Dated 5 April 1960, this Latin letter of John XXIII to Benjamin de Arriba y Castro, then archbishop of Tarragona and cardinal of the conciliar structures, congratulates him on the 25th anniversary of his episcopal ordination. The text praises his loyalty to the Roman See as then occupied, commends his concern for priestly sanctity and migrants, invokes divine assistance, and grants him the faculty to impart, on a chosen day, a blessing with a plenary indulgence in the name of John XXIII to the faithful of his jurisdiction.
Celebrating an Empty Milestone: The Cult of Office without the Kingship of Christ
Formal Panegyric as Symptom of a Usurped Authority
From the first line, this epistle is a clinical distillation of the conciliar deformation: a text almost perfectly devoid of supernatural gravity, yet saturated with sacerdotal flattery and the self-referential cult of a man who had already set in motion the destruction of the visible structures of the Church.
John XXIII, the first in the line of usurpers, addresses Benjamin de Arriba as one “closely bound” to the See of Peter. The entire logic of the letter presupposes that juridical adhesion to the person occupying Rome suffices as a mark of fidelity, without the slightest reference to *fides integra*, to the duty of resisting error, or to the traditional axiom that a manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church he destroys.
The letter’s core elements are:
– congratulations for the “happy” anniversary,
– praise for administrative diligence and pastoral activity,
– rhetorical allusions to priestly sanctity and care for emigrants,
– the grant of a delegation to bestow a plenary indulgence.
No mention of:
– the objective content of the Catholic faith,
– the fight against doctrinal error,
– modernism condemned by St. Pius X,
– the public and social reign of Christ the King (Pius XI, Quas primas),
– the grave threats of socialism, liberalism, and masonry exposed by Pius IX in the Syllabus.
This omission is not accidental; it is the very mark of the emerging conciliar sect: a new “magisterium” that speaks like the Church, cites pious commonplaces, and dispenses “indulgences,” while silently undermining the doctrinal foundation that alone gives these acts meaning.
The Factual Level: A Hollow Exercise of a Non-Existent Jurisdiction
John XXIII pretends to act as Roman Pontiff in extending spiritual favors:
“Quo autem salutarior quintus et vicesimus episcopatus tui natalis contingat, id tibi facultatis facimus, ut, quo volueris die, adstantibus christifidelibus nomine Nostro Nostraque auctoritate benedicas, plenaria Indulgentia proposita.”
(“So that the twenty-fifth anniversary of your episcopate may be more salutary, we grant you the faculty that, on whatever day you wish, with the Christian faithful present, you may grant a blessing in Our name and by Our authority, with a plenary Indulgence attached.”)
On the factual level, two points emerge:
1. The entire letter presupposes that John XXIII possesses:
– supreme jurisdiction over the Church,
– authority to bind and loose,
– the power to attach the Church’s treasury to specific blessings.
2. According to the integral Catholic doctrine articulated by theologians like St. Robert Bellarmine and summarized in pre-1958 canonical tradition, a manifest heretic cannot be head of the Church nor possess jurisdiction. A non-Catholic cannot be pope: *“non potest esse caput eius qui non est membrum”* (“he cannot be the head of that of which he is not a member”).
Once the line beginning with John XXIII is recognized—as it must be on objective doctrinal grounds—as a line of public innovators preparing and promulgating the conciliar revolution, their “acts of jurisdiction” are devoid of binding force and supernatural efficacy. A purported plenary indulgence emanating from an usurped authority is not merely “irregular”; it is null. The panegyric tone overlays a juridical emptiness.
The letter therefore documents:
– the self-confidence of a usurper speaking and blessing as if nothing had changed,
– the integration of local hierarchies into this new obedience,
– the quiet displacement of the true understanding of authority, now reduced to personal loyalty to the reigning innovator.
Linguistic Flattery and the Eclipse of Supernatural Seriousness
The rhetoric is emblematic: sugary, courtly, bureaucratically pious. It multiplies sentiments; it silences dogma.
Key features:
– Repeated affective titles:
– “Dilecte Fili Noster” (“Our beloved Son”) – a paternal tone used to consecrate the status quo, not to summon to the defense of truth.
– Emphasis on feelings and auspiciousness:
– “faustum felicemque diem”, “ominibus et votis iucundemus” — language of secular jubilee rather than of militant Church militant.
