Archbishop Viganò: Homily on the Feast of the Christ the King

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Rex Sum Ego
Homily on the Feast of Christ the King

Dixit itaque ei Pilatus : Ergo rex es tu?
Respondit Jesus: Tu dicis quia rex sum ego.
Ego in hoc natus sum, et ad hoc veni in mundum,
ut testimonium perhibeam veritati:
omnis qui est ex veritate, audit vocem meam.

Jo 18, 37

Your Excellency, dear priests and clergy, dear faithful: praised be Jesus Christ!

By the providential will of Pope Pius XI, this last Sunday of October is dedicated to the Universal Kingship of Our Lord. The encyclical Quas Primas, promulgated on December 11, 1925, illustrates this doctrine and the reasons why, by virtue of the hypostatic Union – that is, the union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ – we must recognize our Lord and Sovereign in the Word of God Incarnate.

Last Sunday’s Gospel – the twenty-second after Pentecost – has in some way prepared for today’s feast, inviting us to contemplate the Kingship of Christ also in the precept “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). Recognizing Our Lord as the Sovereign both of individuals and of societies is in fact already contained in these simple words: Give to God what is God’s.

I believe that each one of you has been able to rediscover this beautiful truth of our holy Religion; a truth that has been preserved since the dawn of the Church. The institution of this Feast, apparently redundant given that the whole Liturgy is a profession of Faith in the Divine Kingship of Our Lord, shows us how the Roman Pontiffs were able to reaffirm His Universal Lordship precisely at the moment when the errors of secularism, socialism and liberalism (in its two variants: collectivist in Russia and nationalist in Germany) were trying to oust God from public sphere, taking the errors and horrors of the Revolution of 1789 to their extreme but logical consequences. Behind this centuries-old conspiracy against Christ, which began well before we can imagine, we know there is the subversive work of the Synagogue of Satan, of the Masonic anti-church devoted to the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist. Protestantism, the Rosicrucians, the Bavarian Illuminati, Freemasonry, and all the sects that have conspired since the sixteenth century against Catholic Europe are expressions of this all-out war against Christ and His Church.

The Popes who reigned between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries condemned with apostolic severity the revolutionary principles in the name of which the monarchies of the Catholic nations were overthrown. These Popes saw clearly what immense ruins would follow their spread throughout the world, and warned the Christian people against accepting any compromise with the secular, liberal, materialist mentality that these errors conveyed.

What the Pontiffs could not foresee – it was so unheard of and scandalous even to be able to hypothesize it, at that time – was that this rebellion against Christ the Lord would not only find support among subsequent popes, with all the instances of Modernism ferried into the bosom of the Catholic Church with Vatican II, but that this rebellion would extend to the whole ecclesial body, to the point of apostasy from the Faith and the emancipation of the vicarious authority of the Roman Pontiff from that possessed exclusively and fully by the Divine Head of the Mystical Body, King and Priest. The post-conciliar popes, architects of innovations in the theorization and exercise of the Papacy, have come to adapt and reinterpret the Papacy in a synodal (ad intra) and ecumenical (ad extra) key, thus demonstrating their willingness to change what Our Lord established in founding His Church.

The apostasy of the Bergoglian church, now openly before everyone’s eyes, is not a phenomenon that started with Bergoglio. Its causes are to be found in the errors deliberately insinuated by the Council and obstinately supported by the popes of the post-conciliar period. The modernist revolution of Vatican II consisted precisely in having welcomed into the Church the anti-Catholic principles – Masonic and liberal – of modern nation-states, despite the fact that it was obvious that immense damage was caused by the Revolution in the space of a few decades, first of all to the eternal salvation of souls and the good government of nations.

But what is the essence of this unconditional surrender to the anti-Catholic ideologies that the Church had uninterruptedly condemned without appeal? Why are concepts such as liberty, fraternity, and equality so opposed to the Gospel and so disastrous in their effects on individuals and societies, on both the State and the Church?

To fully answer this question, we must first of all keep in mind that everything that comes from the Evil One is deception and lies. Satan lies us when he deceives humanity that it can “free” itself from the Lordship of Christ by presenting it to us as an “oppressive yoke.” Satan lies when he deludes us into thinking that he can claim for himself a sovereignty that instead belongs to Our Lord and to Him alone. Satan lies when he deceives men that they can be “brothers,” while simultaneously denying the Divine Fatherhood of God. He lies by presenting uniformity in sin and approval in vice as desirable – because this is his concept of equality – and he lies when he shows us how to avoid the multiplicity and variety of gifts with which the magnificence of God fills each of us in a unique and unrepeatable way.

We are “the chosen race, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, the people whom God has acquired for himself to proclaim the marvellous works of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pt 2:9), and it is against this race – which is the seed of the Woman (Gen 3:15) in perpetual enmity with the seed of the Serpent – that Satan is unleashed,  in his livid envy of the destiny of glory that he irrevocably rejected with his Non serviam.

Satan knows that Jesus Christ is King. His sole purpose is to induce us to rebel against our Sovereign, to have Him as an enemy, to deny our due and necessary submission to Him, our Redeemer and Lord, in order to subjugate ourselves to the hateful slavery of the Evil One. In short, what Satan wants is to make us deny Christ the King and High Priest and instead acclaim the Antichrist as Our Lord’s blasphemous counterfeit. That is why this fury exists on the part of Satan and his servants in wanting to deny Christ His sovereign rights over the Nations and also over the Church.

Only those who do not believe and do not want Christ to be King can accept the idea that civil authorities should not publicly recognize the true and only Church, of which He is the Divine Founder. Only those who do not believe and do not want Christ to be King can accept syncretistic ecumenism and theorize that “all religions are a path that leads to God.” Only those who do not believe and do not want Christ to be King can arrogate to themselves the sacrilegious right to change His Church and the Papacy established by Him in order to obsequiously obey His enemies.

On the other hand, those who recognize that Our Lord Jesus Christ is God, Lord, King, and High Priest lead everything back to Him, return everything to Him, and consecrate everything to Him.

We cannot profess ourselves as Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman without proclaiming the Kingship of Christ, and without living it out daily, beginning with ourselves, our families, our communities. In fact, how can we hope that the Lord will not abandon us and return to reign over civil societies, if those who compose them do not recognize Him as King? Brought before Pilate by the Sanhedrin, Our Lord finds Himself answering the Roman Procurator who asks Him if He is King: “You say it, I am King. I was born for this, and for this I came into the world: to bear witness to the Truth; everyone who comes from the truth hears My voice” (Jn 18:37).

We listen to the voice of Our Lord if we come from the truth, and recognize Him as our King. It will be in this sequela Christi Regis that we will find the reasons for our fight in this hour of history and we will be able to recognize who is lined up under His holy banners and who, scelesta turba – wicked mob – is lined up with the Antichrist. “Qui non est mecum, adversum me est; et qui non colligit mecum, dispergit” (Lk 11:23). He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters.

The first creature to listen to the voice of Our Lord was Mary Most Holy, Regina Crucis, the mystical Throne of the divine King. Let us remember this well: wherever Christ reigns, His August Mother must also reign; because it is the will of the Son that She be the One who in Her unblemished Virginity humbles the impure spirit, and who in Her Humility crushes the proud head of the Serpent. May she be the Lady and Queen of every Christian and in particular of every priestly soul, so that the Mediatrix of all Graces may intercede before the Throne of the Most High for the Holy Church, for all who faithfully profess the Catholic Faith, and for the destiny of the world. And so may it be.



+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

27 October 2024
Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis