Christ the King

A political feast reconsidered

Guanajuato

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The Feast of the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ was instituted by Pius XI, rather belatedly, Anno Domini 1925. In his explanatory letter, Quas primas, Pius declared that it would be celebrated on the last Sunday of October, before All Saints, as it still is in the Latin rite. With his 1969 motu proprio, Mysterii Paschalis, Paul VI re-designated it “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” and re-situated it on the final Sunday before Advent, where Christ the King, as it is popularly known, stands as the conclusion of the liturgical year.

This situation better corresponds to the Father’s purposes in creation, for the dominion promised to the man made in the image of God comes to final fruition in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, who is that man—the one who now sits at the right hand of God, having been found worthy “to receive blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever.” It better corresponds to the announcement of Gabriel to Mary, and to the final clause of the middle article of the creed, “his kingdom shall have no end.” It better corresponds to the Spirit’s work of adorning the handiwork of God with surpassing beauty, effecting the marriage of heaven and earth, and to the role of the church in leading the choir of creation in adoration of the Holy Trinity.

As completion of the Pentecostal arc and capstone to the liturgical year, this feast perfects the symbolic redemption of time. At the beginning of that arc stands the Solemnity of the Ascension. At its end stands Christ the King. The perspective is eschatological. It does not send us back into Advent as if enclosing us in the hollow, wearisome time of eternal recurrence. It sends us forward in fresh anticipation of Christ’s royal parousia and the coming transfiguration of the world. It serves to remind us that the church, with its eucharistic liturgy, appeared in human history as “a great portent,” as “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” It serves to remind us that the consummation of all things is at hand.

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Now, the long stretches of secular time between the ascension of Jesus and his return to effect the last judgment and the regeneration of all things, reflected in the long stretches of so-called ordinary time between Pentecost and Christ the King, present a certain subtle temptation to subtle men. “The master,” they say, “delays his coming; shall we not take advantage of his goods and chattels meanwhile?” Such men, some of whom are merely worldly while others are truly wicked, forget the unsubtle warning of their master: “The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looks not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him asunder and appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.”

These same stretches present also a second and a third temptation. The second is the temptation to doubt that the master will come at all. St Peter spoke to that when he said:

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

St Paul likewise, when he said that the Day of the Lord “shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that as God he sits in the temple of God, making himself out to be God.”

The first temptation appeared almost as soon as the Roman imperial persecution ceased and Christian emperors appeared; it is still with us today, many reformations notwithstanding. Those who succumb to it turn stones into bread and bread into stones. The second temptation took much longer to mature. It flowered with nominalism and fruited with many subtleties in the Enlightenment. It is only now emerging into the open in such a way as to lose its subtlety. Even so, it continues to draw many into apostasy who ought to know better. Those who succumb to it will accept the man of perdition when he comes, when he descends majestically from the pinnacle of the temple of God to seat himself there as if he were God.

The third temptation is more subtle yet. It is the condition of possibility for the other two. It is the temptation, as Cyril of Jerusalem might say, proper to the church—the temptation to suppose that the bride of Christ, already pregnant with the kingdom of Christ, must bring it to term and birth it into the world. It is the temptation so powerfully dramatized by Dostoevsky: the temptation to believe that the church will enfold all nations, ruling over them or through them in the name of Christ, while no longer truly believing in Christ.

I hope the reader will not misunderstand me when I say that, in Quas primas, Pius does not sufficiently guard against these temptations; that his analysis, being profound yet somewhat insufficiently eschatological, is prone, in the wrong hands, to distortion of the church’s rule with Christ. This, at all events, I will try to explain.

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It is true, as Pius asserts, that through the church the gospel brings to society enormous benefit. It is safe to say, as he does say, that “once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.” Did Jesus himself not say that those who forsake all to follow him will receive much by way of blessing in this life and incomparably more in the life of the world to come? Surely, then, it is reasonable to suppose that a society of such men will also benefit greatly.

Yet forsaking all is a necessary condition. That being so, we can hardly suppose that the mission of the church is to build the kingdom or even to guide its construction. Its mission is only to dress stones for the building, those “living stones” of which Paul and John speak. When that task is finished the Architect himself will return. He who on the third day raised up the temple of his own body, he who into the third millennium has raised up a people for a temple of the Spirit, will appear to consecrate that temple. When he comes, the kingdom of God will come with him.

