The Feast of Christ the King 

Today Holy Mother Church celebrates In Festo Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis: Christ the King. Pope Pius XI instituted this feast in 1925 to help correct the world’s tilt toward the chaos of secularism. The Great War (which ended in November 1918) made terrifyingly evident that universal devastation is the price we must pay for casting God out of public life. A few years after this war, and foreseeing the next global war to come, Pius XI wrote the encyclical Quas primas: “These manifold evils in the world are due to the fact that the majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; [with] no place either in private affairs or in politics: as long as individuals and states refuse to submit to the rule of our Savior, there will be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.” Before Christ, the world knew no peace, but on a certain year in human history, the Son of God became incarnate and established his Kingdom. It is at this moment we enter today’s Gospel reading. Jesus Christ faces Pilate. The Roman king of Judea stands in judgment over the eternal King of heaven.

A King faces the King

Pilate was not a bad king, as earthly rulers go. He had nothing against God—he just didn’t know him. He was only trying to keep order in the best way he knew. He was like most political officials in our day—non-Christian, with no recourse to a higher moral authority—for our social order has lapsed into its primitive, non-Christian state. Like Pilate, Christ has nothing to do with our decision-making, and we are trying to maintain peace without God.

Pilate asks Jesus: who are you? Are you a king? Jesus answers Pilate’s question with a question: “Do you say this on your own?” In other words, do you really want to know who I am, and what it means to be a king? Pilate becomes a little frustrated with these deeper questions, which seem like riddles to his crudely political mind: “Do I look like a Jew to you?” he flings back at Jesus. “How am I supposed to know about your weird religion? Just tell me who you are and what you’ve done to cause a riot in my district.”

Pilate Doesn’t Get It

Then Jesus gives Pilate, and all humanity, the answer we have been longing to hear: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Every worldly political order will fail to the degree that it refuses to have reference beyond the world. We can’t keep order by ourselves. What do you think will happen if you put three children in a room by themselves for five hours? They need an adult to keep from hurting each other. We “adults” need a Father greater than any earthly father. Deep down, we all know this, and we know that the answer to our political conflicts is not found in this world.

Jesus continues: “I came to testify to the truth.” Every politically mature person asks whether an earthly ruler ever be completely honest. And Jesus answers that question: No, he can’t. The world is ruined; it is lost to original sin. Only the ruler who is beyond this world can bring peace and order. Only God bears the fullness of truth, and the only way to rule this world is to refer beyond it. Pilate doesn’t get it, and, with all due respect, Barak Obama doesn’t get it. Few rulers have ever understood this; most politicians who call themselves “Catholic” don’t get it, and I’m not sure how much we get it either. It is enormously difficult for anyone in our society, soaked as we are in secularism, to grasp how empty, how frail, how vain is any attempt at a peaceful order divorced from God’s laws.

Are We Taking Earthly Politics Too Seriously?

Many good Catholics complain to me that they struggle with despair over our country. American leadership, and world politics, becomes more anti-Christian, more irrational and chaotic, more dishonest, every day. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we can’t do anything about it.

But remember this: Jesus said that his kingdom is not of this world. So why do we expect order, peace, and honest politics from this world? The world as we know it is passing away. Our hopes are not in this world, but in Jesus Christ, the Lord of a Kingdom not of this world. If we are discouraged by earthly politics, we probably think too much of them. If you never miss the evening news, whether it’s Fox or CNN or NPR, but you do miss your evening family rosary, you are bound to be depressed. But don’t you know that the rosary is far more real than the news? Turn the TV and computer off, and pray the rosary together, and you will gain courage and hope.

Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King to remind us how transitory are this world’s rule. The Lord Jesus Christ reigns over heaven and earth; nothing and nobody can topple him. We put our hope in him, we commit our allegiance to him. With our Lady, we work to bring about his Kingdom in this world, but with our heart set on the Kingdom that is not of this world.

Fides quarens intellectum

Thomas Aquinas College is founded on two traditions: that of the Great Books and that of Catholic Education. Dr. Glen Coughlin, then the College dean, wrote in his 2001 Report on Instruction that the College is “committed to the proposition which animates all of truly Catholic liberal education …“faith seeking understanding.” St. Anselm used this phrase, fides quarens intellectum, in his Proslogion (which Sophomores will read this semester), to describe the relationship between human intellect and divine wisdom, between faith and reason. Theology is an attempt to articulate God’s ways in human words, but it is successful only to the extent that the theologian believes in the Faith. Pope Benedict (who better than most understood the relation of faith to reason) instituted our Year of Faith to underscore that faith is indispensable to the higher acts of the human intellect.

