Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King. It’s the last Sunday in the liturgical year: next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to relive liturgically the whole mystery of the meaning of life as we apprehend it, once again from the beginning, with the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem.

The liturgical year now ends with the feast of Christ the King, This is a feast introduced by Pope Pius XI in 1925. What he was doing then was simply to sanction and ratify a movement which started about 1870 in the town of Paray-le-Monial in France, a movement called La Société du Règne Social de Jésus-Christ, the founders of which seem mostly to have been aristocrats and merchants. The idea behind it seems to have been to suggest that the power of Christ, the sovereignty of God, was not just in our hearts, purely inward and spiritual, but that it made some visible difference to society. After all, 1870 was not a very happy time for the Church; the pope had finally lost control of the city of Rome and withdrawn into the Vatican. The new secular state had just offered him a pension and declared his basilicas and palaces extra-territorial and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the government. Pius IX refused to accept these terms and it was not until 1929 that Pius XI signed a treaty with Mussolini’s government which ran on these lines. In the climate of 1870 it must have seemed natural enough to compensate for the pope’s loss of temporal power by propagating the idea that Christ’s sovereignty is more than merely spiritual and interior— that it is also social and political.