Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an

encounter with Christ and his church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's word where it is most needed.

Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we've come to the end of the liturgical year, which means the Feast of Christ, the King.

We always end the year with this reflection on the kingship, the lordship of Jesus.

You know, it's interesting how this feast was instituted

at the beginning of the 20th century

with the rise of the totalitarian dictatorships.

And the church was saying, no, no, no, to all those false claims to ultimate authority.

Ultimate authority for us belongs to one person, Christ the King.

Well, for this year the church gives us as the first reading, a marvelous passage

from the 34th chapter of the prophet Ezekiel,

again one of the most compelling of the major prophets.

Complex, fascinating, rich. Well, Ezekiel, as I probably told you before, was temple priest certainly and he was carried

off in the first wave of the Babylonian exile so around the year 600 BC he was in a word witness to the greatest catastrophe in the history of Israel.

Israel which was meant to be the nation to gather all the nations of the world, the nation to give God right praise and thereby

attract everyone in the world.

That nation of Israel is now crushed, defeated, its capital city destroyed, its temple burned down.

That's what Ezekiel is dealing with, that catastrophe at the heart of Israel.

Now he certainly would have recognized that to a degree foreign potentates were responsible

for this disaster, but he also saw that very bad leadership on the part of Israel's Shepherds was also to blame.

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