The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition)

Three days before His Passion, Our Lord warned the High Priests: “the Kingdom of God is taken from you and given to a nation that will bear the fruit thereof.” What is this nation? Who are the people of the Messiah? What is the Kingdom inherited by the saints of the Most High, and why does the Messiah rule the nations “with an iron sceptre”? The Church Fathers, East and West, are clear in their answer: the people of the Messiah are the Romans. Although in its pagan form it is Babylon and the Beast, the Roman Empire is translated by the power of the Cross from the temporal to the spiritual order and becomes what the Apostle calls “the restrainer”: the power that holds back the coming of the Antichrist. The removal of this restrainer signals the commencement of the final persecution of the Church and the end of all mortal things.Guided by the teachings of the Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas, and St John Henry Newman, The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man explores the essentially Roman character, the Romanitas, of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and demonstrates how a true understanding of this fifth Note of the Church can guide us in the most vital and perilous of all discernments.Alan Fimister is Assistant Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Director of Graduate Theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut. He is the author of Robert Schuman: Neo-Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe (2008) and, with Fr Thomas Crean O.P., Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (2020). He is the Director of the Dialogos Institute. A native of Newcastle upon Tyne, he is married and has three children. Read more