The Iron Scepter
and the Eternal City

Introduction: The Question of Rome

The case for the Roman destiny of the Church begins not in the New Testament but in the great apocalyptic visions of the prophet Daniel. Writing from exile at the court of Babylon, Daniel received through divine revelation a panoramic vision of the succession of pagan empires that would rule over God's people from the destruction of Solomon's Temple until the coming of the Messiah. This vision appears in two complementary forms: the great statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, and the vision of the four beasts in Daniel 7.

In Daniel 2, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of an enormous idol composed of four metals. The head of gold symbolizes the Babylonian Empire. The silver chest and arms represent the Persian Empire. The bronze torso signifies the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great. And the legs of iron — the strongest of all the metals — represent the Roman Empire, mightier and more enduring than all its predecessors. Then, at the climactic moment of the vision, a stone cut from a mountain by no human hand strikes the feet of the idol, which collapses entirely, and the stone grows into a great mountain that fills the whole earth.

Daniel 7 presents the same prophetic schema under a different image. Here, the four empires appear as beasts rising from the sea: a winged lion for Babylon, a bear for Persia, a four-headed leopard for Macedon, and a nameless, terrifying beast for Rome — more powerful and dreadful than all the others. During the reign of this fourth beast, "one like a son of man" appears on the clouds of heaven, and to him is given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that shall never be destroyed.

The third great Danielic prophecy, the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9, provides the precise chronological framework. The angel Gabriel announces that from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem until "Messiah the Prince," a specific number of weeks of years will elapse. After this, the Messiah will be "cut off" — crucified — and "the people of the prince who is to come" will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The people who destroy the Temple are the Romans under Titus in AD 70. They are called "the people of the prince" — that is, the people of the Messiah, His people, the nation to whom the kingdom is being transferred.

The inscription that Pontius Pilate placed above the head of Christ on the Cross was written in three languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The Fathers of the Church did not regard this as merely a practical concession to multilingual Jerusalem. It was a theological sign of the highest order.

St. Augustine expressed a substantially identical interpretation. The convergence of an Eastern and a Western Father on this reading demonstrates its deep rootedness in the apostolic tradition. What the inscription proclaims is that in the Crucified One, three great streams of human civilization — the governance of Rome, the reason of Greece, and the revelation of Israel — are united and brought to their ultimate fulfillment.

One of the most dramatic moments in the Gospels occurs during Holy Week, in the days immediately preceding the Passion. Our Lord tells the parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21:33–46), in which a landowner sends servants to collect the harvest — who are beaten and killed — and finally sends his own son, whom the tenants murder. When Jesus asks the chief priests and Pharisees what the owner will do, they pronounce their own sentence: he will destroy those wretches and give the vineyard to other tenants who will produce fruit.

The custodianship of the covenant is being transferred from the Jewish nation to another nation — and from Daniel we know which nation this is. It is the fourth kingdom, the people of the prince, the Romans. The companion parable of the wedding feast (Matthew 22:1–14) reinforces the point: the king sends his armies to destroy the murderers and burn their city. This is not merely a spiritual metaphor; it is a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, accomplished by the Roman legions under Titus — precisely as foretold in Daniel 9.

The cleansing of the Temple takes on new significance in this light. The Court of the Gentiles existed as a sacred space where the nations could worship the God of Israel in anticipation of the Messianic age. The priestly authorities had profaned this space, turning it into a marketplace — an eloquent denial that the Gentiles had any share in the Temple's worship. Christ's cleansing foreshadowed the sending of the Holy Spirit to convert those very Romans from their idolatry to the worship of the God of Israel.

The trial and crucifixion of Christ constitute, beneath their surface of injustice and cruelty, the most elaborate act of divine irony in all of history. When the Jewish authorities bring Jesus before Pilate, they are transferring the Messiah to the power and jurisdiction of the Roman governor. They intend this as a political maneuver; in reality, they are fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel. They are handing the Messiah over to His own people — the Romans — who will, despite their ignorance, enthrone Him as King through the very instrument of His execution.

When the Jewish authorities reject their Messiah and acknowledge Caesar as their king, Caesar's representative proclaims the Messiah as king. The dominion of the fourth beast is, at that very moment, being transferred to the Son of Man. As Dr. Fimister notes, even the shape of the Roman military standards anticipated the Cross. And when Constantine, in AD 312, replaced the pagan eagles atop those standards with the monogram of Christ's name, the sign that had been hidden in plain sight was at last made manifest.

If pagan Rome was founded in the fratricidal blood of Romulus and Remus, Christian Rome was refounded in the fraternal blood of Peter and Paul. This magnificent typological parallel, articulated most powerfully by Pope St. Leo the Great, stands at the heart of the Church's Roman self-understanding.

