Christ the King & the godless Balrogs!
At the end of the Church’s year we focus on the Feast of Christ the King which is a feast that touches on all aspects of human existence. But as a Feast day this feast was instituted relatively recently. Pope Pius XI instituted The Feast of Christ the King in 1925 for the universal church in his encyclical Quas Primas. In so doing, like Gandalf, he drove his pontifical staff in to the bridge of power and said to all the secular Balrogs of our modern times, “You shall not pass… for Christ is King, not you!” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwmJ76VjXaE&ab_channel=TheHobbit ]
Why did he do this? Pius XI, and the rest of the Christian world, witnessed the rise of non-Christian dictatorships in Europe with secular ideologies be it Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism or unfettered Capitalism, and saw Catholics being taken in by these earthly leaders and movements. These dictators often attempted to assert authority over the Church. He connected the increasingly denial of Christ as King to the rise of secularism.
However, despite this feast we have seen more and more aggressive forms of secularisation that have come to dominate the peoples of the West to such an extent that Pope Benedict XVI described it as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’. We now live in a time when the intellectual life of our nations is dominated by the philosophy of nihilism, namely, there is no meaning or purpose to life; where the moral life is corrupted by relativism where there is no right or wrong, no moral norms to live by such that there is a collapse in the practise of the virtues and the rise of increasingly uncontrolled vices; where what it is to be human, what it is to be married and what it is to be male and female is up for grabs and can be redefined and remodelled according to personal whim, bio-technology and trans-humanist developments in technology [watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cACETqHXq94&t=40s&ab_channel=GBNews ].
A dark age has now come upon us as evidenced by the rise of what Pope Francis calls World War III, a war over mankind’s future! Is the future to be one of a technocracy which seeks to control every human being as outlined by George Orwell’s futurist novel ‘1984’ or is human life to be eugenically enhanced, diminished, experimented on or removed as depicted by the novel ‘Brave New World’ of Aldous Huxley?
The feast of Christ the King is also a day for Youth, for the promise of tomorrow lies with the young people of today, hence why it is called Youth Sunday. It was a Feast set up to save and arm young people against attempts to rule, control and enslave their hearts, minds and bodies. But the times in which we now live show that the gradual power and control over the hearts and minds of the young took over 100 years to bring about:
The History of Modern Youth began in the late 19th Century with the Massification of society through the Industrial Revolution that brought us Mass Production, Mass housing, Mass hospitalisation and Mass education. For the first time young people were organised by age and put into classrooms in the new schools that now gave us Mass education. It is from a Youth Class there comes eventually a Youth Consciousness that would be the soil into which the Youth Movements were sown - Hitler Youth of Germany, The Komsomo of Soviet Russia, The Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) of Italian Fascism. All served secular ideologies that made the State God and rejected the human soul for a materialist view of Man.
After the Second World War there followed, years of rationing until the rise of a Consumer society. Young people who were employed from the age of 15 years or possessed from their better off parents spending power of pocket money or acquired an income from sources ranging from paper rounds to odjobs, now became visible to Big Business as a Youth Market.
Big Business saw a great opportunity to access this new Youth Market but they needed to release the buying potential of youth by freeing it from the constraints of moral and religious values held by parents, schools, the Church, establishment Media and Government institutions. In this exploitation of the youth market there was born the manufacturing of a liberation or rebellion of Youth called Youth Culture.
From the mid 50s onwards Youth Culture arises and it had fashion, pop music, hairstyles, dance styles and hip language to mark out its distinct character from the older generations as evidenced by films like ‘Rebel without a Cause’ [James Dean, 1955], ‘If’ [Malcolm McDowell, 1968], ‘That’ll Be The Day’ [David Essex, 1973]. If Youth Culture began with a rebellion against parents and old ways, it soon morphed into a Youth Tribalism by the late 60s and 70s where youth was set against youth as we saw with the appearance ofTeddy Boys, Rockers, Bikers, Mods, Hippies, Soul boys, Skin heads etc [see ‘The Wild One’, 1953; ‘Quadrophenia’, 1979 - based in England around 1964; ‘American Graffiti’ set in 1962; ‘The Warriors’, 1979 - based in New York in 1970s etc].
