Christ, King of All!

Christ the King, from an altar in Ghent, artist: Jan van Eyck

It has been an "open-secret" that when Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King in 1925 in the Encyclical, Quas Primas, he was doing so for very political reasons. He wanted to illustrate to points: (1) to provide a vivid example of proper government, and (2) to show that government had necessary limits that it could not step beyond. He was not endorsing one political system over another, nor was he endorsing one candidate over another. He was simply highlighting the role of government in relation to other intermediate powers.

The historical context of Quas Primas is Europe between the two world wars. In Russia Papa Pio is seeing the rapid transformation of the Soviet Union into the world’s first totalitarian state under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin. In Germany he can see the incompetence of the Wiemer Republic. In Italy he faces the rise of Mussolini. In many places in the world he is seeing the expansion of atheistic communism and totalitarian-fascism.

Christ the King as depicted in the Cathedral of Wheeling in West Virginia

Neither of these two systems were good forms of government. They subjected their people from their proper roles as citizens, to the subservient role of servants to the powers of the state. Papa Pio accurately fore-told that this would lead to a rapid erosion of personal and human rights, and also to some the catastrophe of Western Civilization we now call World War II and the Holocaust.

These consequences were inevitable, since they denied the basic truths about man: (1) that each person has an inherent dignity that ought not to be violated, (2) that the rights of each person are inherent, especially life – liberty – and the pursuit of happiness, and they cannot be dissolved by the state, and (3) that these ends are to be promoted by the state. In short the state properly exists to promote the temporal and moral well-being of humanity, and both communism and fascism reverses, reducing man to an instrument of the greatness of the state.

Papa Pio wished to counter this by the example of Christ as King. As Saint Irenaeus writes, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” The Kingship of Christ was meant to glorify man and prepare him for eternal life. Papa Pio wished that this serve as an analogous model for the “kingdom of the world” that there glory be found in supporting the full dignity of its citizens.