Jesus autem tacebat: Dignitatis Humanae and Social Kingship, Part Three

“But Jesus remained silent”— Matthew 26:63

Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), affirmed the doctrine of the social kingship of Christ. He thereby kicked back against the tide of the modern political world with its emphasis upon religion as merely a private affair of individuals, wherein religious truth is viewed as just a subjective choice similar to one’s taste in food and drink.

Pius XI criticized this trend toward the complete privatization of the faith and emphasized that, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, Jesus Christ is to be affirmed as the king, not just of individual souls, but of all of society, up to and including civil authority. Issued on the Feast of Christ the King (December 11th), Pope Pius wanted to remind the world that Christ is the ruler of all, and not just of the few devotees of a single “religion”.

The Cross and the Hammer

Pius makes his intent clear in the opening paragraph:

… as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ; and that We promised to do as far as lay in Our power. In the Kingdom of Christ, that is, it seemed to Us that peace could not be more effectually restored nor fixed upon a firmer basis than through the restoration of the Empire of Our Lord.

This was, of course, the theological vision that animated the reality of European Christendom, with its organic social unity grounded in the theological conceptualization of a single sacral order that united throne and altar for the sake of promoting Christ and his Kingdom. It is no exaggeration to say that it was this vision created modern Europe. And let us thank God for, without it, Europe after the fall of Rome to the Germanic tribes would have remained pagan and evolved into a far different socio-cultural reality, and one most likely characterized by a fractious tribalism oriented around an altogether different notion of the relationship between power and true authority. After all, Thor is not Christ, and his hammer represents a different ordo than that of the cross.

It is that cross, and not the hammer, under which Europe evolved, which, among other things, at the very least placed European culture under the banner of charity and love for all. Charity is the queen of the virtues, guiding all human endeavors toward the true, the good, and the beautiful. Therefore, it was no accident or mere quirk of history that it was the culture of the cross, the culture of kenotic charity, that gave us the Church’s invention of hospitals, orphanages, schools, and an intellectual life permeated with a love for philosophy culminating in the grand intellectual synthesis of the medieval scholastics.

And in so doing, and despite falsehoods to the contrary, it provided the foundations for the modern natural sciences. It also gave us the literary genius of Dante, the polymath humanism of Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus, and the unsurpassed architecture (in my view, at least) of the grand Gothic Churches.

Christendom was truly an impressive achievement, and despite the downside to the Church’s embracing of the Constantinian order, there is no denying that Europe was better off with the Church as her spiritual guide rather than any other religious worldview.

But Christendom, as a socio-cultural project, did eventually fail. And by the beginning of the 18th century, Christendom was dying on a cultural level, and its death rattle was heard on a political level. By the early 19th century, after the French Revolution in particular, we see the inexorable and seemingly unstoppable rise of secularism, militant atheism and anti-clericalism, followed closely by reductionistic scientism, the vague ideology of a formless and directionless “progress” guided only by market forces and concepts of “power”, and the naturalization of religion as the mere epiphenomenal flotsam and jetsam of ignorant early humans who projected “divinity” onto natural powers that are now easily explained scientifically.

This new cultural reality was a witch’s brew of toxins, an elixir of atheistic negation, and a form of cultural arsenic laced with honey. Its allure was powerful and totalizing. This is the context in which, I think, it is best to read the condemnations by 19th-century popes of false notions of religious freedom. Notions that were most often forms of anti-Christian ideology masquerading as the triumph of newly manufactured “rights” of society over and against an “oppressive” Church. The fear of the reign of a nihilistic religious indifferentism, and/or hostility to religion, was very real.

In other words, given the reality and context, the popes were not wrong to flag it as a threat to Christ’s kingdom.

A Christendom built on kenotic love

Nevertheless, the fact remained that Christendom was dead or dying. Furthermore, only a naïve and superficial triumphalism could continue to pretend that Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again if only we could get new concordats to shore up the crumbling religious infrastructure of the confessional states. Absent such arrangements, many in the Church focused not on a diagnosis of the true crisis but on how best to guarantee the Church’s freedom within this new reality.

Of course, the freedom of the Church is profoundly important, and I don’t minimize that fact. My point is that the deeper need was an honest appraisal, both theological and pragmatic, of the factors that led to the end of Christendom.