Well the 70s gave way to the 80s where Youth Culture became more individualised and eclectic in its taste in music, fashion and language reflecting the political era of Thatcher and Reagan. But this was the first sign that Consumerism was absorbing Youth Culture and drawing it away from a liberation or rebellion mode into one where Youth became a by-product and eventually they were to be absorbed into a strife between youth over Designer Labels; so that a consumerist, even dare we say a bourgeois, division developed among youth between who is In and who is Out grounded on the haves and the have nots. It began with trainers but then it eventually grew to incorporate mobile phones as these were the must have and must buy products as they now had a social value that determined whether or not a young person was socially In or Out!
A secular, materialist and consumerist zeitgeist had now arisen in a powerful way, mediated by the sale, purchase and use of modern technology such that youth were drawn into virtual reality, virtual friendships and virtual communities that fed on the self-advertising of youth through their photo-shot illusions, follower indexes of likes and dislikes and a narcissism overload of selfies about what they were doing and what they hope to do, day after day; till it included photos of the meals they were eating! To which people indicated their likes and dislikes - how incredibly boring! So today we can no longer talk about youth as teen-agers but rather Youth as Screen-Agers!
Summary of this History of Youth: Youth Class-Youth Consciousness-Youth Movements-Youth Market-Youth Culture [Youth Tribalism; Youth as By-Product; Designer Youth; Screen-Agers] - Concluding with a Youth that has no sense of liberation, rebellion, critical thinking, just a Compliant Youth that is not woke but asleep to history and the long hard struggle for liberty.
So where is the hope for the future?
Our world today is where information is power and money. Our young people are being drawn into a world held, controlled, manipulated and forged by intelligence agencies, corporate industry, medical data acquisition systems and a massive surveillance state that wants our young people to comply to their agendas and their narratives. Sadly, many do. When we look back at the young men and young women who died in the Second World War to make sure we would lives free from the Great Dictators and consider how young people have been brought to be so uncritical and so compliant to the new dictators and new pharoahs of our time, we stand aghast and shocked.
If ever we need to refocus our minds and hearts to be witnesses of Liberty and harbingers of Hope it is now. We need to raise our heads above the waters of State sponsored chaos and State suppression of Dissidents that is all around us and behold He who is ever ancient and ever new and who always wills our complete good, Christ the King! We need to make Christ be King of our hearts, minds, wills and bodies for in such times of totaliatrian control of news, media and institutions, He alone has the spiritual and corporeal power to draw us up out of the chaos of totalitarian slavery and into the order of grace where true and lasting freedom is to be found.
Today, we stand at a cross roads: we can either choose to submit to the powers and principalities of this world that wish to make us slaves to deadly illusions and foist on us new ways of giving death or we can choose the Kingship of Christ who desires us to have life to the full by living free in the grace of God. Before us lies the choice of the way of grace or the way of slavery! In the words of St Paul, Christ is the King who alone can set all creation ‘...free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21).
Our Lord, in the Book of Revelation, makes this statement about himself: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” which refers to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Jesus is the Omega because he comes at the end of the prophecies of the Old Testament and is therefore their fulfilment but this is so because he was there at the beginning of both creation and history. He is the Alpha because through him all things were made as John’s Gospel makes clear when we states:
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.’
The Lord Jesus, as The Word of God, is Alpha and the Omega and he is thus the King Cosmologically, Historically and also Universally. As King the world, the cosmos, history and the universe belong to him and not the World Economic Forum! And in this month of November we remember because he is raised from the dead that he is also the Lord of the Living and the Dead as he is the first born of the new creation through his glorified and risen humanity.
In the words of St John Eudes, the Kingship of Christ establishes a visible Kingdom in the Church wherein
‘He intends to perfect the mysteries of his passion, death and resurrection, by causing us to suffer, die and rise again with him and in him... he wishes to fulfil in us the state of his glorious and immortal life, when he will cause us to live a glorious, eternal life with him and in him in heaven.’
In the meantime, we stand like sentinels on our watchtower awaiting the riders who must soon come over the horizon with great news as they tell us that the “Babylon of the Balrogs has fallen and we are free!” A sentiment and a chant for all today as we find great consolation when we read the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s great song ‘All Along the Watchtower’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT7Hj-ea0VE&ab_channel=BobDylanVEVO ]:
All along the watchtower
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the line
Nobody offered his word
Hey, hey
No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late, hey
Hey
All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Well, uh, outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl, hey