Building the kingdom is not the business of the church. Announcing the kingdom, living the kingdom, preparing men for the kingdom—men of Israel and men of every nation—that is the business of the church. For, as Isaiah prophesied,

To us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace
    there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
    and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
    with justice and righteousness
    from that time on and for ever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

The reader of this passage, as it is rendered in the KJV or the NRSV rather than (as here) the NIV or the LXX, might well suppose that with the birth of the holy child the kingdom of peace has already come; that, rather like our national budgets and bureaucracies, it only requires increase without end. It has come, of course. But it has come precisely where Jesus has gone to receive it.

When his disciples gather “in one place” to pray that it will come here also, when they petition the Father that his will be done on earth as it is done in heaven—that Christ reign on earth, as he reigns in heaven—they are not praying for the expansion of the influence or power of the Vatican, or for the sway of the Catholic Church over the nations. They are praying, or should be praying, as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane. They are praying for courage to join the Faithful Witness in bearing witness; for the courage to testify, in word and deed, that the King has come and will come; for the perseverance to do so until he does come, bearing on his once-crucified, now glorified, shoulders the government of God’s kingdom.

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To say to the people of this age, and to their rulers, that they can expect genuine prosperity only by subjecting themselves to God and his Christ is one thing. We can point to historic illustrations of the truth of that claim. But can we make Christ, even symbolically, the King of France or of Poland or of Mexico? This has been tried, as recently, in Poland's case, as 2016. It is tried in vain.

We can say to the rulers of the nations that they do well if they remember the gospel of Christ. We can remind them that their own judgments are subject to being overturned by Christ. We can call on them to rule with the utmost modesty in expectation of their coming judgment by Christ. We can ask them to respect the twin principles of a truly prosperous society, solidarity and subsidiarity, principles that without Christ do not cohere. We can and should go as far as Pius goes in Quas primas, insisting that deliberately to disobey God and his Christ is not to establish an alternative authority, but rather to dispense with the very foundation of authority.

“With God and Jesus Christ,” We said, “excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.”

O, that we would go so far! Do we not face urgent questions as to whether legitimate authority still exists in our political life, or how it may be recovered? Recognition of Christ's kingship is crucial to any recovery.

Pius observes that Christ's kingship is spiritual, that it comes from above and is of an altogether higher order than the kingdoms of this world. As such, it does not eradicate but rather supports lower-order rule. Yet it must not be forgotten, he says, that Christ has been granted legislative, juridical, and executive power over all creatures. “It would be a grave error,” then, “to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, ‘for all things are in his power.’” To celebrate the kingship of Christ is “all the more loudly to proclaim his kingly dignity and power, all the more universally to affirm his rights.”

All true! True also that “our Lord's regal office invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance,” ennobling “the citizen's duty of obedience.” True, as well, that even unbelievers are “subject to the power and dominion of Jesus Christ.” Yet we must be careful with these claims.

Pius is careful, appealing with Leo XIII to Aquinas: “All things are subject to Christ as far as His power is concerned, although they are not all subject to Him in the exercise of that power.” But when he appropriates Leo's own claim in Annum sacrum—the claim that, if men subject themselves to Christ, “it will at length be possible that our many wounds be healed and all justice spring forth again with the hope of restored authority; that the splendours of peace [will] be renewed, and swords and arms drop from the hand, when all men shall acknowledge the empire of Christ and willingly obey His word”—he moves onto shakier ground. It is the same ground, though some will be surprised to hear it, that John XXIII began to explore in Pacem in terris.

On this ground, the church is rightly regarded as the world reconciled, mundus reconciliatus. Yet it must not be forgotten—Paul and John and the author of Hebrews all insist with Jesus that we not forget!—that the church is not the world, and that in the saeculum the world cannot be the church. The city of God and the city of man, having different foundations and different ends, will remain in conflict. As the age wears on and draws to a close, that conflict will intensify, not diminish.

