By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami

Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily during a Mass Nov. 22, 2020, at St. Mary Cathedral, to mark the 60th anniversary of Operation Pedro Pan, the airlift that surreptitiously brought 14,000 unaccompanied minors from Cuba to the United States between 1960 and 1962.

In the original story of Peter Pan, Peter and the “lost boys” lived in neverland – and never grew up. The boys and girls of Operation Pedro Pan have not only grown up – but they’ve grown old.

60 years ago, parents did what was unthinkable – they sent their children alone and unaccompanied to the United States. They were desperate – and 60 years later, their homeland, their beloved Cuba, is still not free; 60 years later we know that their fears were not misplaced. 60 years ago, an Irish priest, Father Bryan O. Walsh, along with many others – some well-known to us like Polita Grau, others whose names are hidden in obscurity, did the impossible: resettling 14,000 minor children throughout the United States and eventually reuniting most of them with their parents.

It is providential that we celebrate the 60 years since the beginning of the Pedro Pan exodus on this the Solemnity of Christ the King.

At first glance, we might be tempted to regard such a feast as some sort of relic of a long past era. After all, today, in our post-modern age, we are not governed by kings. And so we might dismissed today’s liturgy’s acclaiming Christ our King as a bit anachronistic.

And yet the solemnity of Christ the King – as a liturgical institution – is quite recent. It was established not by some medieval pope but by a quite modern day one, Pope Pius XI in 1925.

The pope was not engaging in some flight of fantasy; in fact, adding the feast of Christ the King was rather a thumb in the eye of a world which had already pretended that it could organize itself without God. The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had already been consolidated and with it, under the spell of radical secular ideologies of both the right and the left, the 20th century was well on its way of becoming the most violent, the most murderous in history.

This was the climate in which this feast was born – and perhaps what motivated the pope to establish this feast was a revolution in Mexico. There, a revolutionary government was established which persecuted the Church – and not just bishops and priests, but the entire community of the baptized – with a ferocity that paralleled what was already happening in Soviet Russia. There in Mexico, thousands were killed in the name of freeing people from religious “superstition." Led before firing squads, many died shouting: “Long live Christ the King,” "Viva Cristo Rey!" A few short decades later, as your parents sent you out of harm’s way, many Cubans – some were your family members – also died before the "paredón" shouting “Viva Cristo Rey!”

These martyrs and the millions who died in the successive holocausts of the 20th century remind us that when we pretend to organize the world without reference to God and his truth, we end up organizing the world against man himself.

And so when many thought that God should be exiled from the affairs of the world – or at least marginalized to the point where he didn’t really matter – Pope Pius XI in establishing this feast day wished to remind us that Jesus is the world’s true ruler and judge.

To say that “Christ reigns” is the equivalent of what we say in our profession of faith: “Jesus is Lord.”

The Gospel today reminds us that this King shall return at the end of time to judge us. Judgment Day will be something like taking a final exam – but Jesus in today’s Gospel parable has told us what’s going to be on the test. And the parable makes clear: God will judge us on how we model ourselves on Jesus’ own way of acting; in other words, on how we serve the “least of his brethren.”

In the Gospel parable, those he called “blessed by my father” are those who served: that is, those who clothed the naked, fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, visited the prisoner, and welcomed the stranger. Jesus wants us to understand that where the poor and their needs are acknowledged, he himself is acknowledged. “Whatever you do for these the least of my brethren you do to me.” In saying this, Jesus implies that we won’t have to wait until the end of time to meet our judge: We have already met him. We have met him hidden in the often-distressful disguise of the poor – or of the unaccompanied minor.

Today’s Mass is an opportunity for the Pedro Panners to say a prayer of thanksgiving to God for all those whom Jesus will call “blessed by my father” because they recognized Jesus in you – and fed you, clothed you and welcomed you. Let us offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the freedom that your parents sacrificed so dearly to give you. This Mass is an opportunity to pray for your parents; to pray for those foster parents who took care of you in your first days in this country; it is a time to pray for Cuba and for the United States. And of course, it is a time to greet each other, to see old friends and to renew acquaintances. Years have passed but you are still the children of Pedro Pan.