Why the Mass Should Be Kingly and Courtly
For the 100th Anniversary of Pius XI's Encyclical "Quas Primas"
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Today, December 11, 2025, is the one hundredth anniversary of the promulgation of Pope Pius XI’s decisive encyclical on the kingship of Jesus Christ, Quas Primas, through which he gave the Church a full theology of this mystery and, to make it firmly a part of the Catholic soul, instituted a new feast for the last Sunday of October. (The profound meaning of this choice of date as well as the significance of Paul VI’s changes to the feast and its location are discussed in a different article of mine: “Two Dates, Two Different Feasts: October vs. November ‘Christ the Kings.’”)
Here, I will speak of why it is appropriate that the Mass should follow the fundamental symbolic paradigm of worship according to Sacred Scripture and the entire Christian tradition, namely, that God is our great King, ruling over all with the scepter of righteousness; that Jesus Christ is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Judge of the living and the dead; that heaven is His throne and earth His footstool; and that, in His holy court, a vast multitude of saints and angels minister unto Him, with His holy Mother, Our Lady, as their Queen.
Foes of tradition assert that the classical Latin liturgy is characterized by courtliness or court etiquette, and that, as time went on, it got mixed up with (and corrupted by) expressions of Baroque secular politics. In other words, the progressives hold that the traditional Mass—think especially of the Pontifical Mass—is an elaborate show of deference toward a prince or king, indebted more to secular high culture than to sacred precedent, and detracts from the humility, simplicity, and immediacy of the presence of Christ in the community, the brotherhood gathered around the table.
However plausible this may sound to some, there are nagging counterindications that deserve the attention of honest inquirers. In his work The Treasure of the Church, Canon Bagshawe argues to the intimate connection between royalism (or royalty) and temple liturgy, and how, as a result, the image of “the court of the great king” was taken up by Christian liturgy and everywhere accepted as a normative framework—something it obviously already is in both the Old and New Testaments.
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I'm not usually a follower of "The Royals," but I took great care to watch the various rituals and traditions surrounding the death of the late Queen Elizabeth II, as well as the accession of Charles III to the throne of England; not because the English monarchy means much politically any more, but because the semi-sacramental ritual of coronation survives, and because that ritual beautifully expresses invisible things visibly.
During the multiple periods of Anglo-Catholic recovery of Catholic ritual, traditions, feasts, theology and attitudes, they also managed (against the Puritan faction of their divided Church) to keep and preserve a a "Kingly" aspect to their liturgy; perhaps as a beneficial outgrowth of their (lamentable) Erastian ecclesial model. It's no accident that both the Oxford Movement and the Caroline Divines (and their secular brethren, the Cavaliers) had royalist sympathies.
One example of this is the "Prayer of Humble Access;" a prayer unique to the Prayer Book and to the Ordinariate Liturgy, developed in part from the Latin prayer of "Domine Non sum Dignus," as well as other sources. In this prayer, the faithful pray for permission to access the sacred mystery of the Eucharist, and speak to God explicitly as a Feudal Lord: powerful but merciful; beloved but fearful.
When I was making my way from Anglicanism to full reunion with the Catholic Church, I would always recite this prayer before receiving communion. Now that I'm in the Ordinariate, I get to say it with my priest and congregation every Sunday.
"We do not presume to come to this thy table (O merciful Lord) trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies: we be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table: but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, [in these holy Mysteries,] that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood. Amen."
Brilliant framing on this one. The inversion is what alot of people miss: the charge that traditional liturgy borrowed from secular courts actually gets the causality backwards. Temple worship established that paradigm first, and royal courts then mirrored divine worship. The Bagshawe reference nails it, and it sidesteps the tired "Baroque contamination" arguement that keeps getting recycled without examining its actual historical basis.