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Unfortunately, there is no reminder of this in Quas primas. Being reminded, must we not read what is said there as invitation rather than expectation, as promise not prophecy? Conditional promise, I mean, on the pattern of Jesus’s announcement to Israel that the kingdom, while he was present, was within their grasp (ἐντὸς ὑμῶν). Two paragraphs of the encyclical are crucial in this regard, so I will quote them in full:

19. When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. Our Lord's regal office invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance; it ennobles the citizen's duty of obedience. It is for this reason that St. Paul, while bidding wives revere Christ in their husbands, and slaves respect Christ in their masters, warns them to give obedience to them not as men, but as the vice-regents of Christ; for it is not meet that men redeemed by Christ should serve their fellow-men. "You are bought with a price; be not made the bond-slaves of men." If princes and magistrates duly elected are filled with the persuasion that they rule, not by their own right, but by the mandate and in the place of the Divine King, they will exercise their authority piously and wisely, and they will make laws and administer them, having in view the common good and also the human dignity of their subjects. The result will be a stable peace and tranquillity, for there will be no longer any cause of discontent. Men will see in their king or in their rulers men like themselves, perhaps unworthy or open to criticism, but they will not on that account refuse obedience if they see reflected in them the authority of Christ God and Man. Peace and harmony, too, will result; for with the spread and the universal extent of the kingdom of Christ men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished.

20. If the kingdom of Christ, then, receives, as it should, all nations under its [s]way, there seems no reason why we should despair of seeing that peace which the King of Peace came to bring on earth—he who came to reconcile all things, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, who, though Lord of all, gave himself to us as a model of humility, and with his principal law united the precept of charity; who said also: “My yoke is sweet and my burden light[.]” Oh, what happiness would be ours if all men, individuals, families, and nations, would but let themselves be governed by Christ! “Then at length,” to use the words addressed by our predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, twenty-five years ago to the bishops of the Universal Church, “will many evils be cured; then will the law regain its former authority; peace with all its blessings be restored. Men will sheathe their swords and lay down their arms when all freely acknowledge and obey the authority of Christ, and every tongue confesses that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”

The sentence at the beginning of §20, in the Vatican translation above, reads rather tendentiously. I won’t burden you with the Latin, which is a bit puzzling (in a colleague’s brief description, “brutal”), but I will offer this alternative translation: “And why, were the kingdom of Christ in practice to include all men, as by right it does include all, would we despair of that peace which the King of Peace has brought to earth—he who came “to reconcile all things,” who came “not to be ministered unto but to minister, [etc.]?”

Read thus, §20 is amenable to the reminder in question. While all men ought to receive the gospel and enter the church, neither Jesus nor the apostles taught that they would. Indeed, they taught the opposite. As invitation, as longing, this encyclical stands squarely in the prophetic tradition, the tradition of Jesus.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Or later, to his own disciples, with reference to the saeculum, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

§20, then, is amenable; §19 is another matter. Can we read it the same way, as invitation, as conditional promise only? Or should we read it as expectation? It is a weakness of the encyclical that it does not make plain how we should read it.

Now, Pius was following up his predecessors’ attacks on indifferentism in the political sphere; that is, on the notion of state neutrality as regards religion and on militant secularism, both of which uproot the governance of man from its foundations in the governance of God. Indifferentism had begun to flourish even among Christians, some of whom mistakenly thought it distinguishable from practical atheism. The problem had not yet come to a head, but it was already provoking an integralist backlash, a backlash that still relies heavily on Quas primas.

Integralism and indifferentism, however, are but two sides of the same coin, as we shall see. Both are products of an inadequate eschatology, a failure of the theological imagination that wants to think spatially, in terms of above and below, before it thinks temporally, in terms of the old and the new.

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Take Raphael’s La Disputa, which stands opposite his School of Athens, as an example. Or is it a counter-example? It buzzes with activity, and with excitement about the new relation between heaven and earth that is participated by way of the eucharist. As Mary Podles observes,

All the perspective lines, all the diversity of figures, converge toward the monstrance at the vanishing point of the picture. The Eucharist is at the heart of the earthly realm and is the breaking through of the Godhead into the ordinary world, and it is on an axis with the Trinity as it is one with them. This vertical axis both unites the different zones of the composition, and forms, with the upper band of clouds, a cross. At the center of the cross is, of course, Christ, who shows the marks of his redeeming sacrifice which has united heaven and earth.

The common title of the painting, notes Podles, was not supplied by Raphael, but was a later, misleading imposition. The painting is not about a dispute; it is about new harmonies. She proposes instead: The Church, the Unity of All Things Created. Viewing the painting itself as a kind of monstrance, we might propose something more christological that also captures the mundus reconciliatus motif. If I Be Lifted Up would do quite nicely.

