In this address of 12 May 1962, John XXIII congratulates the members of the Central Preparatory Commission shortly before the opening of Vatican II, praises their labours and expresses serene confidence that the coming council – often styled by him a “new Pentecost” – will bring abundant fruits for the Church and even “for the whole human race,” while warning moderately against excessive trust in earthly institutions and stressing the need for orderly preparation, public information, and pastoral openness. This apparently pious and tranquil text is in fact a programmatic manifesto of the coming conciliar revolution, cloaking a radical reorientation of the Church’s mission under biblical phrases and sentimental optimism.
Programmed Subversion Behind the Mask of Serenity
The Self-Celebration of a Counterfeit “Council”
Already the very setting and tone unmask the nature of this allocution.
John XXIII speaks as if presiding over the organic continuation of the twenty centuries of the Catholic Magisterium, whereas, in reality, he is inaugurating a new religion within the walls of Rome. His complacent joy over the preparatory work for Vatican II is detached from any sense of guarding a received, immutable deposit; it is instead a satisfaction at engineering a pastoral super-council intended to relativize all prior doctrinal clarity.
He states, in essence (paraphrasing the Latin):
As the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council draws nearer, we see increasing efforts and vigilant expectation; the Lord has smiled on this hope in His mercy.
The premise is already poisoned: the future “success” of Vatican II is read as a direct smile of God, as if any humanly constructed agenda, once emotionally draped with biblical phrases, enjoyed divine approbation. Yet the constant teaching before 1958 warns explicitly against precisely such illusions:
– Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum condemns the idea that the Church must reconcile herself with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization” as a condition of fidelity.
– St. Pius X in Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili sane exitu unmasks Modernism as the attempt to reshape doctrine according to the demands of history, sentiment, and the “needs” of contemporary man.
– Pius XI in Quas primas teaches that the only true renewal and peace come from restoring explicitly the social and public reign of Christ the King, not from adjusting the Church to the world.
Measured against that pre-1958 doctrine, the allocution is not a neutral administrative exhortation; it is the rhetorical antechamber of a pseudo-council designed to enthrone all the condemned principles under the pretext of “pastoral” aggiornamento.
Deceptive Enumeration: Theology, Discipline, and “Pastoral Questions” Without Dogmatic Backbone
John XXIII lists with satisfaction the topics considered by the Central Commission: questions on the Church, marriage, the family; disciplinary questions regarding Eastern and Western governance; pastoral matters concerning diocesan administration and the religious formation of the faithful. The structure sounds orthodox, but its inner logic is hollow.
From the perspective of integral Catholic doctrine:
– When the Church teaches on marriage and the family, she does so to reaffirm their sacramental, indissoluble, supernatural nature and to condemn liberal errors (cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum; Pius XI, Casti connubii).
– When she treats ecclesiastical discipline, it is as an ordered expression of immutable doctrine, not as a laboratory of democratized experiments.
– When she speaks of “pastoral” issues, these are subordinate to defined dogma: lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”), never its substitute.
In this allocution, dogmatic finality is conspicuously reduced to a background decor. The emphasis falls on techniques: preparation, organization, “free discussion,” information offices for journalists, shaping “public opinion.” This bureaucratic and media-oriented tone betrays the mentality of a council conceived in categories foreign to the Church’s perennial self-understanding. Instead of repeating with Pius IX and Pius X that the Magisterium judges the world, we are given a structure in which the world’s expectations and perceptions (via the press) are carefully managed and courted.
This is not an incidental nuance; it is the symptom of a new cultus: the cult of public opinion, the substitution of the supernatural authority of the Church by the sociological consciousness of mankind. Such an approach was precisely stigmatized by St. Pius X, who condemned the theory that the “Church listening” and historical consciousness co-create dogma and discipline; yet John XXIII anticipates that very inversion by assigning centrality to media and “expectations” about the council.
The So-Called “New Pentecost”: Mystical Language Serving Pastoral Revolution
The allocution embraces and promotes the expression that Vatican II should be regarded as a kind of new Pentecost, a new effusion of light and grace for the Church and for “the whole human race.”
This formula is the beating heart of the spiritual subversion.
– Pentecost is a unique, unrepeatable historical event, in which the Holy Ghost confirmed, perfected, and vivified the apostolic deposit once for all, so that no new public revelation would ever be given.