– Praise of human effort:
– de Arriba’s “diligence,” “benevolent charity,” “ardor” are extolled, yet never explicitly ordered to the defense of defined dogma against contemporary errors.
Even when the letter alludes to priestly sanctity and pastoral work, it does so in a light, sentimental register. There is no trace of the severe and luminous clarity of Pius X’s Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, which condemn by name the modernist refusal of dogma, the subjectivization of faith, and the mutilation of Scripture.
Instead of the virile Catholic idiom of the pre-1958 magisterium, we find:
– generic “gratitude to God” without doctrinal content,
– “care for emigrants” without denunciation of the secularist states that uproot souls,
– a tone that could perfectly fit a naturalistic humanitarian NGO letter, once a few pious formulas are stripped.
This lexical mutation is itself doctrinal: *lex orandi, lex credendi*. When the language of warfare against error is replaced with unctuous compliments, the faith is already being eviscerated.
Theological Emptiness: Absence of Dogma in a Time of Doctrinal War
Measured against the unchanging Catholic doctrine (before 1958), the theological poverty of this letter is glaring—and damning.
1. Silence on Modernism:
– In 1960, the poison condemned by St. Pius X was not extinguished but entrenched in seminaries, theological faculties, and episcopates.
– A true successor of Pius X, conscious of *Pascendi* and Lamentabili, would recall to a jubilarian bishop the duty to extirpate those errors, to enforce doctrinal discipline, to defend the flock against naturalism and biblical rationalism.
– John XXIII does nothing of the sort. The silence is itself a betrayal.
2. Silence on the Social Kingship of Christ:
– Pius XI teaches in Quas primas that peace and order depend on public recognition of Christ’s Kingship and the subordination of states to His law.
– Spain and Europe in 1960 were sinking into laicism and the cult of “human rights” divorced from Christ.
– This letter contains not one word about the duty of Tarragona—and of its bishop—to assert the objective rights of Christ the King against the secular state.
– The episcopal anniversary becomes an occasion for human congratulations, not for mobilization for Christ’s dominion.
3. Indulgence as Ornament, Not as Call to Penance:
– The limited faculty to grant a plenary indulgence is presented as a festive adornment of the jubilee.
– No call to:
– confession of sins,
– conversion from error,
– restitution and reparation,
– restoration of authentic liturgy and doctrine.
– Detached from the hard demands of penance and dogmatic fidelity, the indulgence is trivialized into a ritual token of personal prestige: precisely the abuse that genuine Catholic theology condemns.
4. Absence of Ecclesiological Precision:
– The letter exhorts perseverance “in the cause of God and the Church.”
– But which “Church”? Under John XXIII, the structures occupying Rome were already preparing a council which would promulgate religious freedom, false ecumenism, and a new ecclesiology incompatible with the Syllabus of Pius IX and with the constant magisterium.
– To praise a bishop’s “close bond” to Peter’s See while that See is in fact usurped by innovators is to displace ecclesial obedience from the *depositum fidei* to the living program of apostasy.
In short, the letter is theologically bankrupt because it refuses to name, defend, or apply dogma at the very hour when dogma is under frontal attack. This is not innocent brevity; it is complicity.
Symptomatic Revelation of the Conciliar Sect’s Logic
When read in light of what follows—Vatican II’s texts, the “New Mass,” the cult of man, and the ensuing decades of doctrinal disintegration—this small document becomes a telling symptom of the conciliar sect’s DNA.
1. Personalist Obedience Replacing Dogmatic Obedience
By spotlighting the cardinal’s “faithful obedience” to John XXIII, the letter concretizes a new criterion: fidelity to the reigning innovator as such, regardless of doctrinal content.
Traditional Catholic teaching, as reflected for instance in Pius IX’s and Pius X’s interventions, establishes:
– obedience is owed to legitimate pastors only insofar as they transmit what they have received;
– if they preach a “new gospel,” they must be resisted.
This letter inverts the logic: devotion to the person in Rome is praised without any doctrinal qualifier. It habituates the clergy to identify Catholicity with submission to a man, even when that man prepares to enthrone religious liberty and ecumenical relativism in opposition to the Syllabus and to *Quas primas*.
2. Sacralization of a Counterfeit Hierarchy
By solemnly styling de Arriba as a meritorious shepherd and ‘Our beloved Son’, John XXIII strengthens the web of a hierarchy that will soon:
– accept and implement non-Catholic liturgical rites,
– welcome religious indifferentism,
– collaborate with secularist regimes and masonic structures.