Through the incarnation, time (on the horizontal axis) is reconciled to eternity (on the vertical axis). Through the cross, the time of anticipation is reconciled with the time of realization and the church militant with the church triumphant. The covenants, old and new, are reconciled. (St Peter instructs Adam, St John instructs David.) The liturgical, doctrinal, and pastoral are reconciled in the careful arrangement of personae, and the artistic too. Through the church and its missions (of which evidence appears in Augustine to the right and on the far horizon to the left) the pagan world receives the invitation to be reconciled.

Painting is primarily a spatial art, as music is primarily a temporal art. Each must work within its own limits. It is no real criticism, then, to say that Raphael, though he takes some account of time in relation to eternity, has more trouble with time in relation to time; that is, with the time of the old creation and the time of the new. He appeals to the eucharist and hints at the second coming, but he does not escape the spatial paradigm of above and below. He does not really know what to do with the saints in heaven but arrange them over top the pilgrims on earth.

That eucharistic vanishing point, however, within the monstrance of his monstrance, beckons like a tiny portal. The kingdom of heaven lies through it and beyond it, not merely above it. It is too small to pass through, yes, but with the descent of the Dove all things are possible. Time and space and matter are transformed, to say nothing of hearts and minds.

Is it I who am now imposing? Perhaps. But with this parenthesis I may at least have succeeded in drawing your own attention to the problem. Whether we are speaking of Christ the Reconciler or of Christ the King, we must face it—this problem of the relation between the old creation and the new, this eschatological problem of continuity and discontinuity between the two.

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Neither of the parties with which we are grappling have faced it. Both think the kingdom already present. It descends from above on the vertical axis of the eucharist. It flows out into time—forward, always forward. Both think it is has come only in part and not yet in full. Their main dispute is about the means by which its fullness can be achieved. While the integralist thinks the nations must be brought under the sway of the church, the indifferentist thinks the church must cooperate with the nations, which wittingly or unwittingly are being carried by the flow of the kingdom. The integralist appeals for support to Vatican I and to Pius X and XI, while the indifferentist appeals to Vatican II and lately to Francis.

If time is a creaturely form, and eternity is God himself, and if in the incarnation the eternal God takes to himself creaturely form, we may deploy a vertical and a horizontal axis in representation of this. But that is not eschatology. No sound eschatology can be plotted on a grid with a vertical and a horizontal axis, save an eschatology that crucifies Jesus afresh. A sound eschatology arises only from the gospel narrative—from word of the death and resurrection of Jesus, of his glorious ascension, and of a coming confrontation that will transform the heavens and the earth and radically re-make and re-situate all who dwell in them. In the incarnate Son of God who tabernacled with us, the transformation has already taken place. “Yet once more,” says the Lord God, “I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven,” that a kingdom that cannot be shaken, the kingdom of Christ the King, may appear.

What is the eucharistic mystery but an advance on this unshakeable kingdom? “Let not the partaking of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation; but let it, through Thy mercy, become a safeguard and remedy, both for soul and body.” In the eucharistic liturgy, the kingdom without end, hidden in the fields of secular time, opens its doors to those who supplicate the Lord of that kingdom: “From a temporal gift may it become to us an eternal remedy.”

If we mistakenly imagine the kingdom itself to be secular, do we even require the eucharist? Or if we suppose that “at length” the eucharist will conquer all secular kingdoms—if we look for a grand wedding feast organized by Mother Mary for all nations, which after they have enjoyed the cheap wine of their adulteries will at last enjoy the good wine of their repentance and submission to the church—will we not pine away for past glories until at last we are overtaken by despair? The kingdom of Christ will not be brought to earth by rulers casting down their crowns before him. On the contrary, they will take counsel together against him, just as the princes of Israel did when he challenged the temple regime. But he himself will come, bringing his kingdom with him. Then they will cast down their crowns, willingly or unwillingly.

What was called Christendom was not the kingdom, nor did it bring the kingdom, though it brought much that was good, much that we are now squandering on hollow simulacra that are turning to open mockery. No, the kingdom comes only with the Rider on the White Horse—not Caesar, but Christ—and by the arraignment of all before his terrible throne. Then and only then will the feast of eternal joy be shared by the people of God drawn from every nation.

