National Register commentary by Thomas Griffin (May 3, 2026) invites the faithful to contemplate the risen Christ during the Easter season, urging a personal encounter with Jesus through prayer, Scripture, and the Eucharist. Griffin highlights Christ’s appearances—to Mary Magdalene, the apostles in the Upper Room, and the disciples at the shore—as models for an intimate, daily relationship with the risen Lord. The article emphasizes that Jesus calls each person by name, offers peace, reveals His wounds, and meets us in our weakness. Yet, for all its devotional warmth, the piece omits the most essential truth: that this risen Christ is the eternal King whose reign extends over all creation—and that the post-conciliar structures claiming His name have systematically denied that sovereignty.
The Resurrection Without the King: A Devotional Hollowed of Doctrine
Griffin’s meditation begins with a correct intuition: “The resurrection of Jesus changes everything.” But what does it change? For the pre-conciliar Church, the Resurrection was not merely an invitation to personal intimacy—it was the definitive establishment of Christ’s universal kingship. Pius XI, in *Quas Primas* (1925), taught unequivocally that “Christ has all power in heaven and on earth,” and that His kingdom “encompasses all men—not only Catholics, but also those who have erred or are separated from the Church, and even non-Christians.” The Resurrection is the triumph of the Divine King over sin, death, and Satan—not merely a psychological comfort for anxious moderns.
Yet nowhere in Griffin’s article is Christ proclaimed as Rex Gloriosus, the King of Kings whose rights over individuals, families, and states are absolute and non-negotiable. Instead, the risen Jesus becomes a gentle therapist: “He loves us individually,” “He desires to give us His peace,” “He meets us in our weakness.” These are not false statements—but they are dangerously incomplete. By reducing the Resurrection to a private spiritual experience, Griffin unwittingly echoes the very modernist error condemned by St. Pius X in *Lamentabili sane exitu*: that revelation is merely “man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Proposition 20), and that dogmas are “not truths of divine origin but interpretations worked out by the human mind” (Proposition 22).
Mary Magdalene and the Voice That Commands—Not Just Comforts
Griffin rightly notes that Mary Magdalene recognizes Jesus when He calls her name (John 20:16). He writes: “It is the voice of Jesus that identifies him as the same person who was brutally killed.” True—but what follows from this? For the Church before 1958, it meant obedience to the One who holds all authority in heaven and earth (Matt. 28:18). The risen Christ did not merely say “Mary” to comfort her; He commissioned her: “Go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend to my Father and your Father” (John 20:17). This is a royal command, not a sentimental reunion.
Griffin transforms this moment into a generic invitation to “spend time in prayer,” where “Jesus calls our name like that.” But the liturgical and doctrinal context of the early Church understood such encounters as acts of submission to divine authority. The Fathers—St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory the Great—preached the Resurrection as the vindication of Christ’s divinity and the foundation of His Church’s infallible teaching office. To strip this of its hierarchical, juridical, and eschatological dimensions is to fall into the rationalist error condemned by Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors*: “Human reason is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (Proposition 3), and “Divine revelation is imperfect and subject to indefinite progress” (Proposition 5).
The Upper Room: Peace Without Justice, Wounds Without Atonement
In discussing Christ’s appearance to the apostles, Griffin focuses on the greeting “Peace be with you” and the showing of wounds. He writes: “His desire is for our hearts to rest within his. The peace—the total well-being—that he offers goes beyond anything this world can give.” Again, not false—but fatally incomplete. The peace Christ offers is not the absence of conflict or emotional tranquility; it is the pax Christi, the order established by the King who has conquered death and demands allegiance.
Pius XI warned in *Quas Primas*: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the entire human society had to be shaken.” True peace cannot exist where Christ’s public reign is denied—and it is precisely this denial that defines the post-conciliar era. The “peace” offered by modernist clerics like Griffin is a naturalistic imitation of the supernatural peace of Christ—a peace that ignores sin, judgment, and the necessity of conversion to the Catholic Faith as the only means of salvation.
