Addressing the Redemptorist superiors gathered in Rome in early 1963, John XXIII praises the institute’s growth and apostolic work, exhorts them to fidelity to their Rule and Constitutions, encourages prudent revision of these norms in light of “the needs of the times,” presents observance of the Rule as the path to sanctity and communal harmony, and urges prayers and sacrifices for the success of Vatican II.
Behind this seemingly pious language stands the programmatic subordination of religious life and missionary preaching to the aggiornamento of the conciliar revolution, dissolving authentic Catholic militancy into disciplined collaboration with the emerging neo-church.
John XXIII’s Redemptorist Address: Engineered Obedience for Conciliar Subversion
Systemic Context: A Conciliar Program Masquerading as Religious Exhortation
From the outset this allocution must be situated in its concrete historical and doctrinal context:
– It is delivered by John XXIII, the inaugurator of the conciliar upheaval, whose pontificate marks the visible commencement of that conciliar sect which publicly embraces condemned principles of liberalism, religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the cult of man.
– It is addressed to the Redemptorist General Chapter in 1963, precisely as Vatican II is underway; the entire speech presses the institute to “re-examine” its Rule in harmony with “the needs of these times” and to align itself with the Council.
Thus, although the vocabulary seems traditionally moral and devotional, the allocution functions as a vector of transition: it organizes a venerable missionary congregation, founded by St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori as a bulwark of moral rigor, Marian piety, and preaching of the terrors of sin and hell, into docile auxiliaries of an ecclesial re-foundation alien to Catholic Tradition.
The text must therefore be read as an operative document of the nascent paramasonic conciliar system, and judged exclusively by the infallible pre-1958 Magisterium, not by the later propaganda of the Church of the New Advent.
Factual Level: Controlled Continuity and the Manipulation of Redemptorist Identity
1. John XXIII flatters the congregation:
“Novimus enim Institutum vestrum… laudabili pollere vigore… atque Ecclesiae Sanctae Dei alacriter et fructuose inservire.”
(“We know your Institute… to be endowed with praiseworthy vigor… and to serve the Holy Church of God energetically and fruitfully.”)
This praise is weaponized. It serves to:
– Legitimize his own authority over them as “Christi in terris humili Vicario,” despite his programmatic deviation from integral doctrine.
– Confirm them as effective instruments, precisely as he is about to direct their “renewal” in line with Vatican II.
2. Central factual move:
“Capitulum Generale… ut Regulam et Constitutiones eius rite recognoscatis, ratione habita necessitatum et adiunctorum, quae quidem haec tempora induxerunt.”
(“[You hold] the General Chapter… that you may duly revise the Rule and Constitutions, taking into account the needs and circumstances which these times have brought.”)
This is the operational center of the speech:
– The Redemptorists are urged to subject their constitutions—an expression of the charism of St. Alphonsus—to historical circumstances.
– The revision is framed as an internal strengthening of their vocation, but, in historical effect, the post-conciliar revisions emptied Redemptorist life of its Alphonsian identity: mitigation of community life, softening of asceticism, moral laxity in pastoral approach, alignment with ecumenism and religious liberty—the very tendencies Pius IX and St. Pius X had condemned.
3. He attempts to limit suspicion:
“Liquet autem id minime ita fieri debere, ut leges huiusmodi ad saeculi fluxas et inanes rationes flectantur.”
(“It is clear that this must in no way be done so that these laws are bent to the fleeting and empty fashions of the world.”)
This denial is rhetorical camouflage:
– The entire conciliar and post-conciliar process proved to be precisely such a bending: aggiornamento in liturgy, doctrine, religious life, and mission systematically incorporated “fluxae et inanes rationes” into official structures.
– The allocution thus exemplifies the duplicity characteristic of Modernism condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis: professing fidelity while re-framing principles in historical and pastoral terms that guarantee their subversion.
4. He defines their essential work:
“Congregationis vestrae est sacris missionibus populum ad impensiorem vitam christianam accendere;… eo ablato, Institutum ipsam causam, cur exstet, amittat.”
