The Feast of Christ the King

23.11.08 Community Sermon of Feast – Br. Philip

The Feast of Christ the King

In his encyclical of Dec. 11, 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted a new feast, the Feast of the Christ of King, which is to be celebrated on the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year.

Why did the Holy Father want to commemorate, by a special feast, a doctrine so uncontroversial? Why was the moment ripe, did he suppose, for that particular lesson? Perhaps it is easier to understand that if you understand who the Holy Father was.

He did not belong to the ordinary tradition of ecclesiastical Rome. Until he was sixty, he was known as a librarian and a scholar; he lived in an international and interdenominational world of scholarship. He was the only Pope since the Reformation and long before it, who had visited Oxford. He was librarian of the Ambrosian library at Milan. Quite suddenly at the age of sixty, he was sent as Nuncio to Poland, that is to all that there was of Poland, when the Russian Revolution had already happened and the war was not yet over. The story is that he was chosen for the post, because he was thought capable of learning Polish in a fortnight. His position lasted on after the war; and he was in Warsaw at what was probably the most thrilling moment of history since Versailles; the moment at which the Red Armies swept through Polish territory and were at the very gates of the capital, which seemed doomed to fall. The Government was preparing to leave; it was suggested to the embassies that they should leave too. Mgr. Ratti insisted on staying; the American, Italian and Danish envoys, - no other – remained to follow his example and share his fate. But he saw onthe Feast of the Assumption, the Polish Army roll back the Bolshevists from the gates of Warsaw in defeat.

Almost immediately he was recalled to Italy and was made Archbishop of Milan. It was under his very eyes that the early struggles between the Italian Communists and the growing strength of the Fascists took place, within the walls of his own cathedral city. He had not held the position for a year when he was summoned to Rome for the conclave following the death of Benedict XV; and from the conclave he never returned.

In the course of that providential career he had seen more than it is given to most Popes to see. His background is a background of European culture; and circumstances had suddenly thrust under his eyes, after his sixtieth year, vivid impressions of that great struggle between two great forces in Europe, national and international socialism, which the rest of the world hardly suspected as yet. When he was crowned Pope, he insisted on giving his blessing to the world from the balcony of St. Peter’s, a thing no Pope had done since the loss of its temporal power. Even so early, he had made up his mind that the Papacy must come out of its retirement, and make itself felt as a moral force in the world. And he introduced this feast of the Kingship of Christ with the same ideal in view. He saw that the minds of men, of young men especially, all over Europe, would be caught by a wave of conflicting loyalties which would drown the voice of conscience and produce everywhere unscrupulous wars between nations. To save the world, if he could, from the frenzy of reckless idealism, he would recall it to the contemplation of a simple truth. The claim that the claim of Christ comes first, before claims of nationality. Peace and justice were duties to God more than any duties to his fellow men. And all that before the conflict between the Church and Fascism, before the revolution in Spain, before the name of Hitler had ever been set up in the type-room of a foreign newspaper.

The institution of this feast was not a gesture of clericalism against anti-clericalism, still less a gesture of authoritarianism against democracy. It was a gesture of Christian truth against a world which was on the point of going mad with political propaganda; it was to say to the world that the claim of the divine law upon the human conscience comes before anything else.

The prophet Daniel describing his vision says of Christ:

‘To him was given dominion, and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his Kingdom one that shall not be destroyed’.