Moreover, Griffin speaks of Christ’s wounds as symbols of love and vulnerability: “Our wounds can be redeemed by touching his.” But the Church has always taught that Christ’s wounds are primarily propitiatory—they are the price of our redemption, the satisfaction owed to divine justice. To reduce them to metaphors for emotional healing is to deny the sacrificial nature of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass—the very sacrifice that the post-conciliar “reform” has obscured, if not abolished.
The Shore: Abundance Without Obedience to the Church
Griffin’s reflection on the miraculous catch of fish (John 21) contains a kernel of truth: “He knows that we need him… not even the simplest tasks can be done without him.” Yet he immediately channels this into a modernist framework: “So he gives us his presence in the Eucharist and an encounter with him in Sacred Scripture as means of relying on him.”
But which Eucharist? The Pauline Rite of 1969, with its Protestantized theology, communal meal emphasis, and denial of transubstantiation in practice? Or the Immemorial Roman Rite, the Unbloody Renewal of Calvary, offered by a validly ordained priest with the intention of doing what the Church does? Griffin does not say—and this silence is damning. The Catholic position, defined at Trent and reaffirmed by every pope until 1958, is that the Mass is a true propitiatory sacrifice, not a “memorial meal.” To speak of “encountering Christ in the Eucharist” without affirming the Real Presence under the species of bread and wine, and without condemning the Novus Ordo as a departure from Catholic worship, is to participate in the very indifferentism condemned by Pius IX: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion” (Proposition 18 of the *Syllabus*).
The Omission That Condemns: No Mention of the Social Kingship of Christ
The most glaring absence in Griffin’s article is any reference to the Social Kingship of Christ—the doctrine that Christ’s authority extends not only to individuals but to nations, governments, and the entire order of society. Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism,” which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
Griffin writes as if the Resurrection has no public, political, or cultural implications. There is no call for states to recognize Christ’s sovereignty, no condemnation of religious liberty as a heresy (denounced by Gregory XVI in *Mirari Vos* and Pius IX in the *Syllabus*), no warning against the separation of Church and State (condemned in Proposition 55 of the *Syllabus*). Instead, we get a privatized, interiorized faith—exactly the kind of religion that the conciliar sect promotes to avoid challenging the liberal democratic order.
The Language of Devotion as a Mask for Apostasy
Griffin’s tone is warm, pastoral, and seemingly orthodox. He uses phrases like “the risen Christ,” “daily prayer,” “intimacy with him,” and “relying on him in all things.” But this language, divorced from the fullness of Catholic doctrine, becomes a vehicle for modernism. As St. Pius X warned in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis* (1907), the modernists “clothe their errors in the garments of piety,” using pious-sounding language to mask the destruction of dogma.
Consider Griffin’s final exhortation: “That is the best—and only—way to meet him as a real, living person.” But the Church has always taught that we meet Christ not only in private prayer but in the sacraments validly administered, in the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, and in the public profession of faith before the world. To reduce encounter with Christ to subjective experience is to deny the objective reality of the Church as the Mystical Body—a society with visible hierarchy, infallible teaching, and coercive jurisdiction.
Conclusion: The Risen Christ Demands More Than Feelings
Thomas Griffin’s article is not heretical in the strict sense—but it is profoundly deficient. It presents a Christ without a Kingdom, a Resurrection without judgment, wounds without atonement, and a Eucharist without sacrifice. It reflects the spiritual poverty of a conciliar sect that has abandoned the fullness of Catholic truth in favor of a therapeutic, individualistic, and socially irrelevant piety.
The risen Christ does indeed call us by name—but He calls us to repentance, faith, and obedience to His Church. He calls us not merely to “intimacy” but to submission to His divine authority. He offers peace—but only to those who accept His kingship over soul, family, and nation. Until the structures occupying the Vatican return to the integral teaching of the pre-conciliar Magisterium, such commentaries will remain what they are: well-intentioned but spiritually bankrupt reflections that lead souls not to the Risen King, but to the religion of man.
[The full article content as processed above, formatted in HTML for WordPress, with all critical analysis integrated into the narrative flow, using bold for key accusations, italics for Latin terms and doctrinal principles, and blockquotes where appropriate from the source text or magisterial documents.]
Source:
The Risen Jesus Calls You by Name (ncregister.com)
Date: 03.05.2026