This year Sydney’s annual Walk with Christ Eucharistic procession will be celebrated on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, the crowning Sunday of the liturgical year.
It places the city’s most popular and most public act of Eucharistic faith at the very summit of the Church’s year and on a feast the Church established precisely for an age like our own.
Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 with the encyclical Quas Primas, written for a Europe unsettled by secularism, nationalism, and the belief that public life had outgrown its need for God. A century on, Sydney knows the symptoms and the feast still names the cure.
“While the Feast of Corpus Christi goes back to Pope Urban IV and St Thomas Aquinas in 1264, the Feast of Christ the King is a relatively modern one, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925,” Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP said.
“It emphasises Christ’s sovereignty over all creation, and especially in our own lives, just as Corpus Christi emphasises his intimacy with creation and with us. To bring Christ onto the streets of Sydney in this way is to claim Sydney for Christ and to declare his authority over us but also his closeness to us.”
Sovereignty and closeness are what a Eucharistic procession makes visible: the King who reigns over the city, carried slowly through streets more accustomed to the hustle and bustle of commerce than to adoration.
Bishop Richard Umbers said the new date draws out that meaning further still.
“The Feast of Christ the King marks the final day of our liturgical calendar,” Bishop Umbers said. “This year, our annual Eucharistic Procession, Walk with Christ, will be celebrated on this Solemnity making visible the kingship of our Lord as the reign of truth, life, holiness, justice, love and peace over every age, every heart.
“We carry Christ into the city because the city, and the human work from which it is made, is destined to be gathered into Christ.”
The day begins with a festival in Martin Place from 1pm, with the procession stepping off at 2.30pm from the corner of Martin Place and Pitt Street. Every parish, school, movement and community in the archdiocese is invited – families, young people, religious, clergy and especially those who have never walked before.
This year the Walk carries an added weight. It is a milestone on the road to Eucharist28, an event that will bring the Church from across the world to this harbour city to kneel before the same Lord.
The archdiocese hopes it will be an event carried not by planning committees but by parishes that adore, by young people who discover that the Eucharist is a Person and not an idea, and by Catholics willing to walk in public with the Lord they receive in private.
November’s procession is where that walking gathers pace.
Viva Christus Rex – Long live Christ the King!
On 22 November, Sydney says so out loud.
Walk with Christ, Sunday 22 November 2026. Festival from 1pm, Martin Place. Procession 2.30pm. For more information click on the link here.
