John XXIII’s Preparatory Allocution: Manifesto of the Coming Revolt
John XXIII’s 14 November 1960 allocution in St Peter’s Basilica addresses the members of the preparatory commissions for Vatican II. He invokes the history of ecumenical councils, praises the global enthusiasm for the announced council, contrasts earlier councils’ defensive, anti-heresy purpose with his own “pastoral” orientation, emphasizes optimism about the contemporary world, suggests that the task is not to define or defend particular doctrines but to give “new vigor and clarity” to Christian life, and frames the council as a luminous event for the whole world, including separated groups, pointing toward a hoped-for unity of all who bear Christ’s name. Hidden beneath this pious and scriptural vocabulary is the programmatic neutralization of dogma and the planned substitution of the Kingship of Christ and the authority of the Church with a conciliatory religion of humanity.
From Dogmatic Fortress to Pastoral Dilution: A Programmed Shift
The pivotal and most revealing move of this allocution is John XXIII’s deliberate contrast between previous councils and his planned assembly. He recalls Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Trent, and Vatican I correctly as bulwarks against heresy, as guardians of the integritas fidei (integrity of faith) and the lex credendi, where the Church defined against Arius, Nestorius, Protestantism, Rationalism, etc. Then he turns and calmly declares that “our age” requires something different.
He explicitly states that in former times councils were convoked “ut pariter catholicae fidei consuleretur integritati, pariter legi credendi obtemperaretur” — in order to safeguard the integrity of the Catholic faith and obey the rule of faith — but that now, given contemporary conditions, the point is no longer primarily to investigate and define specific doctrines transmitted by God and Christ through the Apostles. Instead, he proposes as the new task that Christian thinking and living receive “nova vis et claritas.”
In plain terms:
– Past: Councils = doctrinal definitions against concrete, named heresies.
– Now (for John XXIII): Council = not primarily definitions, but pastoral updating, psychological encouragement, and adaptation to modern mentality.
This is the ideological fracture line. According to the constant Magisterium, including Vatican I, the Church must teach, judge, condemn errors, and guard the deposit unchanged. Pius IX in the Syllabus (prop. 5, 58, 80 condemned) rejects the very notion of a “progressive” revelation and reconciliation with modern liberalism. St Pius X in Lamentabili and Pascendi anathematizes the idea that dogmas are mutable expressions adjusted to changing consciousness.
John XXIII’s allocution does not yet verbalize the full modernist formula, but it performs it practically: it relativizes the traditional function of councils as guardians of revealed truth and replaces it with a non-doctrinal “aggiornamento.” The omission is decisive: no call to condemn the reigning heresies of the 20th century — Modernism, Communism united with internal apostasy, naturalism, false ecumenism — but rather a call to optimism and to a re-interpretation of Catholic life that will, in fact, suspend the Church’s essential condemning function.
Where past pontiffs saw their duty to “confirm the brethren” by clear anathemas, John XXIII here inaugurates the opposite orientation: a council without enemies, without dogmatic battles, without precise definitions. This is already the betrayal.
Factual Level: History Manipulated to Justify a New Religion of Non-Condemnation
On the historical plane, the allocution performs several maneuvers that must be exposed.
1. He rightly notes:
– Nicaea: Against Arius, confessing the true divinity of the Word.
– Ephesus: Against Nestorius, affirming the unity of person in Christ and Mary as Theotokos.
– Chalcedon: Clarifying the two natures in one divine Person.
– Trent: Against Protestant revolt, restoring and clarifying faith, sacraments, discipline.
– Vatican I: Defining papal infallibility and reaffirming the supernatural order against Rationalism.
He uses this as a rhetorical backdrop to present Vatican II as standing in the same “line.”
2. But then:
– He explicitly shifts from doctrinal defense to “pastoral” encouragement in a world he describes as morally endangered yet simultaneously not so dark as to warrant strong condemnations.
– He casts the present council as primarily inwardly oriented to “the internal constitution of the Church today,” while publicly radiating a humanistic light for civil, social, political order.
3. What he suppresses:
– No mention of the duty to condemn and extirpate the Modernism solemnly denounced as “synthesis of all heresies” by St Pius X (Lamentabili, Pascendi, confirmed with excommunication).
– No mention of the war against the Church by Freemasonry already unmasked repeatedly by Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, including their infiltration strategies.
– No mention of the apostasy within the clergy and theology faculties, the very plague the pre-1958 Magisterium identified as the gravest danger.
