The final Sunday of the Church year is the Solemnity of Christ the King. The next Sunday we begin a new Church year with the Season of Advent. In 1925 Pope Pius XI established the Feast of Christ the King. In the years following World War I, as Europe slid into the horrors of another World War, Europe saw countries, one by one, taken over by dictatorships, some fascist and some communist. Most of these dictators put themselves above the teachings of God, or denied God even existed.
In the midst of this increasingly secular society where God was absent, Pius XI called for the Church to remember that Christ is King – King over our lives, our world, and the universe. The Pope wrote:
He (Christ) must reign in our minds, which should assent with perfect submission and firm belief to revealed truths and to the doctrines of Christ. He must reign in our wills, which should obey the laws and precepts of God. He must reign in our hearts, which should spurn natural desires and love God above all things, and cleave to him alone. He must reign in our bodies and in our members, which should serve as instruments for the interior sanctification of our souls, or to use the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘as instruments of justice unto God.’
The message is as important for us today in our increasingly secular society as it was in 1925.
As a priest, Pope St. John Paul II lived first under the Nazi occupation of his native country of Poland and then under the Communist oppression of his country. As different as the Nazis and Communists were, they had this in common: both told the people that their rights and their dignity came from the State. The Nazis told the people that their dignity came from being members of the Third Reich; the Communists told the people that their dignity came from being a worker for the State.
John Paul II, as priest, bishop, and Pope, told the people that this was a lie. He reminded his fellow Poles that their dignity did not come from the State but from God. Their dignity and their fundamental rights came from the fact that they were created by God in His image and likeness. His proclamation of this truth inspired the Polish people to throw off the oppression of the Communists in a revolution in which not one bullet was fired.
In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI made a state visit to England and addressed Parliament in Westminster Hall, the very hall in which St. Thomas More had been sentenced to death in 1535 because he would not accept King Henry VIII as the head of the Church in England. As he was condemned to death Thomas More stated: “I die the king's faithful servant, but God's first.” Thomas knew that Christ was king over all, even earthly kings.
Pope Benedict challenged the British Parliament, and indeed all secular democracies, by presenting this issue before them: In our increasingly secular western democracies, in which we increasingly do not wish to acknowledge God, then where do our dignity and fundamental rights come from? If we do not wish to admit that there is a God, then who gives us dignity and rights?
Without God, the only answer left is that our rights come from the State. They come from the government. But this is the same lie of which the Nazis and the Communists were guilty. And it is dangerous lie. Whatever the government can give, the government can take away. Our dignity and fundamental rights come from the fact that God has given them to us.
This is not only a statement of faith, it is also the justification written in the foundational document of our Nation, the Declaration of Independence. The Founders of our nation wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The founders of the country said to the King of England that our rights do not come to us from any king, parliament, or court, instead, they come to us from our Creator – God.
As we observe the Feast of Christ the King, let us remember that this powerful message proclaimed both by our faith and by our country’s founders. This message must be remembered and proclaimed.