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Pius says that the Catholic Church “is the kingdom of Christ on earth,” and so it is, in the eucharistic sense just given. But when he says of his new feast, “If We ordain that the whole Catholic world shall revere Christ as King, We shall minister to the need of the present day, and at the same time provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society,” what is he hoping for? The answer would seem to be: the recovery and expansion of the church’s rule over men, until all are found in submission to Christ.

That we are faced with a plague of impiety cannot be doubted, or that it is accompanied by a “plague of anti-clericalism” with all “its errors and impious activities.” (Pius might have mentioned also the plague of antisemitism, which appears even where pro-clericalism prevails, but he did not; later, with the Nazis in power in Germany, Mit brennender Sorge would at least gesture in that direction by condemning race-based ideology.) Less certain is the claim that such plagues will be overcome if the faithful recognize “that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King,” striving to win over “those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him” while vigorously defending his rights as King and the rights of the Church as well”—though it does indeed behoove them, being altogether right and just.

As for the claim that the church, “founded by Christ as a perfect society, has a natural and inalienable right to perfect freedom and immunity from the power of the state,” that will be granted by anyone who recognizes “the task committed to her by God of teaching, ruling, and guiding to eternal bliss those who belong to the kingdom of Christ.” But Pius’s claims about “the empire of Christ over all nations” and the church’s right “to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation,” are more problematic. If they do not rest on, they at least invite, a serious misreading of the saeculum.

The Gelasian doctrine of two distinct and independent authorities, both operative in the present age, stands in the background here. These authorities are correlative and in principle cooperative. One is higher than the other, however. Ecclesiastical authority exceeds that of the state because the church deals both with secular and eternal concerns, while the state deals only with the former. Where their interests intersect and a conflict arises, respectful negotiation should resolve the problem, leading if necessary to a formal concordat.

All that may be sound enough, where mutual recognition exists and where the consent of the governed is not wanting. Pius, however, thinks that all men, and every external power, ought to submit to the church, and that this “ought” exceeds the obligation of individual conscience and the will of the governed. For “if all men, purchased by his precious blood, are by a new right subjected to his dominion,” it follows that no man or faculty of man “is exempt from his imperium.” If we take him to mean no more and no less than what Leo was saying in Libertas, well and good. But something is in danger of being overlooked; namely, the freedom inherent in the saeculum as an age of grace, as an age of decision, as an age made possible through the divine suspension of judgment while the gospel invitation goes forth.

The freedom inherent in the saeculum is not full freedom, of course. It manifests itself in the libertas ecclesiae and, by extension, in freedom of conscience and religion. It manifests itself in discovery of the dignity of the person and of work and of private property. It manifests itself in new possibilities of solidarity and subsidiarity, and of governance by consent. It manifests itself, above all, in what St Paul called “demonstrations of the Spirit and of power.” But full freedom will arise only when the kingdom appears in its fullness, with the appearance of the King himself to exercise judgment, to drive out the wicked and to remove all that tends, not to liberty, but to bondage. Of that freedom John writes in the conclusion to the Apocalypse:

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day—and there shall be no night there; they shall bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations. But nothing unclean shall enter it, nor any one who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

John is not speaking of the present age. He is speaking of life in the world to come. In the present age, the invitation goes forth to drink of the water of life, that one may arrive at true freedom and live forever. “Whosoever wills” may drink. No one must drink. Even now, the nations may bring their glory into the city of God, but they are not compelled to do so. The church is given no right to rule over the nations. The monarchical church, like the monarchical papacy, is a triumphalist fiction, where its reign is not the reign of the cross.

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Just here we should attend to the fraught context into which Quas primas was dropped. The French Revolution had sounded a gong that was still reverberating around the globe. The Communist Manifesto had appeared in 1848. In Mexico, where an anti-clerical flag had already been planted in the 1857 constitution of the new republican regime, a far more severely anti-clerical regime had come to power in the bloody revolution that began in 1910. The Russian Revolution, of far greater consequence for the world as a whole, had taken place in 1917, in the midst of the Great War. The Chinese Communist Party, and the Italian, had been established in 1921. The kingdoms of man, and the societies of man, were indeed tottering to their fall, though they did not yet know that a second Great War was coming.   

