By Tom Venzor
The liturgical year ends with a powerful—albeit underrated—solemnity: Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. This Sunday solemnity is often overshadowed by Thanksgiving festivities, which turn the hearts and minds of many to Christmas shopping. Even Advent eclipses the solemnity, as if the end of the liturgical year is a mere stepping stone toward the Incarnation that Advent anticipates.
But the Solemnity of Christ the King is a feast worth pausing for.
The liturgical celebration of Christ’s Kingship not only helps us anticipate the Second Coming of Christ, but also helps reorient our political attitudes in this earthly pilgrimage. In a world where political attitudes are poisoned by various ills—self-serving motives, blind partisanship, and attachment to sin, to name a few—we must ever again establish our allegiance to Christ, the One Who alone can generate within us new hearts capable of establishing peace and justice on earth.
Christ’s universal kingship conveys the fact that the Son of God has dominion and power over all creation and that He came to “make all things new.” Christ came not simply to make “spiritual” things new. He also came to make everything about our humanity new, including our politics. Christ reveals that politics must always be in service to God, even when it is in service of earthly rulers.
This is apparent, for example, in Matthew 22. Groveling at the feet of Christ, the Pharisees and Herodians attempted to entrap Jesus with a political question related to taxes. They wanted to know: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” Knowing their deceit and trickery from previous experience and because He knew human nature, Christ was able to instruct them in the truth without being entangled in their snares. Responding to them, He said: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
With this retort to the Pharisees and the Herodians, Christ does not create a rift between the earthly and political and the heavenly and regal. Instead, as one biblical commentator states, Christ provides the “third alternative” which recognizes the “due limitations of each sphere.”
Christ acknowledges the due respect that must be given to the earthly and political and the due respect that must be given to the heavenly and regal. And, as taught elsewhere in Scripture, each sphere must be respected, but God must always be given His due, and He is due primacy if ever there is a conflict between the two. To learn from the martyrdom of St. Thomas More: “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”
How each sphere should be given its proper due is difficult waters to navigate. Though they were being deceitful, the Pharisees and Herodians brought up a legitimate political issue about taxation. Many other political issues confront us with varying levels of perplexity, whether they are questions about war, healthcare, immigration, the environment, abortion, school choice, or marriage and family. The overarching question with each of these issues is how to render unto Caesar (that is, the state) what is due to Caesar, and how to render to God what is due to Him. These questions strike at the core of who we are as members of human society.
Fortunately, as Catholics, we are blessed with the Church’s social teaching tradition. By articulating and summarizing the foundational principles for understanding complex political realities, the Church’s social teaching provides a sure norm for determining how to render unto Caesar and to render unto God. This is treated more extensively in the great encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor), Pacem in Terris (On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty), Evangelium Vitae (On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life), Caritas in Veritate (On Integral Human Development in Charity in Truth), Laudato Si (On Care for Our Common Home). This is treated more broadly in works such as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
From these principles, and through prayer and our lived experiences, we can decide on authentic action that strives for true peace and justice on earth and begins integrating what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God.
As the liturgical year ends and a new one begins, this is a fitting time to create a plan of action for diving more deeply into the Catholic social teaching tradition. In doing so, you can begin to live out more clearly the words of Christ the King, as He cried out to the Father: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
