By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King, a most
peculiar Christian holiday and a relatively new one: It was instituted by Pope
Pius XI in 1925 — practically the day before yesterday, for a 2,000-year-old
institution.
Anno Domini 1925 was a dark time in Europe. The Continent
had subjected itself to a horrifying war only a few years before, the
industrial and mechanized nature of which announced a new kind of uniquely modern horror. In Germany, Adolf Hitler
had published Mein Kampf and had just
attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch. In Russia, V. I. Lenin had
died after establishing the monstrosity that was the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republicans, and his shoes were more than filled by his protegé, Joseph Stalin.
Closer to Pope Pius’s own besieged dominion, Benito Mussolini’s fascists had
marched on Rome in 1922 and seized power in a bloodless coup d’état. The papacy
was at the time in a tenuous position: Though it had been stripped of the Papal
States, it had not yet formally renounced all claim to them, and the Lateran
Treaty, which recognized Vatican City as an independent sovereign power, had
not yet been signed.
From its first days, the 20th century was doomed to be
the century of totalitarianism and the playground of tyrants: Communists in
Russia and the satellite states dominated by Moscow; fascism in Italy; national
socialism in Germany; the Generalissimo in Spain; the Colonels in Greece;
Salazar in Portugal; Mao in China; Pinochet in Chile; Trujillo, Papa Doc, Uncle
Roo, Park Chung-hee, Idi Amin, Castro, Tito, Saddam Hussein, Ho Chi Minh,
Khomeini, Perón, Marcos, Pol Pot, Milošević, Honecker. Even democratic India
would fall into autocracy under Indira Gandhi’s permanent “emergency,” while
postwar France quietly accepted rule-by-decree under de Gaulle. The United
States walked up to the edge under would-be dictator Woodrow Wilson and “war
socialism,” but came to its senses with the “return to normalcy” and Warren G.
Harding. The English and their offshoots were nearly alone among the world’s
great powers in maintaining their commitment to democracy and liberty, perhaps
because they’d already had their own experiment in tyranny under Cromwell.
The 20th century was an age of political arrogance unlike
any that had come before. Ancient kings and khans had given themselves
grandiose titles, and ordinary warlords could, with a little luck and
longevity, come to be regarded as gods. But the great idea of the 20th century
— putting all of society under the single discipline of a single mind bent to a
single aim — was beyond the dreams of Julius Caesar or Henry II. German
national socialism, Italian fascism, Russian communism all shared an assumption
that was truly new to the age, though there had been a foreshadowing of it in
the French Revolution. That idea was that the state is destined to be total, and that this development
represents the culmination of its evolution rather than a perversion of its
nature. For the Nazi, the fascist, the Soviet central planner, nothing was to
be outside of the purview of the state. The state, guided by the enlightened
reason of the men entrusted with its power, was to determine everything: which
fields to plant with wheat and which to plant with potatoes, how those should
be distributed and consumed, how the family should be organized, who should
have children and how many they should have and how they should be raised . . .
who lives, who dies, who is an Enemy of the People, where to build the
concentration camps and how to populate them, how much to bill the grieving
families of the state’s enemies for the bullet the state’s agents put into
their heads.
The idea of the total state may have been discredited by the
horrors of the 20th century — 100 million dead under communism, millions gassed
and murdered under Nazism, unknown numbers disappeared, tortured, maimed,
murdered, and occasionally eaten under sundry juntas — but the idea never quite
dies. Of course we good liberal Americans are going to lock religious
dissidents in cages for declining to bake a wedding cake when the state says
they must.
The United States has had an uneasy relationship with the
Catholic Church. Some of the Founding Fathers believed that it was a mistake to
extend religious liberty and other civil rights to Catholics, who had, in their
view, pledged their allegiance to an alien power. And the Catholic Church, for
its part, has not always had the most enlightened attitude toward Anglo-American
liberalism and its separation of the priestly and stately powers. But the
spirit behind the institution of Christ the King was and is entirely consonant
with the American idea. To the encroaching and arrogant spirit of communism and
fascism the Vicar of Christ said: “No. You are not the beginning and the end.
You are not the dispositive power in this universe. You are not the final
judge. There is something above you and beyond you and infinitely greater than
you. You, with all your bombs and bayonets and prisons, may command all the
known world to kneel at your feet, but we have seen pharaohs before, and
emperors and god-kings, too, and we have in the end stood over their graves,
and thought on the grave that is empty.”
We Americans have a related creed, one that holds these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by — there’s no avoiding
the question — their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Our founding
notion is that even a king may go only so far and no further — because even the
greatest powers on this Earth are, in the end, answerable to an infinitely
higher power. On this, there is and can be no negotiation and no compromise. It
is not mere coincidence that what the Nazis and the Communists had in common
was their paganism, reconstituted for
20th-century consumption. The Christian understanding of the universe, in which
God and man meet in the person of Jesus, is fundamentally incompatible with the
totalitarian view of the universe, the philosophy of man as meat, the understanding
of the human being as a herd animal to be husbanded, traded, milked, and, if
the powers that be so decide, slaughtered. The message of Christ the King is
that while we may owe the legitimate secular powers some obedience, they cannot
claim us as property to be disposed
of in accordance with their own whims, because there is Another who has a prior
and superseding claim on us.
Render unto Caesar? We will what we must — but not a mite
more.
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