Christ the King

The solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe closes the liturgical year. It is the last Sunday of Ordinary Time. The First Sunday of Advent, one week later, begins a new year. The feast proclaims that Christ’s reign is over history, nations, and every human heart, and that this reign is the reign of the Cross rather than of earthly force.

Pope Pius XI instituted the feast in 1925 with the encyclical Quas Primas, in a century of rising totalitarian claims on the human person. He first placed it on the last Sunday of October. The reform after the Second Vatican Council moved it to the final Sunday of the year so that the whole cycle would end by naming Christ as the goal of history. The vestments are white. The preface speaks of a kingdom of truth and life, holiness and grace, justice, love, and peace.

The date is a Sunday, so it moves. In the civil calendar it falls in late November, on the Sunday between November 20 and November 26. It is never correct to freeze one of those dates as the permanent feast. A guide for a particular year can say which Sunday it is. This page stays the same because the meaning of the solemnity does not change when the Sunday does.

The Gospel of the day, across the three-year cycle, shows the kind of king Jesus is: the Son of Man separating the nations by works of mercy, the crucified King answering Pilate, or the shepherd who seeks the lost. His throne in John’s Passion is the Cross, and the inscription above him is written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.