Christ is King: a truth, not a taunt

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 22, 2025

The Vigil Mass tonight begins the feast of Christ the King. Or, more precisely, “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.” I got a head start on it this year thanks to the two Connecticut parishes (here and here) run by the Institute of Christ the King (ICK), where the feast day is celebrated a month earlier on the Traditional Latin Mass calendar, and where both parishes invited me to their blowout celebrations. I attend a Novus Ordo parish myself. But if you ever want to see Hilaire Belloc’s famous lines (“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine...”) come to life, visit one of the ICK’s glorious parishes on their patronal feast day.

The phrase, “Christ is King!” is very close to my heart. Pope Pius XI instituted the feast in the 1920s to remind the world that Christ, not the state, is King. Here in North America, “¡Viva, Cristo Rey!” (“Christ is King!”) was the battle cry of the Cristeros. They were Catholic freedom-fighters who were martyred for their faith while fighting a tyrannical anti-Catholic government in Mexico in the early 20th century.

The first members of the Knights of Columbus to become canonized saints were among the martyrs. There is a painting of them at the Knights of Columbus museum in New Haven. We take our kids to see it every year.

The martyrdoms of pro-life and pro-family Catholics in 21st century blue-state America are white, not red—so far. But it’s not too early to unite ourselves to the Cristeros. To say with them, and to our own increasingly tyrannical state governments, that Christ—not Planned Parenthood, not the rainbow flag—is King.

Which is why it is so painful to me to see some Catholics repurposing “Christ is King! to be an antisemitic dog whistle. “Christ is King!” should mean what it says. It should not mean “Shut up, Jew.” As Princeton professor Robert P. George recently told EWTN:

We believe Christ is King. Definitely. There’s no question about that. And when we proclaim “Christ is King” as a statement of our faith, we say what is true and we honor Jesus Christ as the Son of God, our Savior, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. But when anybody, Catholic or not, uses that wonderful truth, that wonderful phrase, “Christ is King” as a taunt, as a way to express contempt for other people, to express hatred for Jewish people, when it becomes a taunt, that is blasphemy. That is taking something holy and debasing it and degrading it and using it for immoral and wicked purposes.

Which still leaves us with the question posed by EWTN’s host:

How do we as Catholics move forward in the Great Commission, and proclaiming the gospel, while maintaining relationship properly with our Jewish brothers and sisters?

A lot of words have been spoken and written on that topic these past two years, as well as the two millennia prior. We know that the twin errors of dual covenant theology and replacement theology should be avoided. A “fulfillment theology,” one that denies nothing that is true in modern Judaism while still making the case—yes, even to our Jewish friends and family—that those truths reach their greatest fulfillment in Christ and his Church—is a thing that, even now, still needs to be fleshed out. As George Weigel said in his recent speech on the 60th anniversary of the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, the “2,000-year-old divinely mandated entanglement of Jews and Catholics” is a mysterious thing.

My own answer to the question is precisely to lean into Christ as King properly understood. The Daily Roman Missal for the feast day that begins with tonight’s Vigil Mass includes this paragraph (671) from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Though already present in his Church, Christ’s reign is nevertheless yet to be fulfilled “with power and great glory” by the King’s return to earth. This reign is still under attack by the evil powers, even though they have been defeated definitively by Christ’s Passover. Until everything is subject to him, “until there be realized new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church, in her sacraments and institutions, which belong to this present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and she herself takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the sons of God.” That is why Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Christ’s return by saying to him: Marana tha! “Our Lord, come!”

Happy feast day of Christ the King. “¡Viva, Cristo Rey!”