Christ the King, Mindanao Week of Peace, and Year of Consecrated Life

What do they have in common?

The feast of Christ the King is always celebrated on the last Sunday of October. This year it falls on the 26th of November. The 2017 Mindanao Week of Peace always begins on the last Thursday of November which is November 30. And the Year of Consecrated life begins on the First Sunday of Advent which is December 3. The focus of these celebrations is Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ as King is also the Prince of Peace. A Christian lives a Consecrated Life in answer to His call. By the so-called spiritual adoption, a person receives thru the sacrament of baptism a grace like a blood that sanctifies and makes him or her a son or daughter of God just like the genetic transmission where the blood of the child comes from the blood of the father and mother. This process is also termed baptismal grace and baptismal consecration.

When a baptised person is ordained to serve the Church as another Christ (Alter Christus) or makes a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience to follow Christ the process is also called the fulfillment of the baptismal consecration. Now to mature or grow in the priestly service or in consecrated life one has to struggle in living faithfully and courageously the three functions of Jesus Christ as Priest, Prophet and King.

For this reason, we have the linguistic terms like priesthood of the ordained and priesthood of the laity. The prophetic stance in proclaiming the moral truths of the faith and defending the Church even to the point of death is demanded of all baptized, ordained or vowed persons. Sharing in the Kingship of Christ they are all encouraged, especially in Mindanao, to help build Basic Christian Communities (BECs-GKKs) that are self-governing, self-nourishing and self-sustaining. This is possible when the transformative element in Christian’s personal psyche, which is the soul or the self, the inner person, is intimately living in inner peace with himself/herself, with Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in outer peace with others. A person of this type may be correctly the personification of Shalom, the Hebrew word for Peace. St. Paul calls Jesus, “our peace” ( Eph 2:14).