Interview by Aldo Maria Valli with Father Francesco Ricossa.
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The Kingship of Christ and the anniversary of the ‘Quas primas’. Father Ricossa: ‘Repudiate conciliar modernism to return to integral Catholicism’.
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of Quas primas, the encyclical that Pope Pius XI dedicated to the kingship of Christ. Taking our cue from the anniversary, we talk about it with Fr Francesco Ricossa, superior of the Mater Boni Consilii Institute, who has repeatedly explored the subject in his writings and speeches.
Father, if there is one teaching that the Church has totally forgotten, perhaps even more than divine chastisement, it is that relating to the social kingship of Christ. No one dares to reaffirm it any more. It resembles a fossil that speaks to us of a very remote past. Personally, the more I reflect on how to live today as authentic counter-revolutionary Catholics, in the sense of not accepting liberal and democratic dogmas, the more I realise that we need to start again precisely from the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and 2025, with the centenary of Pius XI’s Quas primas, offers us a propitious occasion for reflection. Pius X had already explained that the city cannot be built differently from the way God designed it. But we are so imbued with secularism that perhaps not even we, who reread this magisterium, really believe that a rebuilding of the city according to God’s designs is possible. Do you also have this impression?
I often recall in sermons Pope Pius XI’s expression in the encyclical Quas primas that secularism was a ‘plague’. The plague was a contagious and deadly disease. Secularism is therefore a deadly spiritual disease, and the death of the soul is its eternal perdition, and it is contagious, so that those who are affected in turn, even unknowingly, infect those around them. Living in a liberal, secularised society, we inevitably breathe, so to speak, the air of our times, and many of those few who still say they are faithful to the Kingship of Christ in fact behave as if they did not believe in it. And since this kingship is social, it is above all in social life that they are (we are) imbued with secularism. And in political life, it goes without saying, in which we are tempted to adhere to surrogates on the pretext that they are less distant from the truth than others. But also, and with disastrous practical consequences, in family life, where fathers and parents are often resigning.
1925, too, was a jubilee year. And on that occasion Pope Pius XI wanted to reiterate: Jesus Christ is King of minds, wills and hearts. As an image, I spontaneously think of Christ Pantocrator in the apse of Monreale Cathedral. Today, however, for the 2025 Jubilee, the Vatican has commissioned a mascot, Luce, which looks like something out of a Japanese comic strip and has been designed by a cartoonist who says of himself that he is ‘non-practising religion’ and explains that he wanted to ‘freshen up’ the image of the Church. In reality, there is nothing older than these assertions, but in the sacred palaces they evidently do not realise this. How is this possible?
As far as I have read, if I am not mistaken, the cartoonist would also be engaged in defending the lgbt cause, as they say now. You say: they don’t notice. I cannot generalise, but I’m afraid they notice very well, only that they knowingly want to reject everything that refers to the tradition of the Church. There is nothing more intolerant than a ‘liberal’ (in this case: a modernist) with regard to those who are not ‘liberal’. All affection is due to those who are outside the Church, all ill-concealed contempt to those who belong to it.
The Church, as such, is not prone to the world.Those who hide ‘in the very bosom and bowels of the Church’, to use the expression of St Pius X, are, and programmatically so: ‘We too, more than anyone, have the cult of Man’. Secularism (demurely baptised ‘positive secularism’), consecrated by the conciliar declaration on religious freedom Dignitatis humanae personae, can only disrupt ‘private health’ (the salvation of souls), public health (the temporal and spiritual common good) and the two perfect societies, the State and – as far as possible – the Church.The new concordat in Italy also officially consecrated this principle, inspired by the Republican Constitution and Vatican II respectively.
The public tributes of those who are believed to be the successors of Peter to the two champions of secularism, Pannella and Bonino, are the most degraded and degrading exemplification of this. Christ’s promises (non praevalebunt) in favour of the Church ensure the miracle you invoke. But after how much damage caused to society, to the Church, to souls? God alone knows.
