In this address of 24 August 1960, John XXIII welcomes Olympic athletes gathered in Rome, evokes the martyrdom of St. Peter near the Vatican obelisk, praises physical exercise and noble competition, commends the educational value of sport (health, discipline, self-denial), and briefly alludes to Rome’s providential role as center of empire and then of Christianity, concluding with a generic blessing. The entire text politely flatters a global athletic assembly while carefully avoiding any mention of the necessity of the true faith, of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church as the unique ark of salvation, of sin, judgment, hell, the Cross, the Most Holy Sacrifice, or the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ—the silence itself betrays the spirit of the conciliar revolution more clearly than many subsequent manifestos.
Olympic Humanism in the Shadow of the Martyrs: John XXIII’s Sporting Manifesto of Apostasy
From the Blood of Peter to the Cult of the Stadium
On the very ground sanctified by the martyrdom of the Prince of the Apostles, John XXIII stages a benign catechesis of natural virtue and athletic harmony, transforming the arena of persecution into a platform for a new religion of global concord.
He greets the athletes as “dear” participants of the Olympic Games, recalls St. Pius X’s reception of Pierre de Coubertin, and expresses warm satisfaction at their presence in St. Peter’s Square. He states that while not all can win, all should profit from the contests; he affirms that it is not the crown but “proper bodily exercise” that most matters; he warns only in passing that sports should not overshadow duties, yet enthusiastically praises the moral and physical benefits of sport: health, agility, beauty, fortitude, perseverance, self-denial.
He encourages them to be examples of fair play: to show serene composure, joy, modesty in victory, equity in defeat, perseverance in difficulties, thus confirming the adage: mens sana in corpore sano. He then briefly points to Rome’s providential destiny: first as head of an empire unifying nations, then as fitting center of the Christian religion, laboring to spread the blessings of salvation, charity, and peace. Finally, he offers a generic invocation of divine gifts for the athletes and their families.
At first glance—mild, “pastoral,” harmless. In reality: an archetypal document of the emerging neo-ecclesial religion: Christ reduced to a decorative backdrop, Rome’s supernatural primacy dissolved into humanitarian symbolism, the martyrdom of Peter instrumentalized to legitimize a naturalistic cult of man and international sport.
Factual Rewriting: Rome’s Vocation Reduced to Diplomatic Scenery
On the factual level, several elements stand out, not by what is said, but by what is systematically suppressed.
1. John XXIII recalls that Rome, by divine Providence, became capital of an empire uniting nations and thus an apt center for the Christian religion. This is historically and theologically sound as far as it goes; the Fathers often praised the providential Roman order as a preparation for the Gospel. But in the allocution:
– There is no confession that Rome’s true dignity rests on the See of Peter as instituted by Christ, with full, unique, indefectible jurisdiction over the universal Church.
– There is no affirmation that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus), defined by the Fourth Lateran Council and taught constantly.
– There is no mention that the same Rome must command the obedience of rulers and nations to Christ the King, as Pius XI taught in Quas primas: peace is only possible in the Kingdom of Christ, and states must publicly acknowledge His reign.
Instead, Rome is presented primarily as:
– an imperial and cultural unifier;
– a stage that now embraces all nations fraternally through sport.
This is a subtle factual deformation: the natural order is exalted as if self-sufficient, and the supernatural mission appears merely as a pious nuance in a broader humanistic narrative.
2. The reference to St. Pius X’s favorable reception of De Coubertin is instrumentalized.
– John XXIII appeals to Pius X’s benevolence toward the Olympic revival as if to anchor his own discourse in pre-1958 authority.
– But Pius X was the hammer of Modernism and defender of the rights of Christ and His Church against laicism, indifferentism, and Masonic influence. He condemned the very currents—religious relativism, secular exaltation of “human progress,” autonomous morality—that permeate the Olympic cult and its ideological sponsors.
– To invoke Pius X for a text that omits Christ’s Kingship, the true faith, and the necessity of grace is not continuity; it is manipulation.