The letter thus functions as a pious veneer over the integration of Spanish episcopacy into the conciliar revolution. The vocabulary of continuity masks the metastasis of apostasy.
3. Descent into Naturalistic Pastoralism
The only specific pastoral work singled out is concern for migrants:
“laudamus praeterea diligentiam, quam erga eos consilio et actu demonstras, qui, laribus relictis, huc illuc locandae operae causa commigrant”
(“we praise moreover the diligence which in counsel and in deed you show towards those who, having abandoned their homes, migrate here and there in search of work.”)
But:
– There is no insistence that these souls must be preserved from religious indifferentism in liberal host countries.
– No reminder that the first duty toward migrants is to ensure access to the true sacraments, orthodox catechesis, and protection from Protestant and secular seduction.
Pastoral concern is reduced to humanitarian accompaniment: the seed of the later cult of “migrants” weaponized by the conciliar sect to preach a borderless humanitarian religion divorced from Christ’s Kingship and the duty of conversion.
4. Manipulation of Traditional Forms to Convey a New Religion
The letter uses:
– Latin language,
– the style of curial correspondence,
– mention of indulgences,
– Petrine blessing.
Precisely these external forms are used to smuggle in a different substance:
– an authority no longer understood as guardian of a fixed deposit, but as source of a “new Pentecost”;
– pastoral priorities ordered not to the eradication of error, but to socio-human projects;
– a hierarchy defined by loyalty to the conciliar project rather than fidelity to the timeless dogma.
This is the essence of the conciliar operation: revolutionary content, cloaked in traditional phraseology, to disarm resistance. By 1960, John XXIII is already exercising that method. The letter is a minor but pure example.
The Omission that Condemns: No Warning, No Battle, No Cross
To judge this letter fully, we must linger on what is most damning: what it does not say.
A Catholic pontiff writing in 1960 to a bishop of a major see, in an age of:
– communist aggression,
– militant masonry exposed repeatedly by pre-1958 popes,
– raging modernist exegesis and theology,
– accelerating secular apostasy,
should:
– exhort him to uphold the Syllabus against liberalism and religious freedom;
– recall Pius X’s condemnation of modernist exegesis and evolution of dogma;
– urge the strict guarding of seminaries, pulpits, and universities from error;
– insist on the Most Holy Sacrifice as propitiatory, guarding against any liturgical novelty;
– reinforce the duty to maintain Catholic confessional states and reject laicist compromises;
– warn that any accommodation with naturalism and ecumenism offends Christ the King.
Instead, the letter:
– passes over these in total silence,
– contents itself with sentimental blessings,
– converts the anniversary into a quasi-secular jubilee of career longevity.
This silence is the loudest accusation.
The integral Catholic faith knows that:
– Silentium de veritate (silence regarding the truth) in the face of error is itself a grave sin.
– The shepherd who refuses to warn the flock when the wolf approaches becomes, effectively, an accomplice.
When such silence emanates from a man claiming the papacy and is systematically replicated throughout his acts, it reveals:
– not weakness,
– but a program: the gradual dethronement of dogma in favor of a humanistic, diplomatic, “pastoral” religion.
This letter is an artifact of that program.
Conclusion: A Small Document, a Clear Witness to the Great Betrayal
Taken in isolation, this epistle could be misread as a harmless congratulation. Read in the light of the unchanging pre-1958 magisterium and of the subsequent conciliar devastation, it stands revealed as:
– a testimony to the usurped claim of John XXIII to papal authority while preparing a revolution against the very doctrines defined by his predecessors;
– a snapshot of how the conciliar sect cultivates personalist obedience and bureaucratic piety to neutralize doctrinal vigilance;
– an example of pastoral language emptied of militancy, where indulgences and blessings are mobilized not to call to penance and resistance to error, but to ornament an apostate system.
The theological and spiritual bankruptcy of this letter lies precisely in its refusal to be Catholic in the only sense that matters: unflinchingly doctrinal, sacrificially faithful, openly combative for Christ the King and His one true Church, against the world, against error, and against the synagogue of Satan condemned by the pre-conciliar popes.
Source:
Quoniam mox – Ad Cardinalem De Arriba et Castro, Archiepiscopum Tarraconensem, quintum et vicesimum annum a suscepto episcopato implentem (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025