Another residue of World War One

This Sunday is a hinge in the Christian calendar, the end of the long season of "ordinary time," all those Sundays "after Pentecost" that stretch on through summer and fall (in the northern hemisphere.) The Sunday that precedes the new year and season of Advent is labeled "Christ the King."

I don't remember encountering Christ the King Sunday in the very Protestant Episcopal American-nationalist congregation I was raised in during the 1950s. Maybe our clerics didn't truck with no monarchs, proud that their insurrectionist forebears had dispensed with the English king -- this despite a strong undercurrent of Anglophilia. Or perhaps they thought the feast was just a Roman Catholic innovation. In the latter, they were right.

Christ the King Sunday entered the calendar as a papal response to the horrors of World War I in Europe and its aftermath. Chris Gehrz explains.

... the 20th century notion of dedicating one Sunday each autumn to Christ the King emerged out of the Catholic Church’s ongoing wrestling with the worst war to that point in European history.

... One month into that war, Benedict XV began his papacy. Protestant leaders in England and Germany didn’t shy away from the language of holy war, but the new pope — spiritual leader of millions on both sides — was horrified ...

That pope's successor, Pius XI, remained horrified, perhaps more attuned than leaders of Northern Europe to the reality that in Central Europe the carnage didn't end.

In the midst of a “dense fog of mutual hatreds and grievances,” Pius declared the aim of his papacy to be “the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Christ by peace in Christ.” In the 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, he reiterated that “as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ…”

Hence the need for “a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ.”

Emphasizing the royal attributes of Jesus was a telling choice for the decade after WWI. When better to reflect on a kingdom “that shall never be destroyed, and shall stand for ever” (Dan 2:44) than in the aftermath of a war that toppled four royal dynasties? But by the same token, placing special emphasis on the kingship of Jesus also suggested the nervousness of a religious hierarchy that had long relied on earthly kings to hold back forces of secularization.

... Pius thought that the new feast would “provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism…” Most notably, the world war sparked a revolution in Russia that replaced a devoutly Christian monarch with the “Red nightmare” of the “atheistic and bolshevistic Communism” that Pius later warned “aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.” But 1917 also saw Mexico adopt a new constitution containing several articles directly aimed at limiting the influence of the Catholic Church. (Seven years earlier, the overthrow of Portugal’s monarchy had ushered in a similar wave of anticlerical reforms.)

Instituting Christ the King Sunday didn't discernibly turn back the tide of popular repudiation of ancient hierarchies. But putting it in the Church calendar does offer sophisticated preachers a chance to reflect on the central Christian paradox of a God who willingly gives up dominion in order to participate in the suffering of God's creation -- as our new priest-in-charge at Saint John the Evangelist ably did this morning.