– No mention of the absolute requirement that states recognize Christ the King, as taught in Quas Primas, and of the intrinsic evil of the secularist order.
Thus the text creates the illusion of continuity by reciting the list of councils, only to cut their doctrinal heart out and replace it with a talk of “spes,” “alacritas,” “nova vis,” and sentimental appeals. This is the typical modernist tactic: historical name-dropping without doctrinal consequence.
This is not innocent style; it is methodical inversion. To praise Nicaea and Trent while explicitly bracketing their essential polemical function — the condemnation of concrete heresies — is to falsify them in practice.
Linguistic Level: Soft Optimism as the Rhetoric of Apostasy
John XXIII’s language is emblematic:
– Tones of serenity, “laetissimum hoc auspicio,” “sereno tranquilloque gaudio.”
– Warnings not to see our times as enveloped in divine abandonment; reproach of those who would emphasize darkness.
– Emphasis on “caritas,” “unitas,” “charismata meliora,” mutual respect, moderation, silence, amicable collaboration.
– Repeated insistence on avoiding polemical harshness; insistence on careful, respectful dialogue with non-Catholics interested in the council.
This linguistic profile is not neutral. It marks a shift from the clear, juridical, doctrinal language of pre-1958 papal teaching to an ambiguous, therapeutic rhetoric, whose practical consequences we know:
– If heresy is no longer named, it is tolerated.
– If error is treated primarily as “misunderstanding” between brethren, its condemnation appears “uncharitable.”
– If the council is primarily a “joyful” celebration and a “new Pentecost,” anathema becomes psychologically impossible.
St Pius X condemned this style in advance: the refusal to condemn, the reduction of dogma to symbols adapted to the needs of dialogue, the worship of “experience.” Pius IX’s Syllabus condemns as an error that the Church should “reconcile herself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (prop. 80). John XXIII’s vocabulary systematically tends in exactly that direction: no war, but understanding; no condemnation, but encouragement; no clash with liberal civilization, but collaboration.
This sugary verbalism masks a fundamental revolt against integral doctrine. When he assures that the Church must address not so much “this or that point of doctrine” but communicate new vitality to Christian life in the modern world, he is effectively proposing the dethronement of defined dogma in favor of pastoral elasticity.
This tone is not the gentleness of saints; it is the softness of compromise. Authentic charity is inseparable from truth and from condemnation of error. Caritas in veritate (charity in truth) is the principle; a “charity” that refuses doctrinal clarity is seduction.
Theological Level: The Inversion of the Church’s End and Authority
On the theological level, the allocution is gravely disordered. Several points stand out.
1. Silence on the Deposit of Faith as Fixed and Binding
Vatican I (Dei Filius) defines that the doctrine of faith entrusted to the Church was not given as a philosophical invention, but as a divine deposit to be kept in the same sense and the same judgment (*eodem sensu eademque sententia*). St Pius X reiterates that dogma cannot evolve into another meaning.
John XXIII:
– Speaks of “new vigor and clarity,”
– Minimizes the need to examine or define doctrines already revealed,
– Frames the council as aiming primarily at adapting Christian life and thought to the present mentality.
This does not state explicitly the modernist thesis of dogmatic evolution, but it opens the door structurally:
– No fresh condemnations,
– No assertion of immutable dogmatic formulations as binding,
– A re-orientation from fides quae (the content of faith) to “pastoral” praxis.
Such a council, prepared under this principle, inevitably became the platform for all the errors condemned in Lamentabili and Pascendi: the historicization of dogma, its practical relativization, and the dissolution of Catholic identity into a broad “Christian” humanism.
2. Ambiguous Ecclesiology and the Seeds of False Ecumenism
The allocution contains passages about unity that already signal the ecumenical subversion:
– He evokes Christ’s prayer “ut unum sint” and speaks of the “voices” of separated “Christian sects” who purportedly desire to “return” or at least are attentive.
– He speaks of those “not fully in the Catholic faith” with marked respect and sets up a special body to respond to their questions and expectations about the council.
– He insists that while the council is “primarily” for the Catholic Church, this explanation must be handled with great circumspection, with a readiness to “answer” the non-Catholics who seek information with a disposition that clearly aims at appeasement rather than conversion.
What is missing?
– No straightforward statement that salvation is only in the Catholic Church.
– No call to non-Catholics to abjure their errors and submit to the Roman Pontiff.
– No affirmation that schismatic and heretical sects are objectively outside the one fold and must be converted, not dialogued with as partners.
