Father Ramière, the “Inventor” of the Doctrine of Christ the King
Among the members of the 19th-century Catholic anti-liberal school[1], there is one figure who deserves special attention: the Toulouse Jesuit Henri Ramière (1821–1884). He holds the same importance in French Catholic anti-liberalism as would later come to hold Fr. Charles Maignen (1858–1937) of the Religious of Saint Vincent de Paul, author of La souveraineté du peuple est une hérésie (The Sovereignty of the People Is a Heresy). Henri Ramière not only appears to have been the first to use the expression “the social kingship of Jesus Christ,” but he also developed this doctrine extensively. A clear thinker, he produced well-structured writings on this subject, such as Les doctrines romaines sur le libéralisme, envisagées dans leurs rapports avec le dogme chrétien et avec les besoins des sociétés modernes (Roman Doctrines on Liberalism, Considered in their Relationship to Christian Dogma and the Needs of Modern Societies), which we will discuss later, and also Le règne social du Cœur de Jésus (The Social Reign of the Heart of Jesus)[2] .
This link between the reign of Christ and devotion to the Sacred Heart is expressed through consecrations ‒ the consecration of nations to the Heart of Jesus, as well as of armies and of groups. Since the time of the Revolution, this theme of consecration has thus accompanied the desire for a return to a Christian society. In 1875, Henri Ramière organized a petition signed by some 550 bishops and superiors of religious orders; this petition, along with the influence of the German mystic Marie of the Divine Heart, led in 1899 to the consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart by Leo XIII.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Restoration of a Christian Society
Pius XI, in establishing the Feast of Christ the King through the encyclical Quas primas, refers several times to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as paving the way for the recognition of the Kingship of Christ, particularly through familial and national consecrations to the Sacred Heart. He further prescribed that during the annual celebration he instituted for the last Sunday of October, the consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as desired by Leo XIII, be renewed.
This connection is very evident both in his personal piety and in the theological teachings entrusted to Fr. Ramière by the Society in England and later in France, as well as in his apostolate, which on might qualify, along with Fr. Pierre Vallin[3], as being “militant”. In 1861, he founded Le Messager du Cœur de Jésus (The Messenger of the Heart of Jesus), a monthly journal of which he remained the editor until his death, and which, incidentally, still exists today.
For Fr. Ramière, devotion to the Sacred Heart, King of Nations, rests on the theme of the recapitulation in Christ: “Here we touch upon an aspect that brings Ramière’s theology closer to that of St. Irenaeus. The glory of Christ, the Incarnation, would remain, in a sense, incomplete if there were not, within history itself, a redemption of human society, a social reign of Christ and the saints.”[4]
“Catholic action,” for which he advocates in Le Messager and in numerous articles published elsewhere, is an endeavor that is at once religious and socio-political, and clearly anti-revolutionary and anti-liberal. In the context of the Moral Order ‒ that is, following the collapse of the Second Empire, during the early years of the Third Republic, when the latter, governed by Marshal MacMahon with a Chamber dominated by Orleanists and Legitimists, was not yet truly republican, programs were being developed which involved measures for the restoration of a Christian society meant to supplant that society which had emerged from the Revolution. Father Ramière made a solemn appeal in Études, the French journal of the Society of Jesus, to denounce the divisions among Catholics and urge them to unite on the social question[5]. Not to unite on the lowest common denominator of the often very moderate conservative forces of the Moral Order, but on the renunciation of the principles of ’89 and of the alliance with those who profess them: “To the revolutionary principle […], we must oppose the Christian principle” (p. 331).
At a time when a historic reversal still seemed possible, Henri Ramière participated in 1871 in the drafting of a “National Vow to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to obtain the deliverance of the Supreme Pontiff and the salvation of France,” which was linked to the project to build the Sacré-Cœur. The project’s aim was not, as is often claimed, “the expiation of the crimes of the Commune” ‒ which it predated ‒ but rather the symbolic affirmation of a restoration of Christian society through the construction of a sanctuary on the heights overlooking Paris. Its promoters, in fact, attached the utmost importance to the political authorities’ commitment to the construction of this basilica (through the law of July 24, 1873, which declared the construction of the sanctuary dedicated to the Sacred Heart to be in the public interest), so that it might become a kind of act of public worship.
