Defending the Social Kingship of Christ
There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of Christian history, these divisions would have seemed all but impossible.
Today’s feast of King St. Louis IX of France (August 25) offers us an opportunity to recover a gem of medieval wisdom, which is the prospect that political authority can be truly ordered toward Christ. King St. Louis IX, who ruled France from 1226 to 1270, is regarded by many as the greatest medieval king and the only true saint-king of France. His reign is an enduring model of Christian kingship, so much so that the subsequent generations of French monarchs were all expected to emulate him.
In his reign, one finds a sophisticated and saintly understanding that his kingship belonged to Christ.
In his kingdom, there was no secular state lurking beneath religious trappings, waiting to be separated from them. The kingdom itself was ordered around the sacraments, and the faith’s vision of man, justice, authority, family, worship, and the common good. The categories of “religious” versus “secular,” so familiar to us, did not structure medieval society.
By contrast, King St. Louis IX governed by prioritizing the salvation of his subjects’ souls. He governed for France, acquiring the Crown of Thorns, a large piece of the True Cross, and the Holy Lance – and commissioning the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house these relics. The Crown of Thorns became the sacred treasure of the French monarchy itself, placed at the heart of the royal court: thus, his own crown existed beneath the crown of Christ.
What is the meaning of the social kingship of Christ? As Catholics, we understand Christ as Priest, Prophet, and King. His kingship extends over individuals, families, nations, and peoples. Pope Pius XI made this point forcefully in Quas Primas, his 1925 encyclical instituting the Feast of Christ the King. Christ possesses kingship not only in His divinity, but also as man, having received from the Father “power and glory and a kingdom.”
Pope Pius XI explicitly connected the salvation of individuals with the ordering of society, arguing that Christ’s kingship cannot be confined to the private sphere. At the conclusion of Quas Primas, he expressed the hope that the annual celebration of Christ the King would remind rulers and princes that they too owe public honor and obedience to Christ, and that the state should take account of God’s commandments and Christian principles in making laws, administering justice, and educating the young.
This is not a call for the state to force its citizens to convert, or legislatively to mandate Catholicism. But a recognition of what we all know, which is that political communities cannot exist without moral foundations. Every society rests upon assumptions about what man is, what constitutes justice, what rights and duties belong to families, and what constitutes the common good.
Catholic Christianity has never regarded Christ’s authority as something that ends at the church doors. Yet many people today are fine with relegating the faith to the private sphere.
In the life of King St. Louis IX, one can observe how seriously he took his primary responsibility of administering justice. And because justice cannot be separated from love, the Christian ruler was called not merely to administer a bureaucracy, but to cultivate a society ordered toward the good.
His holiness, too, was inseparable from his kingship.
Louis gave generously to the poor and personally served them. He would disguise himself as a beggar and leave the palace to serve the poor and to meet with his subjects. He was a devoted husband and father of ten who took seriously his responsibility to raise his children in the Faith.
His letter to his son Philip III states: “The first thing I advise is that you fix your whole heart upon God, and love Him with all your strength.” Without this “no one can be saved or be of any worth.” Blessed to be raised by a devout Christian woman himself, St. Louis instructed his son to avoid mortal sin, make frequent Confession, love the Church, practice virtue, seek justice, avoid unnecessary war with fellow Christians, and refrain from burdening his subjects unjustly.
For him, personal holiness and the justice of the kingdom were not separable, and thus he saw no option but the pursuit of love and virtue. St. Louis and Europe’s other saint-monarchs show us how discernment can be applied concretely to leadership, that a Christian can govern magnanimously, build, legislate, administer justice, raise a family, serve the poor, and pursue holiness as one integrated vocation. St. Louis eventually died in the Eighth Crusade, giving his final years in service to the Christian faith he had spent his life defending.
There are good Christians in the public sphere today who sense that something has been lost, particularly in how politics has gradually moved from denying the Church’s spiritual supremacy to turning governments away from God altogether.
The vision capacious enough to unite these concerns and prescribe a solution is the social kingship of Christ. It is a supra-political vision because it transcends politics, but directly implicates it. It does not depend upon the fortunes of any particular party, election, movement, or regime. It begins with the nature of Christ Himself, and can be practiced because the kingship of Christ can shape concrete institutions and the people who inhabit them.
And this is perhaps the greatest lesson of King St. Louis IX for our own fractured age: Christ does not cease to be King even if our elected leaders do not acknowledge Him. Christians are a people of miracles. If we are looking for a vision capable of renewing the soul of Europe, we could begin with the conviction that Christ is King in all the realms of our lives.
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