My kingdom is not of this world

 Reprinted from Unam Sanctum Catholic Blog because the text was not easily read there.

Fr. Castellani on the Kingship of Christ

In honor of the traditional Feast of Christ the

 King celebrated this week, we bring you a 

passage from the sermons of Argentine priest 

Fr. Leonardo Castellani, S.J. (1899-1981) on

 the kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ. Fr. 

Castellani suffered intense persecution from the

 Jesuit order during the forties and fifties for refusing 

to embrace the theories of Teilhard de Chardin

 and remaining faithful to St. Thomas Aquinas; 

he even suffered forcible confinement in Spain

 for two years and was eventually expelled from 

the Jesuit order as the sons of St. Ignatius began

 to embrace modernism. The following 

citations are taken from a collection of Fr.

 Castellani's sermons entitled Domingueras Prédicas:

"In front of Pilate, Christ affirmed three times that 

He was a King in the same sense that Pilate 

understood it. 'Then you are a King?' Jesus 

answered, 'You say that I am a King,' in other words, 

'You are correct.' It is true that He told him, 'My 

kingdom is not of this world,' but He did 

not say,  My kingdom is not here.' He used the 

adverb 'hinc' (Regnum meum non est hinc) which

 indicates movement and does not exist in English. 

This adverb 'hinc' meant three things at the same 

time,

 'My Kingdom does not proceed from this world, 

My Kingdom is in this world; My Kingdom 

goes from this world to the other world.'

Apparently He is a 'poor King' who doesn't rule

 much these days, since if He were reigning,

 theworld would be better. A large part of the world 

doesn't even know Him; another part knows Him

 and renounces Him, like the Jews, 'Nolumus 

Hunc regnare super nos' - 'We do not want 

this man to reign over us' (Lk. 19:14); finally, another 

part of the world recognizes Him in 

word but  denies Him in deed; we are those cowardly

 Christians. But there is something else that 

Christ noted, that if a king's subjects rebel against him,

 he 

doesn't stop being king as long as he retains

 the power to punish them and to subjugate them 

once again. If he didn't have that power, 

that's another thing. And so today modernist heretics

 admit that Christ is King 'in a certain sense',

 but they deny the Second Coming of Christ. 

Then, yes, He would be a poor King. The modernists 

either entirely change the meaning of the Parousia,

 turning it into something else

 (as in the case of

 Teilhard de Chardin) or they say it will come in

 18 million years - which is to say 'never.'

Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ

 the King against 'Liberalism;' Liberalism is 

precisely a form of cowardice. Liberalism

 denies the Kingship of Christ, His power by 

right over human society. This current Christian

 heresy is complicated..Liberalism eliminated 

the Kingship of Christ by saying something 

[ostensibly] 'innocent': that religion was a

 private matter, and therefore nations should

 respect all religions and the Church should not get

involved in things

 that don't concern her--in other words, in 

public affairs. However, the great German

 philosopher  Josef Pieper observes that if we

 make God a private matter (a matter within the

 conscience of each person), by the same token we 

convert the State into God; and we turn Jesus Christ 

and the  Eternal Father into sub-gods. Indeed, this 

means that because the State is a public affair,

 religion would therefore be inferior to it and

 would have to submit to the State, since what is

 public is far superior to what is private and the 

private must submit to it.

In fact, history soon showed that 'liberal 

secularism', or supposed neutrality regarding

 religion was not reality true hostility; and it 

ended up deifying and divinizing the State." 

(Leonardo Castellani, DominguerasPrédicas, pg. 327).