Pius XI wrote: ‘The plague of our age is so-called secularism with its errors and impious incentives’. Many years later, Benedict XVI would speak of ‘healthy secularism’ to distinguish it from secularism, which excludes religion from the public sphere and confines it to the strictly personal. But does it not seem to you that the moment one accepts the secularity of the State one already turns one’s back on the social kingship of Christ?
As I answer you, I realise that I anticipate your questions. Ratzinger’s model of ‘healthy secularism’, as he explained, among other things, in his address to the Roman Curia when he spoke of the Council’s hermeneutics, takes as its model the liberalism of the American revolution, which aims to promote all religions, and of the first French revolution (’89), to distinguish it from a secularism hostile to religions. The attempt is unsuccessful precisely because the root of the two secularisms is common (the agnostic Enlightenment) and the effect is the same, short or long term. Even in Masonic lodges, a viscerally hostile secularism is flanked by another that is open to all religions. He said: I am the Truth.
Among the various killers of Christ’s social kingship, in the foreground is ecumenism. If already in 1950 (another holy year) with Humani generis Pius XII denounced: ‘Some reduce to a vain formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to obtain eternal health’, a little more than ten years later the Second Vatican Council imposed the dogma of dialogue, thus putting a tombstone on the idea that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation, and the late rethinkings of Dominus Iesus would be useless. Today ecumenism is practically a walking corpse, but in the meantime, with the new dogma of synodality, Rome, following the self-destructive path of Protestantism, has made the democratic idea its own. We are therefore clearly on the verge of suicide. Hence the question returns: what miracle will be able to make Christ’s kingship re-emerge from the mists?
Bergoglio’s recent speech on all religions as different languages of one God goes far beyond ecumenism, which extends to interreligious dialogue. But if all religions are ‘true’ and come from God, they are also all false: it is the old apologue of the ‘three rings’ all forged by the one divine Father, of which no one knows which is the true one. One ring is the true one, but nobody knows which one, while two are false, yet they too come from God. From the ‘three rings’ one easily passes to the ‘three impostors’. From Spanish Judaism to the court of Frederick II of Swabia, from this to the Masonic and Enlightenment philosopher Lessing (Nathan the Wise) the discourse is always the same. And again Pius XI in his encyclical condemning ecumenism Mortalium animos explained that ecumenism is the way to atheism. Atheism rampant in our days. ‘I will reign in spite of my enemies”: Christ the King reigns either with the benefits of his rule, or with the punishments resulting from his repudiation (as happens now). The ‘miracle’ of which you speak will certainly not be that of a new Dominus Iesus (which nevertheless reaffirms the fundamental points of Vatican II) but it will come about with the repudiation of conciliar modernism: an integral repudiation in order to return to integral Catholicism. When one goes down a dead-end street, all that is left is ‘backtracking’. So, as some nice jokers say: backwards all the way! I admit, I am an indietrist, as the current occupant of the Petrine See would say, who does not believe, it seems, in the Primacy.
Father, could you recommend some useful reading on the subject of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ?
First of all, I recommend referring to the Magisterium of the Church. After the end of Christendom, the Popes have recalled the principles denied by modern societies. In addition to the already mentioned encyclical Quas primas by Pius XI, I would start with the encyclicals Quanta cura and Syllabus by Pius IX, Immortale Dei by Leo XIII, Notre charge apostolique by St. Pius X (which you mentioned). But one should not forget the teachings of the Popes during the apogee of Christianity; very well known is Boniface VIII’s Unam sanctam. For those studying law, I recommend researching good manuals on public ecclesiastical law, such as the well-known ones by Ottaviani and Cappello. For French-speaking readers, there is Jean Ousset’s classic, Pour qu’Il règne (1959), which is also available, I believe, in pdf format. Two collaborators of St Pius X have well illustrated Christian society: from a historical point of view, the Social History of the Church, by Monsignor Benigni, reprinted by our Centro Librario Sodalitium; otherwise, The Problem of the Present Hour, by Monsignor Delassus, reprinted by Effedieffe. Our Book Centre has an important re-edition in the pipeline, which we will discuss when it is published.