Pius IX in the Syllabus condemns the proposition that “Protestantism is merely another form of the same true Christian religion.” Pius XI in Mortalium Animos explicitly rejects precisely the kind of ecumenical atmosphere that John XXIII begins to cultivate: a union based on vague shared Christianity rather than return to the one true Church.
By softening the language, by avoiding any imperative of conversion, John XXIII effectively prepares the later conciliar doctrine of a “partial communion” and the destructive formula “subsistit in” — a direct contradiction of the unambiguous teaching of the pre-1958 Magisterium.
3. Naturalistic Contamination of the Church’s Mission
Throughout the allocution, and especially in the conclusion, John XXIII speaks of:
– The council’s contribution to civil, economic, political, and social order.
– The need for principles on which “rightly constituted human society” rests.
– The call for cooperation between priests, laity, rulers, cultured classes, workers, etc., so that civil structures may be imbued with Gospel principles.
At first glance this echoes Leo XIII’s social teaching. But the decisive difference is again what he omits:
– No recall that public authority must recognize Christ as King, as commanded in Quas Primas: peace is only possible when states submit to His law.
– No insistence that religious indifferentism, liberalism, masonic separation of Church and state, and freedom of cults are intrinsically condemned (cf. Syllabus, propositions 15, 55, 77–79).
– No denunciation of the false religions and their public cultus as offenses against the First Commandment.
Instead, we see a horizontal vision: Christian “principles” are invoked to assist the construction of a more just and peaceful worldly order, in collaboration with all the components of society. The supernatural end (salvation of souls, defense of revealed truth, preparation for judgment) is functionally displaced by the socio-ethical project.
This is precisely the naturalistic contamination warned against by the pre-1958 popes: the reduction of the Church to a moral animator of humanity, a religious NGO of fraternity, rather than the exclusive Ark of Salvation. The allocution is not yet Gaudium et Spes, but the logic is already there.
4. Misuse of Christ’s Promises to Sanctify a Human Project
John XXIII repeatedly cites:
– “Ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus.”
– “Ego sum lux mundi. Ego sum via, veritas et vita.”
These divine assurances of Christ’s indefectible presence to His Church are invoked to underwrite the human design of a “new council” conceived explicitly not as a tribunal against error but as a reconciliation with the modern world.
Here is the theological abuse:
– The promises of indefectibility are conditioned on fidelity to the apostolic teaching.
– To claim those promises while planning to soften, silence, or bypass dogmatic clarity is to tempt God, not to trust Him.
Lex orandi, lex credendi: when the orientation of a council is “pastoral,” allergic to condemnations, open to all, it is the law of belief that is changed. The allocution intends this change; it clothes it in pious formulas, but the project is transparent.
Symptomatic Level: The Conciliar Revolution Revealed in Embryo
Seen in light of the integral Catholic faith, this allocution is not a neutral “preface” but a symptom, almost a manifesto, of the upcoming systematic subversion.
Key symptomatic elements:
1. Programmatic refusal of the traditional council-model.
– Previous councils: dogma, anathema, extirpation of error.
– Vatican II (as projected): no new dogmas, no condemnations, no targeting of concrete heresies.
This corresponds exactly to the modernist strategy condemned by St Pius X: keep formulas while emptying them of their combativeness; “update” praxis to transform belief.
2. Ecumenism as principle.
– Early integration of non-Catholic expectations into the council’s self-understanding.
– Setting up apparatus to respond deferentially to separated groups.
– Idealization of a future unity of “all who bear Christ’s name,” without the condition of abjuring errors.
This leads directly to the pan-ecumenism explicitly outlawed by Mortalium Animos.
3. Optimistic Naturalism.
– Downplaying of the gravity of contemporary doctrinal and moral corruption.
– Suppression of any mention of internal apostasy, liturgical decay, or doctrinal betrayal.
– Trust in “good will,” “charity,” “dialogue,” and human collaboration.
This is the mentality Pius XI refuted: peace and order are possible only in the Kingdom of Christ, not through adaptation to the world’s principles. The allocution inverts Quas Primas in practice by making the modern world a conversation partner, not an order to be converted or judged.
4. Appeal to the Holy Spirit to Rubber-Stamp a Pre-Decided Agenda.
– Continuous invocation of “Spiritus Domini,” unity, charisms.
– Yet no real openness to the possibility that the same Spirit would impel them to condemn and repudiate the liberal and modernist errors already condemned by their predecessors.
This is the pseudo-charismatic legitimation of a human plan.