(“It is the office of your Congregation by holy missions to inflame the people to a more fervent Christian life; with this removed, the Institute would lose the very reason for its existence.”)
This affirmation is true in itself, but:
– No mention is made of preaching about hell, judgment, mortal sin, or the narrow way, which were pillars of Redemptorist missions.
– No mention of the necessity of belonging to the one true Church for salvation, of the errors of Protestantism or liberalism, which St. Alphonsus would have denounced.
– The allocution subtly recasts “missions” in a vague, pastoral-psychological sense: “impensior vita christiana” without doctrinal and sacramental precision—preparing the later ecumenical, moral-relativist “missionary” practice.
5. He closes with the crucial political alignment:
“Hic denique coetus vester… eo tempore celebratur, quo… Concilium… Vaticanum Secundum… vos omnes rogamus… divina auxilia tanti momenti Conventui impetrare studeatis.”
Their fidelity to St. Alphonsus is explicitly bound to collaboration with Vatican II, transforming an Alphonsian congregation into a conciliar troop contingent.
Linguistic Level: Pious Vocabulary as a Vehicle of Modernist Strategy
The rhetoric of this allocution must be dissected as a symptom of theological decomposition:
1. Soft, paternal tone:
– Frequent “dilecti filii,” “grati animi officium,” “Paternae caritatis.”
– This paternal affectivity is used to anesthetize vigilance. The integral Magisterium, when confronting grave dangers, speaks with clarity, severity, anathema; here, where an epochal revolution is being prepared, we encounter only caressing words, no warning of wolves, no clarity about modern errors.
2. Ambiguous praise of “prudence” and adaptation:
– The phrase about distinguishing what is immutable in religious life from what must be “accommodated” is Classic Modernist technique: mutare forma, servare verbum (“change the substance while pretending to preserve the words”).
– He does not anchor this discernment in the dogmatic condemnations of liberalism, laicism, indifferentism, and Modernism (Pius IX’s Syllabus, Leo XIII, St. Pius X). The omission is more eloquent than any phrase: the allocution silences precisely the doctrinal criteria that would block the planned transformation.
3. Instrumental use of Scripture:
– He quotes 1 Cor 12:31 (“aemulandi charismata meliora”) to justify striving for “higher gifts,” i.e., to aspire to a refined, updated religious life.
– He applies Apoc 10:9 (“Accipe librum et devora illum”) to the Rule, a legitimate spiritual application, yet in this context it paradoxically sanctifies a Rule in process of being re-written according to conciliar premises.
4. Sanitized spiritual vocabulary:
– Speaking of community joy, he cites Thomas à Kempis on concord with observance of the rule; yet the same spiritual tradition insists on separation from the world, horror of novelty in faith, and distrust of liberal trends. None of this appears.
– The speech is bureaucratically edifying: devoid of dogmatic precision, strong in general calls to charity, observance, and “service to the Church”—exactly the kind of language by which a paramasonic structure disguises its capture of Catholic institutions.
The linguistic profile is thus that of a controlled continuity: enough traditional-sounding topsoil to conceal the extraction of the dogmatic foundations.
Theological Level: Subordination of a Missionary Order to the Conciliar Revolt
Measured against the immutable pre-1958 Magisterium, the allocution’s theology reveals a program of mutation under the guise of fidelity.
1. Silence on the Kingship of Christ and the Social Order
Pius XI in Quas Primas teaches that peace and order are possible only in the public reign of Christ the King, and condemns laicism and the exclusion of Christ from public life as the root of modern calamities. In this allocution:
– No mention is made of the duty of Catholic nations to submit to Christ the King.
– No direction is given that Redemptorist preaching must combat religious liberty, secularism, socialism, Freemasonry, condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus and by Leo XIII and St. Pius X.
– Redemptorist missions are reduced to encouraging “a more fervent Christian life” detached from the integral social Kingship of Christ.
This silence is not neutral. It aligns religious life with the conciliar project, culminating in Dignitatis Humanae and a new cult of “human rights” over divine rights. The omission of Christ’s public kingship where missionary preaching is defined is a grave doctrinal lacuna and a practical repudiation of Quas Primas.