3. Nowhere are the spiritual dangers of mass-spectacle, idolatry of the body, nationalism divorced from Christ, commercial exploitation, and moral corruption mentioned.
– Pre-1958 Catholic moral theology consistently warned against occasions of sin, vanity, immodesty, and worldly spectacles.
– Here, the only “danger” hinted is that training should not hinder fulfillment of duties—purely natural and horizontal.
The result: the empirical reality of the modern Olympics—penetrated by laicism, cult of performance, and ideological propaganda—is scrubbed clean and baptized rhetorically, without any call to conversion, without any distinctively Catholic criterion.
Linguistic Cosmetics: A Pious Varnish for Anthropocentric Ideology
The language of the allocution is a case study in how the conciliar mentality camouflages apostasy beneath classical Latin politeness.
Key features:
– Continuous warm flattery:
– Athletes are addressed as “dear,” long-awaited guests, embraced as by the colonnades of Bernini.
– The tone is that of a benevolent host of a humanitarian festival, not of the Vicar of Christ summoning souls to salvation.
– Central axiom: mens sana in corpore sano.
– This pagan maxim (Juvenal) is not corrected, elevated, or subordinated to supernatural ends.
– It is presented as if sufficient: a harmonious man is implied to be the ideal, as though grace, faith, and supernatural charity were optional.
– An integral Catholic approach would explicitly affirm: a sound soul is one in the state of grace, nourished by true doctrine and the Most Holy Sacrifice; bodily discipline is subordinate to the reign of Christ in the soul. Here: silence.
– Vocabulary of natural virtues without supernatural grounding:
– Health, beauty, grace, perseverance, self-denial are lauded—but purely as humanistic values.
– There is no mention that virtues without faith and sanctifying grace do not merit eternal life.
– No indication that all created excellence must be ordered to the glory of God in the true religion.
– Rhetoric of fraternal unity:
– Athletes of all nations are “fraternally united” by sport—this anticipates the conciliar language of universal brotherhood severed from supernatural sonship in Christ through baptism and adherence to the Catholic Church.
– This is the lexicon of the forthcoming “Church of the New Advent,” where “unity” is sociological, not theological.
The linguistic operation is: retain a thin shell of piety (mention of Providence, blessing, Peter), but hollow out all dogmatic sharpness, all exclusive claims of the true Church, all eschatological urgency. What remains is a soft religious varnish over Enlightenment anthropology.
Theological Evacuation: Silence Where Dogma Demands Witness
Measured against the immutable doctrine of the Church before 1958, the allocution’s omissions and emphases are theologically devastating.
1. No proclamation of Our Lord Jesus Christ as universal King and only Redeemer.
– Pius XI taught with utmost clarity (Quas primas) that:
– civil society must recognize and honor Christ’s royal rights;
– peace, order, and true harmony are impossible where He is excluded;
– the Church must publicly condemn the secular apostasy that banishes Christ’s Name from public life.
Here, before a unique international assembly, John XXIII:
– never proclaims Christ as King of individuals and nations;
– never declares that all must obey His law and enter His Church;
– never denounces laicism, indifferentism, relativism, Freemasonry, or the false cult of man that envelops such events.
Instead, he blesses the Games as such, thereby implicitly legitimizing their laic spirit. This is not accidental; it is programmatic.
2. No mention of the One True Church as necessary for salvation.
– Against liberal errors, Pius IX in the Syllabus condemned the propositions that man may find salvation in any religion (16), that good hope should be held for all outside the true Church (17), and that Protestantism is merely another form of true Christianity (18).
– The allocution:
– addresses a gathering of men of diverse beliefs;
– never states that only the Catholic Church is the true Church and that all are obliged to enter her;
– instead uses generic language of shared human values and fraternity.
This cultivated silence is already an implicit repudiation of the doctrinal clarity demanded by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. Qui tacet, consentire videtur (he who is silent is seen to consent): the silence before the assembly functions as practical indifferentism.
