Remembering Sunday: Solemnity of Christ the King (Roman Catholic)

“¡Viva Cristo Rey!” ~ Last words of Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro, executed during the Cristero War

I was blessed to spend the weekend before Thanksgiving in an incredibly beautiful, massive, decaying, Georgian Revival mansion owned by the Jesuits. It is natural that the microcosm of the Church should share the characteristics of the Church in its totality. Most of the retreatants were products of the Boom Times of Total Catholicism, the heyday of the 50s and 60s when the parochial schools were full to bursting. Only a few of us were not on medicare, and I found myself wondering what would become of it all in fifteen years’ time.

The sense of terminal institutional momentum is inescapable, but the atmosphere it provides is almost thrilling. One has the feeling of being on the Titanic in the days before the accident, or being the lover of someone who has consumption — the romantic, tragic, literary kind. Let me hold this beauty in my arms for one day more, and let me cherish the day that may be her last.

We spoke only to pray or celebrate Mass. Unlike Sunday at many Roman Catholic churches, one felt like we were really celebrating it in hope and solemnity. We were worshipping together in a real and emphatic sense. We had come for a genuine spiritual experience, and were wrestling with real demons. We asked for God’s Grace and we received it.

It was a silent retreat in a house that had just enough people in it to justify turning on the heat.

The Library has a display of postcards from the retreat center heyday. They used to run one retreat every single weekend, and a second during each week. This tide has fallen back and away. Only the occasional wave still laps up to again fill the dead house with activity.

I found, in this library, the most incredible books. They reflected the internal diversity of the Church, all its antiquated silliness and loving profundity. There was a book on “The Incorruptibles”[3], literal relics of a credulous medieval peasant Catholicism. The claim is that saints’ bodies do not decompose, and this is substantiated by what, to any discerning eye, appear to be wax figurines, put on display in glass coffins. I have been to Madame Tussauds, but this really gives me no standing to speak out of my place. Alas. I am not a peasant, and so this sort of thing feeds my (already massive) skepticism, not my faith. Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, I turn to those books that were astonishingly good.

The first beautiful, true, lovely book was “Introduction to Christianity” by Joseph Ratzinger [4]. It was obvious, using the “page 99 test”, that this book was of the highest quality. It is a shame to me that I had never, until now, read this book. It is a shame to my Catholic education that, until now, I was never offered it. It seemed to call to me and speak to the questions I have about my faith, and in particular Biblical hermeneutics. In his approach to biblical interpretation, Ratzinger shows the benefits of the measured, conservative approach of the Church, and walks a narrow way in grace and truth. Some context is first needed to understand what he is doing.

Perhaps the deepest contemporary divide in the protestant world is the Fundamentalist/Modernist split. it is a battle for the soul of the faith. The Modernists and their Historical Critical method, which insists on tearing aside the veil of divine authorship and examining the bible as a human document, have desacralized the Bible. Their methods have yielded both new insights into the early church, as well as an only nominally Christian religion that would have shocked and repulsed the early church. They have replaced “The great redemptive religion known as Christianity” with a game of competitive doubt and social concern [GO15]. They have replaced the empty tomb with an empty cross. Conversely, the Fundamentalists have safeguarded the seriousness with which they read the Bible, but react too strongly against the Modernists. As Gavin Ortlund has said, they can become close-minded, divisive, and hard-hearted [GO15]. But with time and resources, we can do better than this vanity and reactivity. The Church certainly has both time and resources, and it has deftly steered between materialist hard-relativism and thick-skulled Bible idolatry. Now if only Catholics ever actually read the Bible.

There is something tragicomic about it. Catholics, almost universally, doing the most, doing everything—everything but actually reading the Bible, while at the same time possessing, in their heritage, the most excellent resources for bible interpretation. Ultimately, faith in and love of Christ are the guide. If scholarship is trying to deconstruct or tear down Christ — we ignore it. If it is illuminating — we allow it. There is wisdom on every page of this book, and I intend to study it. Because of the institutional structure of the Church, there is breathing room to learn new things about the Bible, to use what we can take from the Historical Critical methods to deepen our faith and learn more about Christ. On the institutional structure itself, the next book was particularly relevant.

“Catholics in Crisis?” was published twenty five years ago, before the “Spotlight” pedophilia scandals of the early 2000s. It was a good read but is also the kind of book that lends itself to quick summarization. I’ll just run down the major points:
Firstly, It addresses the fundamentalist threat head-on: Catholics are vulnerable to evangelization by protestants because we don’t read or know the Bible, and because we are lukewarm in our faith. Conversely, protestantism contends that the bible is plain to understand, but the history and splintered institutional reality of protestantism demonstrates, without a doubt, that interpretation is non-trivial. This is the most direct and damning criticism of “bible-based” protestantism I have seen. It cuts straight to the point without requiring too much historical detail as prerequisite.

