuing paramasonic neo-church.
The text is therefore not edifying but accusatory: a soft, smiling mask covering the face of an authority already turning its back on the integral Catholic Faith which alone gives true meaning to any episcopal office, any curial service, and any blessing that dares call itself Apostolic.
Source:
– Ad Clementem S. R. E. Cardinalem Micara, Episcopum Veliternum ac Vice Sacra Urbis Antistitem, octogesimum aetatis annum implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025