Over the past century, the Anglo-American Commonwealth succeeded in knocking down all rival empires, except one: the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Without armies or a capillary bureaucracy, the Catholic Church looms as a de-territorialized kingdom embracing worldwide a billion subjects, who are glued to its decisional center —a council of charismatic geriatrics— by an unquestioning belief in the infallible sacrality vested in Rome’s holy men for having, in succession, sat on the throne of Peter, the vicar of Christ.
What has allowed the Holy See to maintain a stronghold in the world is addressed in Empire & Church by touching on that ancient question of military versus priestly primacy, which is at the heart of the Church’s millennial experience up to the advent of the modern epoch. To be wielded properly, power must still inspire a mystical type of awe, which the sword alone, no matter how technically devastating, cannot confer.
Yet, already debilitated and unsure of her footing in the Era of the Machine —which heralded the suppression of pain and a triumphant worship of Technique,— the Church, ever the object of envy and resentment, became the target of a joint offensive from two antagonistic ends of the creedal arc: Fascist traditionalism on the one side and Anglo-American Liberalism on the other.
This book details the picaresque twists that punctuated Rome’s vicissitudes in the first half of the twentieth century. With WWI, she was initially deprived of her military arm (Austro-Hungary); she gingerly walked the tightrope between Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s, and eventually survived WWII by the skin of her teeth.
With the demise of Communism, and the proclaimed supremacy of the Anglo-American Commonwealth, American hawks, animated by typically Fascist anti-clerical sentiment finally laid siege to the pontificate of John Paull II, as a part of a maneuver aimed at swallowing the Vatican whole, along with its billion aficionados, into the Commonwealth. After a thirty-year long arm-wrestling match, this came to pass with the abdication of Benedict XVI and the election of Francis in 2013.
Empire & Church explores the spiritual confrontation between Catholicism and Anglo-American Liberalism in light of Rome’s late surrender, which has turned the Vatican into a bureau of the American imperium.