The historian Brad Gregory, in his exceptional book, The Unintended Reformation, gives a granular historical rendering of just how this came about. Space precludes a detailed review of the text. Suffice it to say that one of the key factors, according to Gregory, which led to the demise of Christendom was precisely the Church’s repeated violations of the rule of charity. In other words, the very triumph of the religion of the crucified Lord, the religion of the kenotic Christ, the religion of the cross, too often fell back into the reign of Thor’s hammer. The Church too often thought that the “public order” needed to maintain Christendom required the use of civil power as the coercive tool the Church used to keep things in line.

Again, these are complicated historical matters, and one can hardly fault various popes for finding grave danger to the public order in groups such as the Albigensians and the Cathars, or in itinerant intellectual rogues, including Giordano Bruno. Again, all haughty anachronisms must be avoided. Nevertheless, the emerging humanism of the Renaissance, even amongst Catholics, grew weary of things like the Avignon papacy, the era of three popes, the corruption of the Roman curia into a copy of the culture of the royal court of kings and their sycophants, the sexual and financial degradations of Rome, and the general tendency to hold the entire rotten edifice together with the glue and balsam wood of coercive repression.

These historical memories became fodder for the anti-Catholic animus of the emerging culture of modernity and were quickly turned into forms of useful social propaganda that created a narrative about Catholicism as the enemy of freedom that persists with us even today. Even many Catholics today speak of the medieval world, falsely, as “the dark ages” and share the same broad consensus that the Church was the enemy of science, freedom, and democracy.

Therefore, beginning in the 19th century, many in the Church began to recognize that they had entered an entirely new cultural reality wherein resort to the old ways of Christendom in order to “restore” them was a doomed and therefore foolish project. They realized that if Christendom in some form was to be restored, it had to be of a different kind with a deepened and chastised self-awareness that the “Empire of Christ” was that of kenotic love grounded in the cruciform reality of the Lamb who was slain.

The social kingship of Christ

We must indeed fight for the Empire of Christ and his social kingship. But the question is: in what form?

Must the Church’s pursuit of Christ’s rule over everything always manifest as a strong integralist union of throne and altar, complete with grandiose privileges for prelates and the use of laws to impose from above what the Church has not been able to persuade from below? Law has a proper place, of course, in the moral and spiritual regulation of the public square. But in what swimming pool do those laws swim? In the waters of the crucified Christ? The waters of charity? Or the waters of coercion and punitive sanction?

The Notre Dame theologian John Betz summarizes this point beautifully. Discussing the Church’s mandate to make Christ the King of all things, he states:

But if the Church is to serve this glorious end, of which the sacrum imperium was only a passing type, what must it do? … one thing is clear: the Church must give up all coneitedness and self-centeredness, indeed it must be prepared to lose itself and to die to itself if it is to find its destiny. … but this is to say nothing other than it must follow the way of its Lord.

And he follows up with the following conclusion worthy of a lengthy citation:

But if the Church gives up the form of godliness, does this not mean that the Church ceases to be the Church? No, no more than the Son of God ceases to be the Son of God in leaving behind the prerogatives of divinity. Rather, precisely in letting go of the form of godliness it shows itself to be the Church, in the way that God shows who he really is in the Son’s self-emptying love. … Needless to say, this does not mean that the Church is called to give up its claim to the truth; rather, it means that its claim to represent the truth of Christ requires the Church to give up the form of godliness and all the trappings thereof … which have kept the world from seeing the humility of Christ in it, and its own desperate need for the forgiveness and mercy of Christ. ((559, n. 48)

This was the animating project of Vatican II, which, of course, had only mixed success. In some ways, to borrow a culinary metaphor, there were not only too many cooks in the kitchen, but cooks who were often at odds about the menu. Therefore, the Council had flaws and cracks that can be criticized. But the tendency today, in some very conservative circles (sometimes loosely referred to as “traditionalists”) to focus on those flaws as reasons for dismissing the entire project in order to restore the old order, is deeply unfortunate and regrettable.

