Dear Parish Family,
 
This beautiful feast of Christ the King was instituted during a period of great difficulty. It is not an ancient feast, only created in 1925 by Pope Pius XI. At that time, it was with a strong sense of symbolic power that the choice of last Sunday in October was chosen for the feast, and of great importance in terms of the prevailing political situation: the Russian communists came to power with their revolution of October 1917 and the Italian Fascists in October 1922 with their March on Rome. The specific instance for the Pope to make it a solemn feast was the martyrdom of a Catholic priest, Father Miguel Pro, during the revolution in Mexico whose shout and gesture just before his execution, “Viva Cristo Rey!” rang throughout the entire Church. The institution of the feast was almost an act of defiance by the Church against dictators who at the time were seeking to make absolute their own political ideologies, insisting boldly that no earthly power, no particular political system or military dictatorship is ever absolute. The feast was to restate that only the Kingdom of God is absolute, and that this Kingdom is everyone’s source of power. The year 1925 was also the sixteenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea which in the Year 325 defined, proposed, and added to the Creed the words “of his kingdom there will be no end.”

If there is no divine being above us we will be consumed by all that is around us. In other words if Christ is not our king then the principalities and powers of this world will rule us. We will have sold out to them, sold our hearts and souls for the cheap glitz and glitter of fool’s gold. If God is not our Father and Christ is not our king when we shall have our own gods and goddesses — and they will give us nothing. In the end we will have betrayed ourselves and lost our citizenship in the everlasting kingdom of God.
Christ is our King so that the powers of this world cannot hold us in their grip. Our freedom is found in “the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God.” In the Preface for the Mass we find Christ’s mission statement.
As king he claims dominion over all creation, that he may present to you, his almighty Father, an eternal and universal kingdom: a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.

This must be also our mission statement too as the followers of the King, which means that we must be a people of truth, a people who protect the dignity of life in all of its forms. We must be a people liberated from the seductive lures of this world and who live fully in God’s gifts to us. We must be a people of justice, who love others without self-interest, and who work for peace. Choosing Christ as our King is choosing to make our life into a sign of the cross and preach Christ by daily living in his truth: in mind, heart and will. The Gospels consistently emphasize that as followers of Jesus, we are to relate to one another by service, not domination. We are to be servants of those whom most other people ignore. The thief dying beside Christ on the cross recognizes divinity and power in the worst situation of human abasement and torture. By faith and by baptism, which through an external sacramental rite signifies and produces an interior transformation of spiritual identity, we are called to become the sign of ‘divine presence’ in the most trying circumstances. We are not colored by circumstances as believers, rather we add a regal color because we share in the kingship of Christ.
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.