Dr. Marshall identifies the stone of Daniel 2 — the stone cut by no human hand that strikes the idol and becomes a mountain filling the earth — with Simon Peter, whom Christ renamed "Rock." Peter, the rock, goes to Rome — the seat of the fourth kingdom, the iron empire — and there establishes the visible foundation of the fifth monarchy. The Book of Acts finds its narrative coherence precisely in this trajectory: it begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, because that is the arc of salvation history itself.

In AD 380, the Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, establishing Catholic Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The language of this edict is theologically momentous: it defines the faith as that which "was delivered by the divine apostle Peter to the Romans and is now professed by the Pontifex Damasus." The title Pontifex Maximus — the supreme priestly office of the Roman Republic, held by every emperor from Augustus through the fourth century — is here applied not to the emperor but to the Bishop of Rome.

This was dramatically enacted when St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, barred the Emperor Theodosius from the cathedral and denied him the Eucharist until he performed public penance for the massacre at Thessalonica. The most powerful man in the world knelt in submission before a bishop. St. Augustine marveled at this inversion: the emperors who once persecuted the Church were now supplicants at the tomb of Peter the fisherman.

A common objection to the Roman character of the Church comes from the existence of the Eastern Catholic churches. If the Church is Roman, what of the Byzantines, the Maronites, the Copts? The answer is both historically rich and theologically precise.

As Pope Benedict XVI said upon taking possession of the Lateran: "As Catholics, in some way we are also all Romans." The term "Roman Catholic" properly describes not the Latin Rite alone but the entire Catholic communion. Byzantine Catholics in the Middle East are, in Arabic, called "Roman Catholics" — meaning Catholics who follow the rite of the Romans, which in their context means the rite of Constantinople, the second Rome.

The term "Byzantine Empire" is itself a modern invention, coined in the nineteenth century. The inhabitants of Constantinople never called themselves Byzantines; they were Romans, and they called their state the Roman Republic (Politeia ton Rhomaion). The Romanitas of the Church is not a Latin parochialism; it embraces the entire Roman heritage, Eastern and Western.

As St. John Paul II memorably said, the Church breathes with two lungs. The fullness of the Church's Roman character requires both: the spiritual authority centered in Rome and the lay Christian political heritage preserved in both Eastern and Western tradition.

One of the most intriguing implications of the Church's essential Romanitas concerns the eschatological figure of the catechon — the "restrainer" of 2 Thessalonians 2, who holds back the coming of the Antichrist. Lactantius, writing at the beginning of the fourth century, stated plainly that it is Rome — the Roman polity — that "still sustains all things," and that when it is removed, the "detestable tyrant" will come.

The logic follows directly from Daniel. The Antichrist emerges from the fourth beast — from the Roman system — and so long as the fourth monarchy remains residually present, even in attenuated form, the reign of the Antichrist cannot fully begin. Dr. Fimister notes with striking historical precision that the last two plausible claimants to the Eastern and Western Roman imperial thrones — the Russian Tsar and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor — were deposed within twelve months of each other at the end of the First World War, an observation that carries sobering eschatological weight.

What emerges from this cumulative argument is a vision of salvation history of staggering depth and coherence. God prepared a people — the Jews — to receive His Messiah. He prepared a philosophy — Greek rational thought — to express the truths of revelation with precision. And He prepared a polity — the Roman Republic, with its law, its universality, its instinct for governance — to serve as the institutional vessel of His Church.

None of the human actors in this drama understood what they were doing. Pilate did not know he was enthroning the King of Kings. The chief priests did not know they were transferring the Messianic covenant to Rome. The Roman soldiers did not know that their cross-shaped standards were already proclaiming the reign of Christ. And yet, in and through all of it, the providence of God was working with what St. Paul called a wisdom that surpasses human understanding.

The Romanitas of the Catholic Church is, in the end, a testimony to this providence. It declares that the Church is not a human invention, not a Hellenistic adaptation of a Semitic cult, not an accidental product of imperial politics, but the divinely established, prophetically anticipated, historically fulfilled kingdom of the Son of Man — who rules the nations with an iron scepter from His throne on the Tiber, through His Vicar, unto the ages of ages.

The Church is Roman not by accident but by divine decree. From the prophetic visions of Daniel, through the three languages of the Cross, through the parables of our Lord, through the trial before Pilate, through the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, through the Edict of Thessalonica, and through the entire unfolding of Christian civilization, the same truth emerges: Christ chose Rome.

He chose it as the seat of His Vicar. He chose it as the vehicle of His universal mission. He chose it as the iron through which His scepter would extend to the ends of the earth. To be Catholic is to be Roman, and to be Roman is to be Catholic — not in the narrow sense of the Latin Rite, but in the full, cosmic, prophetic sense of a Church that has inherited the mantle of the fourth kingdom and transformed it, by grace, into the kingdom that shall never be destroyed.

Soli Deo Gloria  ·  Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam