Christ the King

The feast of Christ the King is one of the most datable in the calendar: Pope Pius XI instituted it in 1925 in the encyclical Quas Primas. Its context was explicit. Written in the aftermath of the First World War and amid the rise of secular nationalism and totalitarian movements in Europe, it asserted the kingship of Christ over states and societies as well as souls, a deliberate counter-claim against ideologies that made the nation or the party ultimate.

Pius set it on the last Sunday of October, before All Saints. In the 1969 revision of the Roman calendar it was renamed the solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, and moved to the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the week before Advent, so that the year now ends by proclaiming Christ's reign over all time before it begins again with his first coming. Several Protestant churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary have adopted the day, often as "the Reign of Christ", giving a twentieth-century Catholic feast a modest ecumenical afterlife.

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.