In sum, the allocution confirms why John XXIII must be regarded as an antipope from the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine: he publicly proposes a conception of a council and of the Church’s mission incompatible with the prior Magisterium’s clear teaching on dogma, on the duty to condemn error, and on the Kingship of Christ over societies.
Against the Cult of “Pastoral” Councils: God’s Law Above Human Sentiment
This speech is also a paradigmatic example of how secular concepts infiltrate the Church when dogmatic clarity is abandoned.
– “Dialogue,” “mutual respect,” “collaboration” become quasi-absolute values.
– The hard language of anathema, condemnation of sects, naming of Masonic and modernist infiltrators, is completely absent.
But the Church does not exist to flatter modern consciences. It exists to teach with authority:
– That outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation rightly understood.
– That false religions and sects are objectively paths of perdition.
– That public authority is bound to Christ’s law.
– That liberalism, indifferentism, naturalism are mortal enemies of souls.
Pius IX and St Pius X speak with crystalline severity. Here, in contrast, we see the bureaucratic and sentimental idiom of a man who wants to be loved by the world and to reassure its enemies that the age of condemnations is over. The later fruits — religious liberty for all cults, ecumenical prayer with heretics and infidels, destruction of the Most Holy Sacrifice, idolatrous spectacles under the auspices of the conciliar sect — were already encoded in this refusal to wield the sword of truth.
Dura lex, sed lex (the law is harsh, but it is the law): the divine law of exclusive truth and the Kingship of Christ does not bend to the moods of 1960 or to the sensibilities of those attached to “progress and modern civilization.”
Exposure of the Preparatory Project: Technical Machinery for Theological Surrender
The allocution also describes with pride the technical apparatus:
– Numerous commissions and preparatory bodies.
– Massive collections of proposals and opinions.
– Procedures emphasizing moderation, silence, mutual respect, limitation to one’s “proper competence.”
At first glance, this appears as organizational prudence. In reality, it functioned as:
– A filter to neutralize integral Catholic voices.
– A mechanism enabling a small modernist and liberal minority — already entrenched — to re-write schemas in line with John XXIII’s “pastoral” vision.
– A formally episcopal, materially manipulated process.
By forbidding open denunciations, by binding the work within a framework of “no condemnations,” John XXIII ensured that the preparatory schemas faithful to Trent and Vatican I could be discarded once the council opened. The allocution is the ideological warranty for that sabotage: it establishes that the council’s nature is not defensive, not anti-error, but promotional and optimistic. Everything followed coherently from that poisoned principle.
The True Catholic Response: Return to the Pre-1958 Magisterium
Measured by the sole legitimate criterion — the unchanging Magisterium up to Pius XII — John XXIII’s allocution must be rejected as:
– Theological dereliction: refusal to exercise the office of confirming the brethren in clear doctrine and condemnations.
– Historical falsification: invoking councils while undermining their essential doctrinal and disciplinary character.
– Ecclesiological distortion: preparing a notion of “Church” open to ambiguous belonging and false “unity” with sects which refuse submission to the Roman See.
– Moral betrayal: flattering a world steeped in apostasy, instead of warning it against judgment and hell.
– Political apostasy: silently abandoning the duty, proclaimed in Quas Primas and the Syllabus, to fight liberal secularism and demand the public reign of Christ.
Those who remain faithful to the integral Catholic faith must:
– Reject this allocution as a foundational text of the conciliar revolution.
– Adhere instead to Pius IX, Leo XIII, St Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, who speak with one consistent voice against Modernism, liberalism, indifferentism, and all attempts to dilute doctrine.
– Recognize that a “council” founded on the refusal to condemn reigning errors cannot be an act of the true Church but a project of a parallel structure — a paramasonic “Church of the New Advent” that occupies Catholic institutions while betraying Catholic faith.
Non possumus (we cannot) accept the inversion by which “pastoral” becomes the alibi to renounce truth. The only authentic “aggiornamento” is the perennial call to penance, faith, sacramental life, submission to Christ the King and to the unadulterated doctrine taught always, everywhere, and by all before the conciliar betrayal.
Tear off the veil: this speech is not a harmless preface; it is the courteous mask worn by the coming abomination, the manifesto of a council deliberately stripped of the Catholic essence of all previous councils. Its honeyed words must be answered with the iron of immutable doctrine.
Source:
Ad concilia coetusque Concilio Vaticano II apparando, die 14 m. Novembris a. 1960, Ioannes PP.XXIII (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025