2. Adaptation of the Rule: Proto-Historicist Ecclesiology
The instruction to revise the Rule according to “the needs and circumstances of these times,” while allegedly not bending to worldly fashions, imports into religious life the very evolutionist principle condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi:
– Lamentabili condemns the thesis that dogmas and ecclesial structures are “merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness.”
– By treating core expressions of a founder’s charism as elements to be re-read through the signs of the times, this allocution applies the same historicist lens to religious life.
Even if no explicit doctrinal error is formulated here, the operative principle—mutable constitutive norms under pressure of modern circumstances—prepares the ground for mutating doctrine, liturgy, and morality under the same pretext.
3. False Ecclesiology: Identification of the Conciliar Apparatus with the True Church
Throughout, the structures occupying the Vatican are equated with the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church:
– The Redemptorists are praised for serving “Ecclesiae Sanctae Dei,” but that expression is made to encompass the conciliar revolution in progress.
– Their obedience is demanded not in relation to the perennial Magisterium, but to Vatican II: they must pray and do penance to obtain heavenly assistance for that “Coetus amplissimus et universalis.”
Here lies a central theological perversion: to bind a venerable congregation morally and spiritually to a council whose texts (on religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality) contravene previous solemn teaching. This is not mere exhortation; it is the attempted conscription of Alphonsian obedience into complicity with systemic apostasy.
4. Distortion of the Mission: From Conversion to Horizontal Moralism
The authentic Redemptorist spirit, flowing from St. Alphonsus, includes:
– Zealous preaching on mortal sin, hell, judgment, and the necessity of repentance.
– Defense of Catholic moral doctrine against laxism and against naturalistic reduction of sin.
– Marian devotion, especially to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, as mediatrix of grace.
– Defense of the unique salvific role of the Catholic Church against heresy and indifferentism.
In the allocution:
– No reference is made to hell, judgment, or the danger of damnation.
– No insistence on separation from the world beyond a vague “vita… abstracta a saeculo.”
– No call to combat heresy or error; no denunciation of modernist tendencies already condemned officially.
– The mission is described functionally (“impensior vita christiana”), compatible with any conciliatory, ecumenical, or humanistic reading.
Theological result: the supernatural, eschatological, anti-modernist mission of the Redemptorists is dissolved into a naturalistic pastoralism easily co-opted by the neo-church.
Symptomatic Level: This Speech as a Fruit and Instrument of the Conciliar Revolution
From a broader vantage, this allocution is emblematic of how the conciliar sect neutralized religious orders:
1. Capture of Obedience
– The speech consecrates the virtue of obedience to superiors, the Rule, and “the Church,” but without defining that obedience according to objective, prior doctrine. This is obedience emptied of dogmatic content, manipulable by modernist authorities.
– True Catholic teaching recognizes that obedience is limited by the higher law of God and Tradition. Here, such limitation is tacitly erased: Redemptorists are to implement the conciliar aggiornamento as if it were the will of Christ.
2. Institutional Mutation through Capitular Engineering
– General Chapters are praised and encouraged precisely as the tools for “recognizing” and updating constitutions.
– The conciliar method: under the slogan of returning to the founder and adapting to the times, orders rewrite their identity; later, this re-written identity is cited as proof of the “Spirit” of renewal.
3. Suppression of Anti-Modernist Identity
– St. Alphonsus was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pius IX and is a model confessor and moral theologian precisely for his doctrinal clarity and supernatural realism.
– The allocution does not invoke Alphonsus against the very evils denounced by Pius IX and St. Pius X. Instead, Alphonsus is reduced to a soft symbol of pious observance, detached from doctrinal militancy.
– This instrumentalization turns a champion of anti-liberal Catholicism into a mascot for the conciliatory, irenic, and naturalistic ethos of post-conciliarism.
4. Integration into Vatican II: The Hidden Oath
– The final appeal to prayer and sacrifice for Vatican II functions as an oath of alignment:
– Religious obedience + constitutional revision + conciliar intentions = full integration into the Church of the New Advent.
