Fr. Castellani on the Kingship of Christ

 Stolen, by permission, from Brother Boniface owner of the Blog Unam Sanctam Catholicam

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, the 

world 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).