So declares our First Reading from the book of Wisdom. “The deliberations of mortals are timid, … the earthen shelter weighs down the mind.” You may experience this later tonight, in the library, as you try to get through your 80 pages of philosophy for tomorrow’s seminar. You will be tired, and hungry, and distracted, and homesick (some of you), and it will be hard to study. “Scarce do we guess the things on earth,” continues our reading, “and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty”—mathematics, astronomy, physics, and all the natural sciences, which are relatively simple, measurable, sensible—even these we must toil at. “But when things are in heaven, who can search them out … except you had given wisdom?” The highest discoveries of the intellect come only through God’s revelation.

Faith: A superior act of the intellect

Pope Francis in his first encyclical, Lumen fidei, says faith is an act of the intellect superior to that of unaided human reason, because it is illuminated not merely by empirical observation, but by love. Mother Teresa, for example, aided by her faith in the Love of God, understood reality on a grander scale than those who analyze things only in terms of power and economics. She could see the broader connections, the “mega-stories,” the deepest relationships between things and peoples. This kind of understanding is not achieved by men but given by God. And that is why Thomas Aquinas College spends great effort developing the student’s understanding of faith as well their understanding of intellect. Without faith, our intellects are hamstrung.

Only All for Jesus

In the Gospel, Jesus insists on the absolute primacy of God above every other created being. He goes so far as to say that we must “hate” our mother and father in order to love Him, and even hate ourselves. He uses sharp Semitic overstatement to press home his point: nothing must come before the things of God. Should my own mother mean more to me than God, I must “hate” her, that is, crucify my attachment to her. It is not my mother I hate, but my own disordered attachment to her that I hate. My own ways—my own “counsels” apart from God’s counsel—leads only to chaos and disappointment, and ultimately to death. Mother Teresa told her sisters that we must be “only all for Jesus,” and “nothing and nobody” must come between us and God.

Syria

This primacy of God’s wisdom over human wisdom bears on the current question of a military strike against Syria. Yesterday our College held a holy hour for the people of Syria, at just the time Pope Francis was holding his prayer vigil in Rome. 100,000 people prayed from 7pm to midnight in St. Peter’s Square, begging God to guide the deliberations of men in this difficult situation. God’s Church teaches that war must be a last resort, after all possible diplomatic negotiations have failed. War is an evil so great that scarcely any other evil justifies it. If men use only their own intellects, however, they will frequently resort to war; if men use their intellects assisted by God’s counsels, war will be a relatively rare occurrence in human history.

In 1991, both Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa begged the elder President Bush to refrain from war with Iraq. “War is always a failure,” the Pope wrote. In 2003, John Paul pleaded with the younger President Bush not to attack Bagdad. Three days ago Pope Francis pleaded with President Obama to refrain from attacking Syria. He wrote to the twenty richest nations meeting at the G20 summit in Moscow last week: “please lay aside the futile pursuit of a military solution.” He went on to say that the leaders of the G20 “cannot remain indifferent to the dramatic situation of the beloved Syrian people.” For a man of faith, the 6 million refugees and 110,000 dead are, each one of them, “beloved.” Only love can see the human faces in war; only faith can illuminate the intellect towards a real solution in difficult conflicts. Human reason must submit itself to the corrective influence of faith in order to succeed. For his part, Syrian President Assad is ready to pit his country against the entire American military, effectively using his own citizens as human shields in a futile and ridiculous attempt to maintain his own petty power.

Syria cannot win this war, but neither can the American Military. Everyone will lose if we depend on mere human intelligence to solve this problem. Only the intellect informed by faith and charity can see the path to a real solution.

Our Lady, Queen of Peace

Today, September 8, is the feast of the Birth of Mary, although because it is Sunday we don’t celebrate it this year. Our Lady is the Queen of Peace, the Mother of the Prince of Peace. Her Immaculate Heart understood what the human mind, crippled by original Sin, can never understand. Let us submit ourselves to her Heart, perfectly in accord with God’s Sacred Heart. Her wisdom is God’s wisdom; her love is his love. Without God, and his Holy Mother, humanity is condemned to destroy itself, as history has repeatedly shown.