– To speak of a “new Pentecost” in connection with a council engineered precisely to adapt doctrine, liturgy, and discipline to modern “needs” is to insinuate either:
– an effective new revelation; or
– a total transfiguration of pastoral practice so radical that it functions as a new religion while falsely claiming continuity.
Pre-1958 Catholic theology allows neither.
St. Pius X solemnly condemns the proposition that revelation continues in the consciousness of the Church or must be recast to fit contemporary thought (cf. Lamentabili 21, 22, 58, 64, 65). Pius XI in Quas primas grounds peace only in the unchanging sovereignty of Christ the King, not in a progressive accommodation to the principles of 1789 and masonry. Pius IX brands as an error the attempt to reconcile the papacy with liberal modern civilization (Syllabus, 80).
Therefore, the invocation of a “new Pentecost” attached to Vatican II is a theological cipher: it suggests a legitimacy and inspiration which, when measured against subsequent fruits (religious liberty, false ecumenism, liturgical devastation, moral dissolution), can only be recognized as counterfeit. The Holy Ghost is not the spirit of rupture, ambiguity, and auto-demolition.
Half-Truths About the World: A Controlled Critique to Mask Complicity
The allocution contains a superficially edifying warning:
We must not place excessive hope in the help and favour of earthly institutions, which are principally concerned with bodily and economic goods; often the kingdom of this world restrains nobler aspirations of man and hinders his progress to heavenly beatitude.
At first glance, these words echo perennial Catholic teaching: earthly powers are subordinate to the supernatural end; temporal structures can oppose salvation. But the context reveals a calculated half-truth.
– John XXIII mentions the danger of trusting too much in earthly institutions, but he does not reaffirm the dogmatic principle that states and nations are objectively bound to profess the true religion and submit their laws to Christ the King (cf. Quas primas, Syllabus 55–77).
– He does not condemn the liberal thesis of religious liberty as an error.
– He does not denounce socialism, communism, freemasonry, and modernist infiltration as Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI had repeatedly done.
– Instead, he moves rapidly from this vague caution to a sentimental exhortation that “each of us must shine by example” in serving the “cause” for the good of the “whole human family.”
The omission is decisive. The greatest pre-conciliar Popes identified the true enemy: organized, doctrinal, and moral apostasy; secret societies; the cult of man; the de-Christianization of states; modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.” In this allocution, the vocabulary is softened and de-dogmatized: no clear enemy, no precise condemnation, only a generic “kingdom of this world” and an appeal to human fraternity.
This silence is not neutral; it is betrayal by omission. Silentium de rebus gravissimis (silence about the gravest matters) in such a context becomes complicity.
Manipulated Apostolic Imagery to Justify Conciliar Public Relations
John XXIII artfully links the concerns of the curious public about the council with the scene of people going to St Paul in Acts 28:
Many came to him where he stayed; he explained, testifying the kingdom of God, persuading them about Jesus… from morning till evening.
He then applies this to the Roman center near the tombs of Peter and Paul, and to his own “ministry,” subtly aligning the apparatus of Vatican II – commissions, information offices, journalists’ briefings – with the apostolic preaching of the Gospel.
This is a sacrilegious conflation in the order of signs.
– St Paul spoke praedicans regnum Dei, et docens quae sunt de Domino Iesu Christo cum omni fiducia sine prohibitione (“preaching the kingdom of God and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, without hindrance”). His content was explicit, dogmatic, exclusive of error and idolatry.
– The conciliar machinery that John XXIII exalts is precisely the structure by which ambiguous schemes and “pastoral” documents would later be imposed, diluting the clear proclamation of the unique salvific necessity of the Catholic Church, opening doors to religious liberty, to the denial of the confessional State, to the leveling of all religions in “dialogue.”
To clothe such an apparatus in the language of Pauline boldness is inversion. The apostolic image is hijacked to legitimize a paramasonic structure oriented towards reconciliation with the world condemned by the Syllabus.
Dogma Eclipsed by Pastoralism: The Conciliar Principle of Immanent Evolution
A central spiritual disease manifested in this allocution is the triumph of so-called “pastoral” concern over doctrinal proclamation.
Note the key emphases:
– praise for “libera disceptatio” (free discussion) in the council;
– trust in preparatory labours as providing a “valid help” in deliberations;
– care to inform the press correctly so that public opinion may be “educated” about so great a matter;
– insistence on firm but serene hope of “fruits” for the “entire human family.”