– Afterward, the Redemptorists in large part became agents of moral liberalism and ecumenism, including cooperation with abuses of the so-called “new liturgy,” collapses in preaching on sin and hell, and complicity with doctrines previously condemned. The seeds are visible already in the conciliar orientation of this address.
What the Allocution Does Not Say: The Loudest Accusation
The gravest indictment is not only what this speech says, but what it refuses to say.
1. No mention of:
– The condemnations of liberalism, indifferentism, and religious freedom by Pius IX in the Syllabus.
– The condemnation of Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” by St. Pius X, nor the binding character of Lamentabili and Pascendi, even though they directly concern abuses in sacred sciences, preaching, and religious life.
– The solemn teaching on the social Kingship of Christ and the duty of states to recognize the true religion (Quas Primas).
2. No warning against:
– Freemasonry and secret societies, explicitly denounced as the “synagogue of Satan” in the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
– The naturalism, rationalism, and cult of man infecting modern society, against which religious orders should be fortresses.
3. No assertion of:
– The exclusive necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation.
– The objective danger of heresy and error among Protestants and other false religions.
– The obligation of pastors and missionaries to refute those errors publicly.
This multidimensional silence discloses the fundamental betrayal: the allocution implicitly accepts the new ideological baseline in which:
– “Dialogue” replaces conversion,
– “Adaptation” replaces resistance,
– “Pastoral concern” replaces dogmatic precision,
– “World” is no longer an enemy to be overcome, but an interlocutor to be affirmed.
Silence here is complicity. Qui tacet consentire videtur (“He who is silent appears to consent”), especially when charged with confirming his brethren in the faith.
Contrasting with the Integral Magisterium: Why the Allocution Cannot Stand
When measured by pre-1958 teaching, the allocution collapses theologically.
– Pius IX’s Syllabus rejects the separation of Church and State, religious indifferentism, and liberal concepts of rights detached from truth. Yet the allocution prepares an order to function harmoniously in precisely such a liberal order, without admonition.
– St. Pius X condemns the idea that ecclesial structures and doctrine are products of historical evolution. Yet the allocution justifies revising the Rule based on “circumstances of these times,” under a council that itself enshrines historicist language and principles.
– Pius XI in Quas Primas teaches that only the full recognition of Christ’s kingship—private and public—can heal society. The allocution, addressed to missionaries, omits this. This omission is a de facto contradiction of the encyclical’s central thesis.
– The anti-modernist oath (1910) and the repeated condemnations of changing dogma or diluting it for modern sensibilities are completely ignored, at the very moment a systematic dilution is being institutionalized.
A true Vicar of Christ, speaking in 1963 to a missionary order, would have:
– Invoked the Syllabus, Pascendi, Lamentabili, Quas Primas, and the anti-modernist oath as non-negotiable norms.
– Warned against false obedience to any directive that would soften doctrine, liturgy, or morality.
– Strengthened the Redemptorists precisely as preachers of repentance, judgment, Marian devotion, and the unique necessity of the Catholic Church.
This allocution does the opposite by omission, by displacement, and by its enthusiastic orientation toward Vatican II.
Conclusion: Engineered Fidelity in the Service of Apostasy
Under a thin surface of piety, John XXIII’s address to the Redemptorists:
– Binds a historically anti-liberal, missionary congregation to the conciliar project.
– Promotes revision of constitutions according to “the times,” a formula historically resulting in the devastation of religious life.
– Empties “mission” and “observance” of their integral Catholic content, leaving them pliable for post-conciliar reinterpretation.
– Silences all reference to the anti-modernist Magisterium that would have unmasked his own program.
It is thus not an innocuous spiritual exhortation but a paradigmatic act of controlled demolition: using the language of obedience, rule, and St. Alphonsus to harness the congregation into the machinery of the conciliar sect, away from the unchanging Faith defined and defended by the Church prior to 1958.
Source:
Allocutio ad moderatores et sodales Congregationis Ss.mi Redemptoris, qui Generali religiosae suae communitatis Consilio Romae interfuerunt, (die 8 m. Februarii, A.D. MCMLXIII) (vatican.va)
Date: 08.11.2025