On Sunday, November 20, the feast of Christ the King, Father Joseph Illo, pastor of Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco, gave a 13-minute homily.
Pius XI in 1925 established this feast of Christ the King. He wrote these words: “These manifold evils are due to the fact that the majority of men in both public and private have thrust God and His holy laws out of our lives.” That’s what’s happening now. But the good news is that we have a king who will provide for us.
He asks for our gifts. “What return shall I make to the Lord for all He has given to me?” We render our time, time we spend at Mass. We render tithing – money, work, energy.
Pius instituted Christ the King to show that Europe was turning her back on the Church, just as we are doing in the U.S. is doing today. In spite of this, Christ is still the King.
This is a good sermon.
The person who commented a week or so ago that they never hear a homily about giving money to the Church should listen to this one.
This is a link to the document establishing the Feast of Christ the King. The manifold evils referred to are in a different encyclical.
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas.html
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https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19221223_ubi-arcano-dei-consilio.html
Public life is so enveloped, even at the present hour, by the dense fog of mutual hatreds and grievances that it is almost impossible for the common people so much as freely to breathe therein. (11)
…The nations of today live in a state of armed peace which is scarcely better than war itself, a condition which tends to exhaust national finances, to waste the flower of youth, to muddy and poison the very fountainheads of life, physical, intellectual, religious, and moral. (11)
The recital of the evils he refers to goes on through paragraph 31 and strikingly includes nationalism.
Rather “extreme nationalism”…..”24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.
25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism – the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ – becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is ‘justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.’ (Proverbs xiv)”
Good post.
Keep everything within the bounds of the law of Christ.
There is so much in that.
I am laughing because on wikihow that have “How to become a saint”
1. Become Catholic
2. Live an exemplary and pious life
3 Perform 2 miracles
4 Die
You actually have to perform the 2 miracles after you die.