Feast of Christ the King

On today’s great feast day, I wanted to share with you a bulletin excerpt written by Fr. John Connelly of Sacred Heart Parish in Newton, MA – he is a dear friend of ours and always writes very thoughtful columns. For the Feast of Christ the King, he gives us all a little history lesson and reminds us of where we stand today.

It was in 1925 that Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King. This action followed the ending of World War I – the war to end all wars, but which became the first in a series of conflicts that made the 20th century the bloodiest in history. Pope Pius knew well that the feast days of Epiphany and Palm Sunday also focused on Christ the King. But he also knew that the temporal and social character of Christ’s kingship had yet to become sufficiently emphasized. Something had to be done to counteract the individual and social apostasy from God caused by the secular spirit that relegated Christ’s Gospel to the private sphere. The secular spirit means for all practical purposes that God is dead. In some quarters, people will say, this is real progress, if God is dead. Those who follow Christ say the secular spirit is the plague of contemporary society. It has been called the “disincarnation” of the spiritual, the very reversal of what we celebrate at Christmas time – the in-breaking of the Son of God into our human history.

Happy Feast of Christ the King! ~That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth…~ Philippians 2:10