What is not present?
– No affirmation that the council’s duty is to condemn prevailing errors by name.
– No insistence that its decrees must merely reiterate, defend, and apply unchanged doctrine.
– No warning that freedom of discussion is strictly bound by the previous magisterium, which it cannot contradict.
The logic of the text is that Vatican II is a dynamic event that will “produce” something new through discussions, commissions, and pastoral sensitivity. This is precisely the modernist conception condemned by St Pius X: dogma as the expression of the religious sentiment and experience of the community in a given epoch, subject to adaptation.
Lamentabili explicitly condemns the idea that dogmas are historical interpretations of religious facts (22), that truth evolves with man (58), that progress of sciences demands transformation of doctrine (64, 65). Yet the allocution breathes the atmosphere of those condemned propositions: what matters is not guarding, but developing; not defending, but re-expressing in a non-condemnatory fashion.
When such a “pastoral” principle is enthroned, the result is automatic:
– Doctrine ceases to be a rule that judges pastoral practice; “pastoral practice” becomes the experimental laboratory that effectively dissolves doctrine.
– The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is replaced by anthropocentric assemblies, because the pastoral concern for “participation” tramples on the sacrificial dogma.
– The rights of Christ the King are abandoned, because pastoral “dialogue” with the world, other religions, and sects is preferred to the “rigidity” of the Syllabus and Quas primas.
The allocution is thus programmatic: it announces, in discreet but unmistakable language, a council that will not use the divine authority of the Church to crush error, but will use the prestige of that authority to crown error with ecclesiastical approval.
The Controlled Warning Against “Worldly Help” as a Screen for Religious Liberty
It is important to expose how the allocution’s slight criticism of blind trust in earthly powers functions as a pre-emptive alibi.
John XXIII says, in substance:
We must beware of placing too much hope in the support of earthly institutions which seek mainly temporal goods; we gather together for the Kingdom of God.
One might naively read this as resistance to liberalism. In reality:
– He does not recall the dogma that political power is subject to Christ and His Church.
– He does not reassert that it is an error to separate Church and State as if the State owed nothing to the true religion (Syllabus, 55).
– He does not warn that governments and international organizations promoting indifferentism and secularism are intrinsically opposed to the Kingship of Christ.
Instead, by warning against excessive reliance on earthly supports, he prepares the mental space for the conciliar novelty of “religious liberty,” understood as a civil right for all cults, which in practice forbids Catholic states to recognize and privilege the true Church. The Church, having renounced the legitimate aspiration to shape public law, confines herself to moral suasion within a pluralistic framework. This inversion is precisely the victory of the “regnum huius mundi” over the visible order of the Kingdom of Christ.
Thus the seemingly spiritual admonition hides a practical capitulation: the Church of the New Advent will no longer demand that kings “kiss the Son” (cf. Psalm 2); she will instead exchange her crown for a seat among the NGOs.
Sanctifying the Machine: The “Information Office” as Instrument of Controlled Perception
The allocution explicitly announces the intention to develop an “office for instructing journalists,” so that “public opinion” may be properly informed about the council.
At first sight, this may appear a legitimate care to avoid distortion. However, in the concrete historical context, it signals the construction of a narrative control center: an official filter of conciliar events designed not to defend Catholic truth, but to ensure that the revolution appears as continuity.
From the integral Catholic perspective:
– The Magisterium speaks with intrinsic divine authority; it does not beg recognition from “public opinion,” nor does it adapt its teaching to the categories of hostile media.
– The proper task of the Church is to convert journalists and nations, not to craft “images” acceptable to them.
By centralizing communications and framing Vatican II as a joyous, open, non-condemnatory “new Pentecost,” the conciliar sect used precisely such structures to impose the myth of hermeneutical continuity while effecting practical rupture in liturgy, theology, and discipline. The allocution is an early, candid confession of this strategy: catechize not the faithful in Trent, but the world in aggiornamento.
Rejection of the Pre-Conciliar Militant Spirit: From Combat to Conciliation
Pre-1958 popes never tired of reminding pastors and faithful that the Church on earth is Ecclesia militans, engaged in unceasing warfare against error and sin.
– Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII denounced by name rationalism, naturalism, liberalism, socialism, communism, secret societies, indifferentism, modernism, false ecumenism.
– They called for a firm, juridically structured defense: condemnations, Index, nullification of anti-Catholic laws, affirmation of the social Kingship of Christ, insistence on obedience to the Holy See against nationalistic or modernist deviations.
