Christ is King! Is he?
Christ the King is not just about Jesus being King at the end of time but that he is also King here and now! Why? Because through him all things were created out of nothing, given existence and are kept in being and through him all things have been Redeemed. So all powers, principalities, kings, princes, rulers, presidents, prime-ministers and peoples must bend the knee at the name of Jesus as we all owe him absolutely everything. Thus, the words spoken to St Catherine of Siena that she heard coming from Our Lord also applies to every single one of us: “I am He Who Is and you are she who is not!”
The Solemnity of Christ the King was first instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in the face of the rise of a many faced godlessness that was both ideological and was increasingly reflected in people’s lifestyle. The roaring 20s, was not just about hedonism but was marked also by the rise of secular ideologies that sought to plan the life of human beings from the womb to the tomb with no reference to God. These were godless plans and in time they would be seen to be inhuman plans. These secular ideologies were Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Socialism and Capitalism. Originally, Capitalism was focused on the primacy of the individual, an unregulated free market and small government whereas the other four were all about big government, the primacy of the State over the individual and a planned economy. If for the Capitalist the Free Market was god, for the other ideologies the State was god!
In 1925 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quas Primas, which added the feast of “Our Lord Jesus Christ the King” to the liturgical calendar. He did this because there was a social struggle for the hearts and minds of young people through the youth leagues and movements that dominated this period. Pope Pius XI saw in these ideologies and in the hedonism of the roaring 20s that people were occluding Christ in favour of a lifestyle dominated by godlessness, material aspirations and the false utopias offered by a new kind of tyrant. He realized that these Midas forces were crowding out the kingship of Jesus by offering a deadly kind of gold which brought with it a dragon sickness and this he had to address. He started by dedicating his reign as pope to “The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ (Pax Christi in Regno Christi ).”
In his encyclical Quas Primus he asks:
But in what does this “power” of Jesus Christ the King consist? It is not the power of the kings or the great people of this world; it is the divine power to give eternal life, to liberate from evil, to defeat the dominion of death. It is the power of Love that can draw good from evil, that can melt a hardened heart, bring peace amid the harshest conflict and kindle hope in the thickest darkness. This Kingdom of Grace is never imposed and always respects our freedom. Christ came “to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18: 37), as he declared to Pilate: whoever accepts his witness serves beneath his “banner.” . . . Every conscience, therefore, must make a choice. Who do I want to follow? God or the Evil One? The truth or falsehood? Choosing Christ does not guarantee success according to the world’s criteria but assures the peace and joy that he alone can give us. This is demonstrated, in every epoch, by the experience of numerous men and women who, in Christ’s name, in the name of truth and justice, were able to oppose the enticements of earthly powers with their different masks, to the point that they sealed their fidelity with martyrdom [Quas Primas n. 24].
Clearly, the Kingship of Christ is not just a private interior devotion, but it must include it as he must be enthroned in our hearts! It was for this reason that consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus went hand in hand with his Kingdom of grace. The consecration flowed out of an interior life and embraced a way of being-in-action that was to be lived out in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; in the working out of an apologetics that defended the faith; in the blessing of homes and families; and in the blessing of places of work, of recreation, of education and of political activity too. In these ways the motto of Pope Pius XI was to be lived out: Pax Christi in Regno Christi - The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.
Today, Capitalism has now come to be dominated by the Corporate-world. Like the other four ideologies, Capitalism is also about big government but one controlled by the corporate-world; old Capitalism is dead having been replaced by what many commentators call crony capitalism, a corporate Capitalism, that over the last thirty years has captured many a government. Today, our national leaders are being offered a global plan by the World Economic Forum [WEF] in Davos. The head of WEF, Klaus Schwab, spelt out the meaning of this plan for the peoples of the world when he stated: “In 2030, you will own nothing and you will be happy about it.” It is a plan laid out by an International forum of Movers and Shakers who are billionaires, and yet they all have Socialist tendencies. They seek to establish a Global Government financed and controlled by the Corporate-World. It is a global rule that is no respecter of sovereignty, individual liberty, morality, natural law, common law or populism. They call this plan The Great Reset and it’s motto is “Build Back Better” and it seeks to effect a bio-tech integration of life, health, ecology, politics, economics and war that is all seeing, all controlling and all encompassing. This vision wants to first collapse everything and then they can rebuild everything. It is a plan that seems to draw its inspiration from Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot and the Borg! And yet, no one seems to notice how familiar all this is, because no one now remembers why the Feast of Christ the King was instituted!
As governments today strive to have control over all its citizenry from the womb to the tomb, we find ourselves in a time when there is a exponential attempt to crowd out God and to snuff out the anthropological foundation of Western culture, namely, man made in the image of God, by re-making and re-modeling mankind in the image of a bio-machine [see Transhumanism]. Yet, it all sounds familiar and so does our sense of powerlessness in the face of it, for this was also something the Greeks tried in the time of the Maccabees. Maybe we all need to become like the Maccabees! Indeed, maybe the chant “Christ is King!” is the only real Word that speaks truth to power today and possibly the only real power that can oppose this totally planned world.
Maybe resistance is futile! Maybe we will all be assimilated! Maybe we will go silently into the night! Or maybe it will mean that we will go back into the catacombs as we did during the persecution in the Roman Empire; maybe it will mean we go back into the desert like Benedict as Rome collapsed in the face of the invasion of new amoral barbarians; maybe it will mean that we go back to the priests-holes like the Catholics did in the days of the Recusants and Protestant persecution; maybe it will mean that we go back to the Mass-rocks of Éirinn go Brách in Penal times; or maybe it will mean that we follow the resistance of the Vendee revolt or Vinegar Hill or the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw.
Or maybe the words of Joseph Ratzinger, spoken in the 1960s, are more apposite, even more prophetic:
‘Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.’ [In 2009 Ignatius Press - Father Joseph Ratzinger’s speech “What Will the Church Look Like in 2000” found in the book entitled Faith in the Future]
Whatever it will mean, O Lord let it not mean that we cower in our corners and hide! Rather, let us, here and now, enthrone Christ the King in our hearts, in our internal and external lives, on our person and in our homes. Let us start with re-discovering the Consecration to the Sacred Heart; attending Adoration of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament; coming under the mantle of Our Lady of Fatima; using sacramentals of Our Faith for protection - blessed oil, water, salt, medal, rosary, crucifix, statue and icon; looking for opportunities or sodalities that afford us the occasions to do works of charity, to do the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; and let us pick up and study the short little yellow booklet called The Reign of Christ the King by Michael Davies [Tan Books]. Let us do these little things here and now, lest we forget to live in the light and grace that Christ is King!
For a deeper study, read Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinely’s excellent book ‘It Is Right And Just: Why the Future of Civilization Depends on True Religion’ [Emmaus Road Publishing, 2020].