In 1926, within a year of Quas primas, the Cristo Rey monument in Guanajuato was completed and consecrated. This perceived breach of Article 24 of Mexico's revolutionary constitution, forbidding public displays of religion, resulted in a still harsher application and enforcement of anti-religious laws, including expulsions of foreign bishops and monastic orders, expropriation of properties, and charges against people involved in creating the aforementioned monument. So serious and dangerous was the situation that on 31 July the Mexican bishops, with Pius's approval, suspended all public worship. In an unprecedented act, part protest and part self-preservation, they closed their remaining churches. Archbishop José Mora y del Rio, who headed the episcopal assembly, explained that, under the draconian regime of President Calles, the church in Mexico could not “function in accordance with the sacred canons.” (In 2020, bishops in many places around the world would do something similar, without protest and with little regard for sacred canons.)

Growing tensions between Catholics and the country's revolutionary government soon broke out into open conflict. Deprived of their properties, their sacraments, their liberties, and their communities, recourse was made to arms. Between 1 January 1927 and the summer of 1929, La guerra cristera claimed upwards of 100,000 lives. Some say that it was more than twice that number, equalling the approximately 250,000 who were displaced or fled. Catholic “rebels,” where things did not go well, were incarcerated, tortured, and killed. In a return to the tactics of ancient Rome, some were strung up on telegraph poles as a warning to the rest of the population.

There were atrocities on both sides, if much more often on the side of the revolution than of the revolt. The atheistic materialism of the former allied itself with a brutally utilitarian ethic. In this context, naturally, there were many martyrs among the innocent, some three dozen of which have lately been canonized. (Yesterday was the feast of Blessed Miguel Pro, the most famous among them.) As for those who fought with conventional arms, the flag under which they fought read Viva Cristo Rey y Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Thus did Quas primas find its first expression on the ground—ground stained with blood.

Neither side being able to attain a decisive victory, a ceasefire was arranged, supported by Rome and by Washington, and the Cristiada came to an end. The persecution, however, did not come to an end. It some regions it became even more severe, especially those controlled by Tomás Garrido Canabal (Governor of Tabasco from 1920–1935) and his notorious Red Shirts, who saw to it that the Cristero flag did not fly there, nor any religious symbol appear, nor any sacrament be celebrated without swift and lethal punishment. Graham Greene, having visiting that region—"I went to my first bootleg Mass today," he reported in a letter dated 13 April 1938—wrote of it in his dark but brilliant novel, The Power and the Glory.

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Long live Christ the King? Well, yes! "His kingdom shall have no end,"whatever the likes of Calles and Canabal may say or do about it. Yet just as we cannot enthrone him—God has already done that—neither can we raise an army for him. It is possible, as Solovyov maintains, to have a Christ-loving army. It is not possible to have an army that fights for Christ with the weapons of this world. Only the martyr does that, and the weapons are in the hands of his executioner. Even Don Juan of Austria's army, whose exploits at Lepanto in 1571 under the banner of Pius V's Holy League were so strikingly recalled in Chesterton's epic poem, did not fight for Christ and Mary, though doubtless it was aided by Christ and Mary. It fought rather for the defence of Europe and of Christian civilization.

That is not a distinction without a difference! It is only the martyr who can enthrone Christ, because only the martyr shares Christ's throne in the saeculum, reigning through the cross. (In The Power and the Glory, a book with a theological profundity to match its author’s literary prowess, Greene’s protagonist slowly learns what it means to embrace martyrdom, finding his life by losing it. Just so does he fulfill his priestly role as alter Christus. But more on that another time.) Popes bear a cross, too, a heavy one. Yet even they do not reign with Christ. They are stewards. They have charge of the keys to the only kingdom that really matters, the kingdom for which we should pray to be “strengthened with all might according to the power of His glory, in all patience and long suffering with joy; giving thanks to God the Father, who hath made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love...”

Peoples and nations may also bear a cross when they seek to gain or maintain a Christian social order. But they do not reign with Christ when they have such, nor are they martyred when they lose such, though individuals among them may well be martyred, perhaps in great numbers. Michael Kenny, in his lament of 1927, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, begins with the moving poem of his fellow Jesuit, A. R. McGratty.

