The Social Kingship of Christ: According to Cardinal Pie

This work gathers and arranges the many scattered writings, sermons, letters, and pastoral works of Cardinal Pie, whose episcopal mission in nineteenth-century France made him one of the most ardent champions of the doctrine that Our Lord Jesus Christ reigns over both individual souls and over human society in all its collective and institutional dimensions. In these sources, the good Cardinal repeatedly affirms that the supernatural order, established by God in creation and consummated in the Incarnation and Redemption, remains obligatory and indispensable; the establishment of Christian piety and divine law in private life must find its complement in the public, civic order so that society might reflect the order of grace. Through the methodical work of Fra Saint-Just, the book renders accessible this comprehensive vision: Christ’s kingship is universal, lawful, and foundational for all legitimate human community.

Very apt for our time, in its systematic chapters the book shows that to deny the social reign of Christ — that is, to limit Christianity to private devotion or mere “personal morality” — is to accept the desacralization of society. Society is thusly reduced to a bifurcation in which the temporal order is autonomous, dechristened, and exposed to the revolutions of impiety, materialism, and social discord. Cardinal Pie, as Fra Saint-Just presents him, insists that when the State or civil institutions abandon the recognition of Christ’s sovereign kingship, they relinquish their legitimacy.