A Feast Some Catholics Still Keep on Its Original Date

Catholics attached to the pre-1969 liturgical calendar, including those who use the traditional Latin Mass under the permissions granted by recent popes, continue to keep Christ the King on Pius XI's original last Sunday of October rather than on the post-1969 last Sunday before Advent, so two different dates for what is, doctrinally, the same feast now coexist within the Catholic Church depending on which liturgical calendar a given parish or community follows, a split that mirrors, on a smaller scale internal to Catholicism, the kind of calendar divergence more usually associated with the difference between Eastern Orthodox churches.

Traditionalist Catholic writers and groups have also tended to emphasise the feast's original, explicitly political content, the direct assertion of Christ's authority over states and public life that Pius XI wrote into Quas Primas against the secularising and totalitarian ideologies of his own time, reading the feast as a standing rebuke to modern secular government that some more recent liturgical commentary, following the 1969 revision's broader and less politically pointed framing as Christ the King of the Universe, treats with noticeably less emphasis on that original nineteen-twenties political confrontation.