This I have seen:

                     a nation hung

On its bleeding cross, with arms outflung

   To sever the startled air of dawn

   As out of the night is Calvary born;

And the Rio crimsons beneath the tide

Of blood that flows from the crucified

   Whilst the Christ once slain in the long ago

   Has mounted a cross in Mexico.

This first stanza contains a powerful metaphor that points both to the suffering of the Mexican people and to Christ’s compassion for them. We must be careful here, however. Anyone, including a soldier, who dies for refusing to recant the faith, can pass from this world to the next as a martyr, with the confession of Christ on his lips. But when the Marxist serpent is swallowing the Mexican eagle, can the eagle cry, Viva Cristo Rey? A martyr may have many companions, but a martyr is not a people and a people cannot be a martyr.

I am not condemning the Cristiada. If citizens have a right and a responsibility to bear arms for the state, they also have a right and a responsibility to bear arms against the state when it has become tyrannical in its denial of their rights and vicious in its attacks on the souls or bodies of their children. (The materialist, ironically, is especially interested in the soul; like a dementor, he goes after the mind and conscience of the young, as Kenny’s book makes clear.) Practical judgments about either responsibility must be made with great prudence. Any decision to bear arms must be carefully scrutinized for conformity to natural law and to the ethical demands of justice. But we may ask whether the whole situation would have unfolded as it did had the church been less attached to its worldly properties and privileges, which it wrongly viewed as possessions of Christ; had it also, and as a matter of first importance, refused to cease offering public Masses as a remedy for body and soul, choosing to fight its own proper battle precisely as the church, rather than to withdraw temporarily to the margins, leaving the field to those prepared to engage in civil war, on the one hand, and to the few who were prepared to embrace martyrdom, on the other. In other words: Would it have better served the people of Mexico with a more nuanced, if equally courageous, doctrine of Christ the King? 

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Such a doctrine is not to be found with either the indifferentist or the integralist. The former, himself very much an activist, advocates ecclesial quietism. Ernesto Buonaiuti, writing anonymously in 1908 on his behalf, opines that “the Church should be only too glad to be able to lay down every sort of political preoccupation, and to retire back into the sphere of her spiritual dominion, confining herself to the religious guidance of souls.”

The latter, if something of a quietist himself, contends that the church must ride forth into the fray on a white horse, bringing the nations to heel and subjecting them to the law of Christ. The social kingship of Christ must be proclaimed and insisted upon. Should it be objected that such talk is an affront to freedom, the retort is made (in Archbishop Lefebvre’s words) that “freedom is not the fundamental principle, nor [even] a fundamental principle in the matter.”

The public law of the Church is founded on the State’s duty to recognize the social royalty of Our Lord Jesus Christ! The fundamental principle which governs the relations between Church and State is the "He must reign" of St. Paul, Oportet illum regnare (I Cor. 15:25)—the reign that applies not only to the Church but must be the foundation of the temporal City.

The mistake of the indifferentist or modernist is to follow Rousseau in dividing body from soul, thus dispensing with any need for the keys save in matters of the soul. The mistake of the integralist or Lefebrist is to conjoin the city of man to the city of God, neglecting Augustine and pining for the days of the Dictatus papae or of Boniface VIII, who seemed to think that precious little in life did not require an exercise of the keys.

The problem common to both, I have suggested, is a spatialized construal of the kingdom of heaven as something lying above the kingdoms of this world, whether timelessly or within a common time-frame. For the modernist, that something is purely spiritual or ideational. For the integralist, it is the source of a cosmic political hierarchy. There is little operative eschatology in either case. One way or another, then, the power of heaven is manifested in worldly glory.

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“The Church,” we read in Lumen gentium, “that is, the kingdom of Christ already present in mystery, grows visibly through the power of God in the world.” But what is that power? It is the power of the cross. In the saeculum, the cross is the divine sceptre.

The origin and growth of the Church are symbolized by the blood and water which flowed from the open side of the crucified Jesus (cf. Jn. 19:34), and are foretold in the words of the Lord referring to his death on the cross: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”

No sound doctrine of Christ the King can appeal directly from his enthronement on the cross to his enthronement in heaven. Neither can it conflate the two; for they are not the same thing. Rather, it must take the indirect way, the humble way of the sacraments.

