After a thirty-year long arm-wrestling match between Rome and Washington, Anglo-America’s steel resolve to swallow Saint Peter’s into the Commonwealth came to pass with the abdication of Benedict XVI and the election of Francis in 2013. In conclusion, Rome’s late surrender, has turned the Vatican into a bureau of the American imperium.
Empire & Church addresses the ancient question of military versus priestly primacy: to be wielded properly, power must still inspire a mystical type of awe, which the sword alone, no matter how technically devastating, cannot confer.
Rome has the mystique, Anglo-America has crown and sword: in order to graduate to One World Empire, the latter needs to appropriate what the Vatican has exuded over the course of two millennia.
Empire & Church tracks the intensity of this ongoing feud between pope and emperor from the days of Dante to those of Rome’s perilous games with Nazi-Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s all the way to the late match between Washington’s Neoconservative hawks and the Church of John Paul II.