3. No reference to sin, grace, Cross, Sacrifice, or the last ends.
– The allocution never:
– warns that bodily perfection without repentance and faith is vain;
– exhorts the athletes to attend the true Most Holy Sacrifice, to confess their sins, to seek baptism or conversion;
– recalls the last things: death, judgment, hell, heaven.
The setting—St. Peter’s Square, near Nero’s circus—is ideal for recalling that those who rejected Christ persecuted His Church, and that each soul stands before eternal alternatives. Instead, the memory of Peter’s martyrdom is neutralized into mere scenic background enhancing the emotional pathos of a “beautiful evening event.”
This is precisely the kind of naturalistic deformation condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi, where Pius X exposes the Modernists’ reduction of supernatural realities to moral inspirations and historic symbols.
4. Lack of condemnation of the ideology underpinning the modern Olympic cult.
Pre-1958 Popes consistently unmasked Freemasonry and similar sects as architects of naturalistic, syncretic worldviews that dethrone Christ and the Church. The modern Olympic movement, constructed as a quasi-religion of humanity, peace, and universal brotherhood without Christ, is a textbook instance of such naturalism.
In this allocution:
– not one word warns against Masonic or secular ideologies;
– not one word insists that true peace and brotherhood exist only in subjection to Christ and His Church;
– instead, the event is received with unqualified optimism, as if already ordered to genuine Christian values.
Theologically, this is a betrayal. It dresses up a naturalistic cult with a Catholic smile, thus disarming the faithful and confirming the pagans in their illusions.
Systemic Symptoms: Proto-Conciliar Religion in Miniature
This brief speech is not an innocent pastoral aside; it is a concentrated symptom of the systemic apostasy that would soon burst forth at Vatican II and in the entire conciliar sect.
Several structural features of this allocution prefigure the new “religion”:
1. Substitution of the Social Kingship of Christ with humanitarian universalism.
– Instead of demanding public acknowledgment of Christ’s reign, the speaker:
– celebrates an event where God’s law is not the norm, but “fair play” suffices;
– treats the assembly of nations as a kind of sacrament of unity, without any necessity of conversion.
This directly contradicts the pre-conciliar doctrine that condemned religious liberalism and the separation of State and Church (Syllabus 55, 77–80).
2. Transformation of the papal role.
– The Pope, as defined by Vatican I, is the supreme teacher of all Christians, whose office is to guard and explicitly proclaim revealed truth, condemning errors.
– In this allocution, John XXIII assumes instead the role of:
– moralizer of natural virtues;
– patron of international sport;
– master of ceremonies of a civil religion of mankind.
He does not exercise the Petrine office but performs the function of a chaplain of global secularism. This usurpation is itself a sign that he does not act as a true Roman Pontiff but as a head of a paramasonic structure adapting religion to the world—exactly what Pius IX and Pius X anathematized.
3. Liturgical-spatial profanation.
– By using the very place tied to St. Peter’s martyrdom and the Basilica of his tomb as the triumphal foyer for a naturalistic festival, without recalling the absolute claims of the faith, the allocution:
– symbolically inverts the meaning of the locus;
– replaces the witness of blood with the spectacle of muscle;
– converts the forum Petri into a podium of “universal” values.
It is the architectural catechism of the coming abominatio desolationis in the holy place: the desecration does not begin with idols on the altar, but with the expulsion of dogma from the papal voice.
4. Pedagogical corruption.
– Youth are told that sport forms character—true.
– But they are not told:
– that without grace their virtues are wounded;
– that immodesty, pride, and idolatry of the body offend God;
– that the only authentic formation is in submission to divine revelation and the commandments, within the true Church.
The speech thus educates a generation toward a refined, disciplined naturalism—ideal material for the conciliar gospel of “human dignity” detached from Christ the King.
Contrast with Pre-1958 Magisterium: A Clear Line of Rupture
When confronted with the teachings of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, the allocution’s deficiencies emerge as a deliberate deviation, not an accidental oversight.
