TRINITY · LAST SUNDAY IN OCTOBER · A PROVINCIAL FEAST IN THE CONTINUING ANGLICAN CALENDAR ✞ Feast of Our Lord
Christ the King
The Kingship of Christ over Every Nation and Every Heart · Instituted 1925
Last Sunday in October · Preserving the Institution of Pope Pius XI
The Christian year does not end with a whimper. It ends, in the week before All Saints, with a shout: that the Child born at Bethlehem, the Man crucified outside Jerusalem, and the Lord raised on the third day is no mere teacher or moral exemplar but King — King of every nation, every family, and every human heart, whether that kingship is acknowledged or refused. The Feast of Christ the King, kept on the last Sunday in October, is the Church's yearly assertion of a truth that the world finds, in every century, equally difficult to hear.
The feast is comparatively young as feasts go, having no place in the medieval calendars or in the Prayer Book tradition inherited from Cranmer. It was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas, at the close of a Holy Year that had also marked the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and its confession of the full divinity of Christ. The timing was not accidental. Europe in 1925 was a continent of rising secularism and rising nationalism in equal measure — two errors Pius XI judged to spring from a single root, the practical exclusion of Christ from public life, whether by the atheism of the new totalitarian movements or by the older liberal insistence that religion was a private matter with no claim upon the state. Quas Primas answered both errors with a single doctrine: that Christ's kingship is not confined to the sanctuary of the individual conscience but extends, of right, over individuals, over families, and over civil society itself — a kingship exercised not by the sword but, as the encyclical insists, by truth, by justice, and by love.
Pius XI set the feast on the last Sunday of October, the Sunday immediately before All Saints — a deliberate placement, so that the sanctoral year should close by naming the King in whose service every saint had lived and died, before the Church turned, in November, to commemorate the saints themselves and pray for the faithful departed. In 1969 the reformed Roman calendar moved the feast to the last Sunday before Advent, retitling it the Feast of Christ the King of the Universe and making it the very last Sunday of the entire liturgical year rather than the last Sunday of October. The Continuing Anglican Church, in this as in its retention of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer against the revisions of 1979, has kept the original observance. The last Sunday in October remains, in this Province, the day appointed — not from mere antiquarian preference, but because the placement Pius XI chose, immediately before All Saints, carries its own theological logic that the later reform set aside.
Quas Primas distinguishes a threefold dominion. Christ reigns over the individual mind and will, which owe him the assent of faith and the obedience of conscience. He reigns over the family, the first society, which he sanctified at Cana and Nazareth. And he reigns over civil society itself — over nations and their laws — not as a rival to legitimate civil authority, but as the standard by which every civil authority is finally judged, since no law contrary to the eternal law of God can bind in conscience. This last claim was, and remains, the most contested; it is also the reason the feast was adopted so readily by Anglo-Catholics who owed no allegiance to Rome, for the claim is not a papal claim but a Christological one, inherited from the Gospels and the Apocalypse alike: the Lamb who was slain is also the Lord of lords and King of kings, and the Church that confesses his Resurrection cannot, without contradiction, deny his reign.
To keep this feast is to make, once a year, in the most explicit terms the calendar allows, the claim that Christian discipleship refuses to keep private: that there is no province of human life, personal or political, that lies outside the competence of Jesus Christ. The saints whose feasts fill the year now yield the last word to the King they served, before All Saints gathers them all before his throne.
Almighty and everlasting God, who in thy beloved Son, the King of all the world, hast willed to restore all things: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, now divided and torn asunder by the wound of sin, may be brought together under his most gracious rule; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.