John XXIII’s allocution, in contrast:
– avoids every concrete name of error;
– reframes the difficulties of preaching the Gospel as a timeless, generic struggle, stripped of concrete doctrinal enemies;
– softens militancy into an appeal that the members of the commission let their example “shine” in service of the cause “for the good of the entire human family.”
This is the embryo of the cult of man that will be displayed at Vatican II and in the documents of its usurping successors. The Church ceases to be a supernatural militia protecting the deposit and becomes a humanitarian agency radiating optimistic goodwill.
Such a shift is not a secondary accent; it contradicts the entire prior Magisterium, which never reduced the mission of the Church to philanthropic elevation of mankind, but always primarily to the salvation of souls from eternal damnation through adherence to the one true faith, the one true Sacrifice, the one true Church.
Silence about mortal sin, sacramental grace, necessity of conversion, and the terror of the Last Judgment in such a solemn context is itself damning evidence. The allocution speaks of the “whole human family” but not of the danger of hell. This is pseudo-charity, saturated with naturalism.
Vatican II as Institutionalization of Modernism: The Allocution as Evidence
Judged in light of doctrinal continuity, the allocution exhibits the core marks of the Modernism condemned by St. Pius X:
– Historicism: The insistence on triennial preparatory work, commissions, media, and the unique “needs of our time” prepares a council whose authority is located primarily in its adaptation to historical consciousness.
– Immanentism: The “new Pentecost” rhetoric, detached from precise dogmatic purpose, suggests that the Church discovers her path via internal deliberation and consensus, rather than obediently repeating what has been defined.
– Evolution of dogma: The stress on “free discussion” and pastoral method implies that doctrine can and should be “re-expressed” in ways acceptable to the contemporary mentality, which, in practice, means collapse of dogmatic barriers.
– Denial of militancy: The lack of anathemas, the cult of optimism, the refusal to name enemies subvert the Church’s obligation to guard the flock against wolves.
St. Pius X summarized the essence of Modernism as the view that truth depends on religious sentiment and evolves with human experience; Pius IX branded as error the reconciliation with liberal progress; Pius XI demanded public submission of states to Christ; Pius XII defended the objective, sacrificial, propitiatory nature of the Mass and the hierarchical, juridical constitution of the Church.
The allocution aligns diametrically against this line: it opens the door for a council that will undermine public Kingship of Christ, encourage religious liberty and ecumenism, destroy the traditional rite of the Unbloody Sacrifice, and supplant the hierarchical Church with a collegial, democratized, humanistic organism.
Therefore, from the standpoint of the integral Catholic faith, this allocution must be recognized not as a benign introductory speech, but as a rhetorical monument of apostasy: a serene, smiling mask placed upon the face of the coming abomination.
Conclusion: The Spiritual Bankruptcy Revealed
– It replaces the clear language of dogma and condemnation with vague, pastoral, sentimental rhetoric.
– It instrumentalizes biblical and liturgical references to legitimize a project fundamentally opposed to the very truths those texts proclaim.
– It cultivates trust in a “new Pentecost” that in fact serves as the theological alibi for evolving doctrine and praxis.
– It extols media management and public opinion as integral to the Church’s self-expression.
– It offers only an anodyne, abstract caution against worldly powers, while refusing to reaffirm the concrete duties of states and nations toward the Kingship of Christ.
– It tacitly dethrones the militant Church, replacing her with a conciliatory, humanitarian society.
Measured rigorously against the Magisterium prior to 1958 – Pius IX’s Syllabus, St. Pius X’s Lamentabili and Pascendi, Pius XI’s Quas primas and Casti connubii, the constant catechetical and liturgical doctrine of Trent and Vatican I – this allocution stands exposed as the polished overture to a conciliar enterprise that would enthrone the very errors infallibly condemned.
No amount of scriptural ornament or references to the martyrs can cleanse a discourse that prepares to subordinate the divine constitution of the Church to the expectations of the world. The true Catholic response is not to admire such texts, but to repudiate their principles and return without compromise to the immutable doctrine and worship that the conciliar sect sought to bury beneath its smiling rhetoric of renewal.
Source:
Allocutio habita post exactos labores Sessionis sextae Commissionis Centralis Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano secundo apparando (die 12 m. Maii, A. D. MCMLXII) (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025