This rejection of the Council, often on the grounds that it was “merely pastoral”, ignores the fact that this pastoral focus, despite having elements of a time-bound analysis of “modern man”, was an absolutely necessary first step in the direction of forging a new vision for what we mean by the social kingship of Christ and his “Empire.”

And it is in that light that I think Dignitatis Humanae is to be read. It does not anachronistically condemn the past, and it does not condemn the notion of a confessional state as such. But it does call into question the all too easy equating of the Empire of Christ with the horizontal plane of a sacral order conceived along the lines of civil power imposed from above. It is asking us, in other words, to think more Christologically in terms of the actual economy of salvation, where the model of “kingship” is radically subverted as a kingship of kenotic humility to the point of death.

The image of the crucified king, crowned with thorns and nailed to the tree of Roman kingly power, is an image to which we must return repeatedly, in order to properly understand our new cultural reality and what it is demanding from the Church by way of a response to modern forms of power.

The silence of Christ

The epigraphic quote from Matthew’s Gospel with which I began is not just instructive in a pragmatic sense, but a deep theological prompting to our conscience as a Church: Jesus autem tacebat. This prompting in no way implies a literal application as if we must remain silent in the face of modern provocations. But it does denote a posture, a mystique, an admonishment to an inner form of kenotic humility whose sole aim is the vicarious taking on of the world’s false notion of power and transforming it from within into a truly spiritual reality.

Henri de Lubac, in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, speaks of Ivan Karamazov’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor, whose denunciations of Christ’s freighting of human freedom with too much eternal baggage are met with nothing but silence from Christ. In this context, de Lubac quotes Nicholas Berdyaev:

The artistic method that Dostoevsky adopts in his narrative is admirable: his Christ is silent all the time and remains in the shadow. The effective religious idea is not expressed in any words. The truth about freedom is inexpressible. But the truth about constraint is easily expressed. (p. 306)

Again, the point here is not the pragmatic preference for silence as a rhetorical device. It is rather on the spiritual power of a love that expresses itself most persuasively in suffering compassion, as symbolized at the end of Ivan’s tale when the only response Christ gives is to kiss the Inquisitor on his “bloodless aged lips”. And here notice too that the lips are not only bloodless and therefore expressive of the lifelessness of a cadaver, but also “aged,” which evokes a sense of a hopelessly impotent and out of touch jadedness.

De Lubac concludes his analysis with a sharpening of the point:

Thus behind the aesthetic device there is a conviction. So long as we talk and argue and busy ourselves on the plane of this world, “evil seems the stronger”. More than that: whether evil distresses us or whether we exalt it … it alone seems real. The thing is to enter upon another plane , to find that fourth dimension that represents the kingdom of the Spirit. Then Freedom is queen, then God triumphs and man with him.

And God triumphs and reigns as King precisely as a King who creates us to live in a regime of engraced freedom–a freedom oriented to a supernatural fulfillment that does not, for all that, negate its truly free character. But also more than that: As Ratzinger noted, truth has an intrinsic orientation to freedom as much as freedom is oriented to truth. Indeed, as de Lubac notes, “what is God indeed, but the creator of freedoms?”

Therefore, what I am claiming is that what DH gives to us is not a rejection or an affirmation of this or that political theory. It is not giving us a detailed program for Church-State relations and is content to leave it to others to figure out the “mechanics” of the relationship between the Church and civil authority. But yes, it advances the idea–perhaps new, perhaps not so new after all–that given the importance of freedom in the economy of salvation—that our dignity as creatures oriented to the worshipping of the one true God “in Spirit and in Truth”—is something embedded within us by God as a theological “right” oriented to that “duty”.

And I further claim that DH is appealing to the Christocentric core of the Council, best expressed in Gaudium et Spes 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” What DH is appealing to, as I think the entire Council is appealing as well, is a hermeneutic of continuity, but now deepened and made radically fecund, by the burning antiseptic of a hermeneutic of kenosis.

And, therein, all that is bloodless and old will be made new again. Jesus autem tacebat.

Related at CWR:
• “Dignitatis Humanae and Social Kingship, Part One” (July 8, 2026) by Larry Chapp
• “Dignitatis Humanae and Social Kingship, Part Two” (July 17, 2026) by Larry Chapp

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