This is the way we are led by John in the opening chapter of the Apocalypse. Christ's kingship is entirely manifest in heaven and to heaven, in that new creation where he reigns in body and soul. It is hidden, however, on earth and to earth, in the chaotic old creation we ourselves inhabit. There it is revealed only through the preaching of the cross and the mysterious adventus in gratia of the eucharist, by the blood of the martyrs and accompanying miracles. These things have many consequences, including political consequences, but men ruling men in the name of Christ the King is not among them.

The “prince” of the church, whose office is that of an ambassador, most often proposes rather than imposes, the power of the keys notwithstanding; that is how Christ himself ruled among us. The secular prince may also strive to emulate Christ. He does not act, however, as vice-regent of Christ. He does not rule, however he rules, by virtue of divine appointment. He rules by reason of strength or by way of civil agreement. He rules also by the hidden hand of providence, of course, and by divine permission. But divine permission is not the same as divine appointment, nor does it imply divine sanction, except in the most general sense; viz., that God has determined that there should be rule and rulers, and that they should rule justly. He has not determined how they are chosen or who they must be, though he has determined, for rulers and ruled alike, “allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation.”

Christendom included, and therein lies a lesson. Historically speaking, Christendom was a realm and an era in which, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “the truth of Christianity was taken to be a truth of secular politics.” It did exist, but not as an expansion of Christ’s rule. Nor was its loss a contraction or diminishment of his rule—something altogether impossible, since God the Father has made him Lord of all, whether in the old creation or the new. It is the will of God in Christ that men should choose freely whom they will serve. One man cannot choose for another. One generation cannot choose for another.

The clause, “His kingdom shall have no end,” was not added to the creed in support of some Christian precursor to Muslim irredentism! Its target was the heresy of Marcellus of Ancyra, which threatened to dissolve the doctrine of the Trinity through a Sabellian reading of history, as later did that of Joachim and Lessing and Hegel. That would mean also, and may yet mean, the dissolution of the notions of personhood and of liberty that derive from the doctrine of the Trinity. Against such threats, the fathers insisted that the incarnation is permanent, that the new creation in Christ is permanent, that the authority given Jesus to mediate between God and man is permanent, and that his judgments will be forever in force.

They did not insist, nor should anyone concede, that these judgments are vouchsafed to the world as political or legal instructions, passed on by the church, that the kingship of Christ be thus manifest. As the catechism says, it is the church itself that is to “show forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies”: by evangelization, first of all, and by teaching men everywhere to love the true and the good, while diligently preserving freedom from coercion, especially in matters of conscience or religion. Only thus may it hope to see the Christian spirit infused “into the mentality and mores, laws and structures,” of the city of man—here and there, now and then, for a time.

Conclusion

The introit for the Feast of the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the 1962 missal, is an appeal to the first and the fifth chapters of the Apocalypse. The Gospel reading is from John 18, where Jesus stands trial before Pilate, declaring that his kingdom is not of this world; hence that his servants do not fight for it as others fight. When the post-communion prayer is said—"We have received the food of immortality and beg, Lord, that we who are proud to fight under the banner of Christ our King, may reign with Him for ever in His realm above"—it is still the fight envisioned in these texts that is in view. The weapons are spiritual, the perspective is eschatological, and Paul VI's intention in re-situating this feast was to make it still more eschatological. The feast of Christ the King, then, bids us look beyond the saeculum, while living faithfully in the saeculum. 

In Quas primas, as we have seen, the eschatology is of a more “realized” sort. Otherwise put, there is some chaff among the wheat. What is the wheat, and what the chaff? The wheat is the reminder that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ, and that this must be announced to the world. The wheat is the assurance that there is no sphere or faculty of man untouched by the accession of Christ to his place at the Father’s right hand; that everything we think and say and do, politically or otherwise, should be regarded as subject to his reign. The wheat is the confidence of the martyr who dies with Viva Cristo Rey on his lips.

The chaff is the support it lends to the idea that earthly princes rule, or may rule, as regents of Christ, and to the expectation that, under the tutelage of the church, they will eventually do so. That is a different claim than the claim that they rule only by Christ’s permission and as those subject, like everyone else, to his impending judgment, concerning which they ought to give heed to the church. The former claim tends to triumphalism, and to the postmillennist error. It is quite capable of passing over into defeatism and apostasy. The latter tends to readiness for whatever comes, until the Lord himself comes and all the faithful shout, Viva Cristo Rey!

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Martyrdom of Miguel Pro, 23 November 1927

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