Secondly, it gives us the concept of the “Total Church” The Church in the US has a bit of an identity crisis, and the confluence of the social unrest of the late 1960s, the disintegration of old ethnic neighborhoods, suburbanization, Vatican II, and other factors makes it hard to find a single cause. Again, he cuts through many of these details to draw an important contrast: In the 50s the Church was culturally dominant and triumphant in media, and we had a total church. One could really live “inside” the Church, and not in a countercultural way. There was a culture of fish fasts on Fridays, novenas, confession on Saturdays, the Latin, the incense, and various cultural and aesthetic qualities. Authority was something understood as obvious, taken as granted. And in many people’s minds this is the idea of Catholicism, but is gone with the wind.

Third, he criticizes modern new-age spirituality not as a cultural artifact but as stemming from the individualistic, romantic idea that the individual is someone who has a spirituality, rather than a faith being something that has you, the individual. To rephrase, it is an application of liberal enlightenment norms to the spiritual life. The problem is that it is spineless and self-centered. In the parlance of today, it’s “self-care”, it’s a spa day, rather than something vital at the core of who we are, collectively.

Lastly, it’s notable that the problems he identified pre-dated the CSA scandals of the early 2000s. We would do well to listen to him.

The Spirit Master by John Shea made quite the impression on me. He talks about the Gospels and the life of the Church as a series of guides to an internal transformation. These things we are given can help us, but ultimately we are making ourselves ready for Grace, for an encounter with the Living God through the Person of Christ. To do this requires an initial fascination. We simply need to let go and allow this fascination lead us to divine intimacy.

Notes on Bouteneff

I also read the EO book I brought with me, "How to Be a Sinner” by Peter Bouteneff. It left me more comfortable with the "Sinner" identity, as in "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." It was good to both pray this prayer often, and take some time to concentrate on the book. Here are my notes on it:

When we encounter God, we ideally experience "Not destructive shame, but the sense of possibility." At the same time, exposure to true love can be terrifying, because "to withstand that exposure entails changing our life".

Dr. Bouteneff describes realizing "there is no sin I am not capable of doing or rationalizing" and the importance of viewing yourself as the most in need of God's grace. Not to pretend you're a worm or that you should be a doormat, but we must follow the examples of the publican in the famous parable, and the good thief. We simply need to ask for wisdom to show we are ready to handle that next revelation of how sinful we are...Which is something I experienced this weekend! I am a very silly guy, I have a silly mind and a distracted heart! But I believe the resurrection will see to it that I am less so in future, and I need to simply focus on following where He leads. 

On Acceptance: Accept yourself, as a young tree given to a gardener. You need to be fed in certain places, or supported in some circumstances, and pruned away in others. Not as a finished work of art.

Kenodoxia: better translated as "vainglory" and not "self-esteem"

"Don't over-dramatize either your sins or your virtues. Frankly, chances are good that neither is spectacular".

"How do you know if you are conducting the 'right kind' of self-condemnation? You'll know it by its fruit...peace, freedom from care, joy, and absence from judgementalism"

He endorses the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression -- we disagree here, though of course psychiatric medicine can help in some situations

2 Corinthians 7:10: “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.”

The next time you see someone you are inclined to judge, roll your eyes at, or condemn, imagine God calling you by name to say, "I love this person and I want to save her. Is that OK with you?" Your answer should be, simply must be, "Yes Lord, don’t let me hold you back!" That goes for everyone and anyone. Makes me think of Jonah.

How to interpret Genesis?

"“The early Christian interpreters didn’t consult it in order to learn about the physical history or layout of our solar system. But they did use it to glean key insights about how the human person relates to God and the rest of creation.”

Namely: 
- God orders the world in a deliberate way.
- The human being is the pinnacle of creation
- Creation, with humanity, is "very good"
Furthermore:
- It is not good for man to be alone. We are defined by relationships with one another and God.
- Humanity is good, but fallen
- We are called to theosis in ways that involve conscious co-operation with God, not magic fruit.
- No "victimless crimes". We are in this together and connected beyond what we can see

What is Sin?

"All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful"
"Shalt not" commandments as vulnerable to legalism and self-justification. Jesus is a living example of the virtue that fulfils and transcends the law, whose basis is Love of God and each other.

One final intersting quote... Not sure what to make of this one. 
“Human sin, as a totality, leads to human sickness and eventually death. Mortality creates a fixed limit to of our lives, so that our gains in wealth and power are a zero-sum game, which means that mortality itself also causes us to sin. It is a vicious cycle, and the way to break it begins with identifying the problem.”