– Pius IX:
– Condemned the notion that human reason is sufficient without reference to God (Syllabus 3–4);
– Condemned indifferentism and the idea that any religion is salvific (15–18);
– Unmasked Masonic and liberal conspiracies working to eradicate the Church.
The speech to the athletes never even hints that their religious indifference is perilous; it blesses their common ground precisely where dogmatic specificity is required.
– Pius X:
– Condemned Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies;
– Rejected the idea that dogma should be conformed to modern consciousness;
– Imposed an anti-modernist oath.
Here we see:
– dogma evacuated from public address;
– supernatural reduced to vague Providence language;
– public papal speech tailored to modern secular sensibilities.
– Pius XI (Quas primas):
– Insisted Christ’s Kingship must shape public life, law, education, international relations;
– Identified secularism as the root plague by which society revolts against Christ.
The allocution:
– does not mention Christ’s kingship once;
– praises an international structure—the Olympics—founded and governed without reference to Christ or His law;
– thereby normalizes the very secularism Pius XI condemned.
Thus, measured against the pre-1958 Magisterium—as required by an integral Catholic criterion—this text stands not in continuity but in rupture. It is an embryonic confession of the new creed: man at the center, religion as ornament, unity without truth, virtue without grace, Rome as humanitarian capital, not as throne of the true Vicar of Christ.
The Deepest Accusation: The Sin of Omission Before the Nations
The gravest crime of this allocution is not what it praises, but what it refuses to say when divine Providence places before its author an assembly drawn “from all nations” in the heart of Christendom.
Before such an audience, a true Pope of the Catholic Church would:
– Proclaim:
– that Jesus Christ, Son of God, is the only Savior, and that all men, including athletes and nations, must submit to His law and His Church;
– that the gifts of health, strength, and talent are received to be used for God’s glory and one’s sanctification, not for vanity.
– Warn:
– that without the true faith and the state of grace, no natural excellence can save;
– that idolatry of the body, pride of life, and moral license lead to eternal perdition.
– Invite:
– non-Catholics to conversion;
– Catholics to confession, to Holy Communion at the true Most Holy Sacrifice offered on the altars of the Roman Church, in continuity with all ages.
Instead, John XXIII:
– blesses them as they are;
– confirms them in a naturalistic ideal;
– canonizes, by silence, the secular foundation of the Games.
Such an omission, in such a place, with such symbolic weight, is not pastoral prudence; it is complicity in the great apostasy.
Conclusion: Anodyne Words as Harbinger of the Abomination
This short allocution, when read through the constant doctrine of the Church up to 1958, reveals itself as a distilled prelude to the conciliar catastrophe:
– Christ is veiled, almost absent;
– the Church’s exclusive claims are bracketed;
– secular humanism is caressed and legitimated;
– Rome is celebrated as a center of world unity more than as the citadel of dogmatic truth.
What passes for encouragement of athletes is in reality catechesis into a new religion of the body and of universal fraternity without conversion. Under the shadow of Peter’s martyrdom, the successor in name drains the witness of blood of its doctrinal content and replaces it with a harmonious slogan: mens sana in corpore sano—as though that pagan formula were sufficient summary of man’s vocation.
Measured by the anti-modernist Magisterium, this speech is not a minor faux pas; it is an indictment. It manifests the paramasonic, anthropocentric spirit that would lead the conciliar sect to enthrone man in the place of God, to subjugate the teaching office to the applause of the world, and to prostitute the holy places of Rome to the cult of global secular spectacles.
Against such betrayal, integral Catholic faith holds fast to the immutable teaching: only in the visible, dogmatically defined Kingdom of Christ—His true Church, professing all that was taught everywhere, always, and by all before the conciliar revolution—is there light for nations, judgment on error, and sanctification of all human endeavors, including sport, by submission to the Cross and the Sovereign Kingship of Our Lord.
Source:
Ad athletas ex omnibus nationibus, qui Romam convenerunt ut Ludos participarent Olympios, d. 24 m. Augusti a. 1960, Ioannes PP.XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025