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Today’s solemnity of “Christ the King” concludes yet another Church year, a “year of grace” God has offered you and me for the past twelve months. The annual cycle began with Advent, proceeded through the Christmas, Lent, and Easter seasons, and included weeks of “Ordinary Time” which constitutes most of our days! All of that ends today. This religious solemnity provides a moment for all of us to look back and consider the many ways God has blessed us this past year. Then, hopefully, with hearts full of gratitude for all of this—including those misfortunes which taught us where our true happiness is discovered—we can give thanks each day of this coming week for all that God has revealed during this year of grace. Where have we learned this? Through the weekly reading of the gospel of Christ the King, who has taught us the way and the truth about how we might live each day as God’s beloved sons and daughters, and through partaking of his Body and Blood each week in Holy Communion. Did you know that Pope Pius XI established this solemnity on December 11, 1925, to provide a clarion call for Catholics in that historical era—the middle of the “Roaring Twenties”—to engage in spiritual combat? Indeed, he did. Pius XI wanted the new solemnity to challenge Catholics to confront the great evil of the day—totalitarianism—as this was evidencing itself in Germany and Russia, in particular, as the Nazi and Stalinist regimes were beginning to consolidate and exert their absolute domination over the German and Russian people long before the outbreak of what would eventually become World War II. With the dictators Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin beginning to impose autocratic rule upon the German and Russian people, Pope Pius XI saw Christianity being displaced by atheistic political dogmas which had as their impetus nothing other than to secularize nations of people and subjugate them to totalitarian rule. This goal would be achieved as these dictators would get their people to marginalize Jesus’ teaching to the sidelines of their daily lives until it ultimately became irrelevant. Pius XI called this a “moral disorder,” as the dictators’ singular goal was to replace God’s divine order with a secular and atheistic order. Thus, by instituting the solemnity of Christ the King, the Pope wanted to present Jesus as the ideal ruler, the One sent by God to restore divine order in a very chaotic world. Looking back, that’s not really all that long ago—only nine decades—and although most of the Catholics who responded to Pius XI’s challenge and confronted those evils are now deceased, the memory of what some of that witness required is preserved in movies which remind us of their heroic witness. Take our fellow co-religionist, General Douglas MacArthur, for example. Equally heroic but not memorialized in movies was the philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand. So, too, with Claire Booth Luce, George Schuster, Alfred E. Smith, Joseph McCarthy, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Francis “Frank” Sheed, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Spencer Tracy, Vince Lombardi, Henry Hyde, William F. Buckley, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. Each, in his or her own way, made Jesus Christ “King” and followed his rule—granted, some more perfectly than others—as the way and the truth of their lives. But, that’s the stuff of history and, as interesting as it may be, for some of us gathered here today, it’s ancient history. What can the solemnity of Christ the King mean for us today, and especially for our young people? To answer that question, we must first answer the question Pius XI raised in 1925: As Catholics, what evils must we confront if we are to make Jesus Christ “King” of our lives and follow his rule today? While identifying these evils might enable us to enter more fully into today’s solemnity, doing so would require surmounting what is an immense obstacle which keeps us from even considering what those evils might be. What’s that obstacle? Our participation in evil during this past year of grace which has made what is objectively “wrong” feel subjectively “right.” We can know that we have allowed this particular obstacle to get in the way when this past year of grace and its culmination in the solemnity of Christ the King means very little, if anything to us. For those of us for whom this statement is an accurate depiction of our lived reality, we will leave Mass today unchanged and the new year of grace which begins next week—the First Sunday of Advent—will also mean little if anything to us. The victor, at least in the short term, will be the power of evil alive and at work not only in our world but also in our lives. As Catholics, what evils must we confront today if we are to make Jesus Christ “King” of our lives? Put in somewhat different way, what rules us to the point that it defines the way and the truth of our daily lives? Consider the national holiday we will be celebrating this coming Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. For many of us, Thanksgiving Day provides a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with family and relatives. We may travel to the homes of other people or they may travel to our homes. There will be the parades to watch in the morning and the football games in the afternoon. Then, we will gather around a table larded with a cornucopia of tasty delights. Some of us will stuff ourselves so much that we will have to stretch out and take a nap before partaking of more food and, in particular, dessert. Then, we may turn on yet another football game or spend some time visiting before grabbing a turkey and stuffing sandwich (topped with cranberry sauce) before going to bed so that we can rise early on “Black Friday,” get out the front door, and begin shopping for Christmas. What’s wrong with this scenario? As Catholics, what is ruling us so that what is “objectively” wrong feels subjectively “right”? For a hint to the answer of this question, consider what’s glaringly absent in this traditional Thanksgiving Day scenario by considering an alternative scenario. In what ways would Thanksgiving Day be different if what we did as families was to attend and really participate in Mass together by giving sincere and heartfelt thanks to God for the many blessings God has bestowed upon us and, then, if we were to spend the remainder of the Thanksgiving Day as we would spend any “normal” Sunday but without turning on the television, computer, or IPod and turning off the cell phone so that we could enjoy and be thankful for one another? Pretty boring, no? My point is not to denigrate the traditional Thanksgiving celebration, but to raise to conscious awareness how many of us knowingly or unknowingly have allowed the obstacles of materialism, consumerism, and secularism to push God almost, if not completely out of the picture on Thanksgiving Day turning what in essence is a religious celebration into a completely secular celebration. Wouldn’t Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin look on approvingly or celebrate enthusiastically because what makes Thanksgiving so delightful and what many of us look forward to it is eating, drinking, and making merry…while we forget entirely about God? Recall what Jesus taught his disciples in today’s gospel: “In those days before the flood, [people] were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage….So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” In our nation, the will of the people is supposed to rule. That is what it means to be a “free” and “sovereign” people. But, we oftentimes don’t consider how evil can co-opt free will. External forces—like materialism, consumerism, and secularism—can seduce us into believing we are self-ruling. However, the simple truth is that when we sell our souls to these external forces, “We the people” don’t rule but are being ruled, slaves who believe themselves free. The past “year of grace” has led us to this moment of today’s solemnity of Christ the King which challenges us to acknowledge once again that Jesus is the way and the truth of our lives. We should want Jesus to rule us so that, as Catholics, the gospel will influence and shape our lives so that what Jesus thinks, what Jesus does, and what Jesus knows—as we have learned about all of this by hearing the gospel each Sunday—rules us and, through our witness, Christ the King will re-establish God’s divine order in our lives and, through our discipleship, in our very chaotic world. We can only confront those external forces which enslave our power of will—like materialism, consumerism, and secularism—as we accept the rule of Christ the King, so that his ideals, aspirations, and commands influence what each of us thinks, what each of us does, what each of us feels, and ultimately, who each of us is in our daily lives. When we acknowledge Christ the King, we sacrifice ourselves and our wills to allow the image of God within to guide us. This is how we overcome those obstacles what otherwise would keep us from establishing the Lord’s house as the highest mountain and raising it above the hills so that every nation will stream toward it and its peoples will say, “Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.”
A brief
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HOMILY
