Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

In his Encyclical of December 11, 1925, His Holiness Pius XI denounced the great modern heresy of Laicism. It refuses to recognize the rights of God and His Christ over persons and peoples and organizes the lives of individuals, families and of society itself, as though God did not exist. This laicism ruins society, because in place of the love of God and one’s neighbour, it substitutes pride and egoism. It begets jealousy between individuals, hatred between classes and rivalry between nations.

The world denies Christ because it ignores His royal prerogatives. It must be instructed on this subject. Now “a yearly feast can attain this end, more effectively than the weightiest documents issued by ecclesiastical authority.” The Holy Father has instituted this new feast to be a public, social and official declaration of the royal rights of Jesus, as God the Creator, as The Word Incarnate, and as Redeemer. This feast makes these rights to be known and recognized, in a way most suitable to man and to society by the sublimest acts of religion--particularly by Holy Mass. In fact, the end of the Holy Sacrifice is the acknowledgment of God’s complete dominion over us, and our complete dependence on Him. And this act is accomplished, not only on Calvary but also through the royal priesthood of Jesus which never ceases in His kingdom, which is heaven. The great reality of Christianity is not a corpse hanging from a cross, but the risen Christ reigning in all the glory of His triumph in the midst of His elect who are His conquest (Epistle). And that is why the Mass begins with the finest vision of the Apocalypse where the Lamb of God is acclaimed by angels and saints (Introit).

The Holy Father has expressed his wish that this feast should be celebrated towards the end of the liturgical year, on the last Sunday of October, as the consummation of all the mysteries by which Jesus has established His royal powers and nearly on the eve of All-Saints, where He already realized them in part in being “the King of kings and the crown of All Saints” (Invitatory at Matins); until He shall be the crown of all those on earth whom He saves, especially by the Mass. It is indeed principally by the Eucharist which is both a sacrifice and a sacrament, that Christ, now in glory, assures the results of the victorious sacrifice of Calvary, by taking possession of souls through the application of the merits of His Passion