A social kingship of Christ in peril in society…
We know the failure with which these projects of historical reversal met. It was within this context of disillusionment ‒ latent at first (Ramière had pinned some hopes for a Restoration on the Count of Chambord) and then patent ‒ that Fr. Ramière developed the doctrine of the social kingship of Christ. His assessment was as realistic as it was pessimistic: “Throughout the entire universe, there is scarcely a single people left that recognizes, in its fullness, the social kingship of Jesus Christ. These nations, which God the Father gave to His Son as an inheritance, have withdrawn from His authority. One after another, almost all of them have echoed the cry of revolt uttered by France in the last century: We no longer want the kingship of Jesus Christ; we claim to depend henceforth only on ourselves: Nolumus hunc regnare super nos. Satan has triumphed.”[6]
But Henri Ramière was a man of hope against all hope: the principle of Christ’s reign must be affirmed nonetheless! “For how long [will Satan prevail]?” he continued. “He had prevailed as well when, at his instigation, the Son of God was nailed to the Cross and laid in the tomb. His triumph was complete; but the divine Savior was not far from taking his revenge, and that revenge was complete as well. It will be no different in our day.” A millenarian theme, according to Fr. Vallin, or rather one rooted in a supernatural optimism ‒ in any case, a very Marian one ‒ which is particularly evident in one of his early works, Les espérances de l’Église, written in the spirit of enthusiasm which followed the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Thus this passage, which brings to mind the Apostles of the Last Times evoked by Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort: “We may therefore believe that once the moment appointed by Providence to halt the flood of errors and passions invading the earth has come, Mary will appear anew and raise up for the Church defenders whose courage will be commensurate with the difficulties. Ah! May they come soon, these chosen ones of God and Mary […] There are certain festive seasons in the life of the Church when the mystery of Bethlehem is renewed with greater splendor, when the Savior is reborn from the womb of Mary in more striking manifestations.”[7]
Henri Ramière was an avid reader of Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre, particularly of the latter’s Du Pape, which inspired all the ultramontane authors of the 19th century, who, traumatized by the Revolution, saw in the pope, if not the last legitimate spiritual and temporal sovereign, then at least the most steadfast (unable as they were, of course, to imagine that a pope would one day seek modern freedom for the Church[8]). For Ramière, the pope par excellence was Pius IX, the pope of Quanta cura and the Syllabus, of the First Vatican Council. Fr. Ramière played a role in this council ‒ which, while not equivalent to that of Frs. Lainez and Salmerón at the Council of Trent, was by no means insignificant, owing to his prominence ‒ directly within the assembly as an advisor to two bishops, and above all externally through the publication of a series of pamphlets against the leading figures of liberal Catholicism, including Bishop Maret, dean of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology, Father Gratry, who reestablished the Order of the Oratory in France, and Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, leader of the anti-infallibilist minority at the council.
… but a social kingship of Christ as a matter of dogma
Henri Ramière’s “social doctrine,” that of the social kingship of Christ, was specifically developed, fifty-five years before Quas primas, in his work Les doctrines romaines sur le libéralisme, envisagées dans leurs rapports avec le dogme chrétien et avec les besoins des sociétés modernes (Roman Doctrines on Liberalism, Considered in their Relationship to Christian Dogma and the Needs of Modern Societies)[9], and this within the apocalyptic context ‒ which is in truth that of the entire history of the Church ‒ of the First Vatican Council, in which the pope was both crushed and exalted: he was losing the last remnants of his states at the very moment his personal infallibility was affirmed.
The “masterpiece of infernal tactics” that overthrew fourteen centuries of Christendom is the French Revolution, which is “the REVOLUTION par excellence.” For “it attacked not only the political crown of society, nor merely the social institutions that form the heart of the edifice, but the very religious foundation that gives substance to all political powers and to all social institutions” (p. 35). It founded a new world in opposition to the Kingship of Christ.