Footnotes

[GO15]: “As you get further into the 20th century, essentially what develops is a battle between those who fall into [theological] liberalism and basically recast Christianity as just a sort of modern system, and those who resist who are initially called fundamentalists. And the term fundamentalists is not a bad term initially, it simply meant those who affirm the fundamentals of the faith. So there was a movement of Christians rising up and saying, No, you can't take the miracles out of the gospel. When you do so, you lose the gospel. And they were affirming the No, Jesus really was born of a virgin. Jesus really did rise from the dead. The Bible really is inspired by God and Divine Revelation, Jesus really is coming again. And let me just tell you about one of these individuals. And I mentioned him before, and that is J. Gresham Machen. He left Princeton Seminary in the 1920s to found Westminster seminary. If you've heard of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania, and he basically made the same observation that we're making here, is that liberalism claims to be contrary to all these different doctrines, but really, liberalism is its own set of doctrines. And by the way, the same thing happens today, when sometimes one of the one of the vibes that is out there in the world is you'll find people who say, “Well, I don't really care about doctrine. I just want to love Jesus.” And the problem with this is that to speak about love and to speak about Jesus assumes a set of doctrines. We have to define those words. Who is Jesus? What does it mean to love Jesus? And I just want to give us a sense of how radically different liberalism is. What J. Gresham Machen was basically saying is that this is a different religion. Christianity and Liberalism are two distinct religions. In fact, two different types of religion opposed to each other. I’ll read a quote from him: “The great redemptive religion known as Christianity, is locked in combat with a totally diverse type of religious belief,” which is pretending to be Christianity and using Christian vocabulary. Here's one of J Gresham Machen's great insights: when you fall into this and you lose the dogmas, you lose the miracles… you end up with not just a kind of flatness, you actually end up with legalism. You lose any sense that Christianity is good news about something outside of myself that comes to save me, because all you're left with is sort of inspiration and stuff for us to do. Here's how he put it. This is the chief difference between liberalism and Christianity. Liberalism is only in the imperative mood. The imperative is the verb mood that is commanding an action. Saying, here's what you have to do. Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative. That's what is true, not what you have to do a gracious act of God. In other words, liberalism is a kind of legalism. The animating core is here's what you have to do. The animating core of Christianity is, here is what God has done through Jesus Christ that you could never do for yourself. Now I'm going to skip over a lot about higher biblical criticism and just make one fundamental observation to finish off this narrative that can give us some perspective about the world today and the church today, and that is among the fundamentalists. There's now another split. So you have first the split between the liberals who take away the supernatural character of Christianity and the fundamentalists or the conservatives who say, No, you can't do that. As the fundamentalist movement goes forward, it itself splits into two groups, and the fundamental problem, use that word again, is that many of the fundamentalists simply go way too far in the other direction. And this is the great insight that's health healthy for us all to wrestle with and to understand, is that to be faithful to Jesus Christ in the modern world requires more than merely opposing this error. It requires opposing it in the right way. And in a moment, I'm going to tell you about a wonderful man named Francis Schaeffer, but I'll just introduce this with his categories. Francis schaeffer's fundamental insight is that we must do the Lord's work in the Lord's Way. In other words, it's not enough to merely speak the truth or advance the truth. We must do so in a spirit that is faithful to the truth. The fundamentalists had four basic problems. One is anti intellectualism. That just means they often were very close minded, and sometimes the liberals had a fair point about some particular thing, and the fundamentalists just ran so far in the other direction. Second, they withdrew from social concern. So one of the great emphases of liberalism is that, basically Christianity becomes reduced to simply bettering the world, and so there's tremendous concern on alleviating poverty and other social issues. And the fundamentalists were so concerned about this that they were pushed so far in the other direction that they were under concerned about social issues. Thirdly, the fundamentalists became constantly and incessantly divisive. So they divided, not only from the liberals, but they divided from each other again and again and again and again and again to the point of these tiny, minute, little theological differences that became another cause for battle and division and alarm, and fourthly, fundamentalists were often just very unkind, and there was a lack of love in how they conducted themselves. We are now. So what happens is you have a new movement that in our own context, we'd think of, especially in like the 1940s and the 1950s around this time, where the term evangelical emerges, though it has been used previously, but it emerges and takes on kind of a new meaning. And the Evangelicals were people who are trying to say, we don't want to be liberals, we want to retain the supernatural character of Christianity, but we also don't want to be fundamentalists. That's also not what faithfulness to Jesus looks like.” AI Transcription of Gavin Ortlund’s final “History of the Church” talk given at Immanuel Nashville on Apr 13th, 2025

Bibliography

1. Bausch, William J. Catholics in Crisis?: The Church Confronts Contemporary Challenges. Twenty-Third Publications, 1999.

2. Bouteneff, Peter. How to Be a Sinner: Finding Yourself in the Language of Repentance. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018.

3. Cruz, Joan Carroll. The Incorruptibles: A Study of the Incorruption of the Bodies of Various Saints and Beati. TAN Books, 1977.

4. Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. Ignatius Press, 2004.

5. Shea, John. The Spirit Master. Thomas More Press, 1987.