Ramière’s thesis was as follows (emphasis added by him): “It is a dogma of faith that Jesus Christ possesses sovereign authority over civil societies, as well as over the individuals of which they are composed; and consequently, societies, in their existence and collective action, as well as individuals, in their private conduct, are bound to submit to Jesus Christ and to observe his laws” (p. 40).
A dogma of faith. He saw one of the proofs of this in the political nature of man, which means that the mission of the incarnate Son of God ‒ to whose humanity all power in heaven and on earth has been given ‒ can be fully accomplished only if those who govern societies place themselves at his service “in order to foster the reign of divine law” and thus contribute to the salvation of many, whereas, on the contrary, they pave the way to the damnation of souls if they obstruct this reign.
It should be noted that Henri Ramière, although he moved constantly in circles close to the Count of Chambord, maintaining a voluminous correspondence with Marie-Béatrice of Modena ‒ wife and mother of Carlist pretenders to the Spanish throne and sister of Marie-Thérèse, Countess of Chambord ‒ was a Legitimist, though not by nature. He maintained that God had granted mankind full freedom to give to political society the form best suited to the circumstances, but that, whatever regime they adopted, they were not permitted to separate it from the kingship of Christ.
His conclusions might seem to reflect a voluntarist optimism[10]: “We therefore lean, with deep conviction, toward hope, without however concealing any of the grounds ‒ unfortunately all too real ‒ on which the school of despair rests” (p. 318).
He hoped for this return to an era in which the Gospel would be accepted as the rule of social relations through an inevitable “reaction,” which could not fail to occur, given that disorder had reached its worst extremes (in which regard he was no prophet…). But his realism tempered his optimism, for ever since the Revolution there had already been “powerful reactions” that had proved quite disappointing, since those responsible for such reactions “had contented themselves with claiming only half the rights of Jesus Christ and of his Church” (p. 325). To be decisive, the salutary reaction would need to be “complete and definitive,” uprooting the evil from the very depths of society.
His remarks ended on a mixed note: one must admit, he noted, that the opponents of the reign of Jesus Christ have expended far more zeal than those who have defended it. “But why should we not hope, at least among a few souls, for a partial success, which would be at least a remote preparation for the complete triumph of our holy cause?” (p. 331). To convince “a few souls,” to achieve at least a “partial success”: a very measured optimism, therefore. But immediately rectified by his unwavering voluntarism, that of hope: “Let us labor, then, and if necessary, let us die in the endeavor. The work set before us is eminently the work of the Lord.”
Abbé Claude Barthe
[1] See Grégoire Célier’s valuable work, L’école de l’antilibéralisme catholique, Hora Decima, 2025.
[2] Henri Ramière, Le Règne social du Cœur de Jésus, Toulouse, posthumous publication of 1892, reprinted in facsimile by Éditions Saint-Rémi. In his conclusion, the author comments on Instaurare omnia in Christo, Eph 1:10, which St. Pius X would adopt eight years later as his pontifical motto.
[3] “Le Père Henri Ramière (1821–1884),” in Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, no. 86, 1985, pp. 24–34, and likewise in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. XIII, Beauchesne, 1988, pp. 64–70.
[4] Pierre Vallin, op. cit., pp. 28–29.
[5] “Le principe politique de la restauration sociale,” Études, February 1873. See Daniel Moulinet, “Des lois pour refaire une France chrétienne,” in L’Ordre Moral 1873–1877: Royalisme, catholicisme et conservatisme, ed. Olivier Dard and Bruno Dumons, Cerf, 2025, pp. 285–286.
[6] Henri Ramière, Le Règne social du Cœur de Jésus, op. cit., p. 12. Nolumus hunc regnare super nos: We will not have this man to reign over us (Lk 19:14), words taken from the hymn of the Vespers of Christ the King.
[7] Henri Ramière, Les espérances de l’Église, Périsse, 1861, pp. 656, 657.
[8] “What does the Church ask of you [leaders] today? She tells you in one of the major documents of this council. She asks of you only liberty.” (Message of Paul VI to leaders, December 8, 1965).
[9] Lecoffre, 1870.
[10] Henri Ramière’s voluntarism was very relative. It was he who produced the first edition of the manuscript he attributed to Fr. de Caussade, the very Guyonian Abandon à la Providence divine.