There was an informative exchange on Catholicism.org when Charles Coulombe’s article, “Which Christian Nation Are We Defending?,” provoked a reply from the redoubtable Henry Sire, “The Kingdom of God in Human History.” The exchange was a friendly one between two Catholic gentlemen who have known each other for three decades. It concluded with a brief note from Coulombe, accepting Sire’s points and reemphasizing the main argument of his original piece: “Race Is a False God: Your True Inheritance Is Not in Your Blood.” (The chief argument Coulombe made — which was directed to Catholic so-called “Groypers” — was not a point of contention with Sire.)
At issue in this exchange were the rejection of Jesus Christ by the leadership and greater part of the Old Israel, and the subsequent emergence of the Universal Church as a Graeco-Roman, primarily Gentile institution — the New Israel — whose terrestrial center was the very capital of the Roman Empire.
The exchange got me thinking about God’s providential designs for the New Israel (the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church), and whether the transfer of the center of the true religion from Jerusalem to Rome was an exclusive effect of the tragic rejection of the Messias by His own people, or whether it would have happened even if the Jews had accepted the Savior en masse. Regardless of what would have happened — a strictly unanswerable hypothetical, to be sure — the main claim I would like to offer is this: The Christian Church is and always was intended to be “Roman” because this best reveals the transition from the national “Church” of the Old Testament (more commonly called “the Synagogue”) into the Universal Church of the New Dispensation — the Catholic Church.
Romanitas and ‘the Plan’
Let me point out early on that the word Roman has a variety of uses in the Catholic lexicon. It may refer to the Roman Rite of the Liturgy (the largest Latin ceremonial in the Universal Church) or to the Holy See itself, in other words, the “particular church” of the City of Rome, whose bishop is also the pope. But there is a distinct use of the word, Roman, and that is as a “note” (the fifth note) of the Universal Church, so that we say that the true Church in its entirety is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. It is in this most expansive use of the term that I am speaking of the Church’s Romanitas (“Roman-ness”) in the present article. (For a longer explanation, with documentation, and for even more uses of the word “Roman,” see “Are You a ‘Roman Catholic’ or Just a ‘Catholic’?”)
Here is Mr. Sire in his own words:
Much more glaring an oversight is expressed in Charles Coulombe’s sentence: “God became Man in Palestine, Judaism was fulfilled, and that fulfilment, explained via Greek philosophy and organised with Roman law.” Yes, it is true that Judaism was fulfilled by the Incarnation, but the statement misses the way in which God’s plan was staggeringly frustrated. Let us be clear: God the Son was not incarnated to be rejected by the Jews; he was incarnated to become their King. The prophecy of Gabriel to Mary was in intention literally true: “the Lord shall give unto him the throne of David his father.” The kingdom of God in the world was supposed to be a Jewish kingdom. Yet, when Christ rode into Jerusalem to claim it, the Jewish people, gathered together before the great feast of Passover, replied: “No, thanks. We prefer to be ruled by a foreign pagan despot. We prefer to have no king but Caesar.” This was no providential fulfilment of history — it was a monstrous frustration of it. That monstrosity led to God’s promise to the Jews being transferred to the heirs of the Roman Empire, but let us not lose sight of the monster and treat it as part of a pre-arranged plan.
Mr. Sire took Charles’ presentation of events as a slight on Our Lady because it was Her fiat that determined the moment of the Incarnation:
It is preposterously untrue to think that in the first century AD God decided to substitute the Roman Empire for the Jews as the vessel of His promise, that he chose Joseph and Mary for His purpose, and that they simply carried out His plan. It raises the question, why did other pre-elected actors, the renegade kings of Judea, or Annas and Caiaphas, not simply carry out God’s plan? In reality, there is only one reason why God became incarnate in the reign of Augustus and not in the Bronze Age or the twenty-first century: it is that a young girl in Galilee said the words: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.” If she had not done so, we might still be waiting now. Salve porta, ex qua mundo lux est orta! This was the door at which God had been knocking in vain for thousands of years, and only Mary opened it to Him. Perish the thought that God was delayed in pouring out His grace by anything except human sluggishness, or that He was engaged in something so trivial as a game of empires.
‘The Jewish Mystery’
What some people call, “the Jewish Problem,” and others call, “the Jewish Question” is something I prefer to call “the Jewish Mystery,” not to negate either the problem or the question, but to affirm that we are faced here with a mystery of divine grace and election, of human obstinacy and rejection, and of the “loss” and subsequent “receiving” back (cf. Rom 11:15) of a unique people that yet bears a peculiar relationship with the true religion — so much so that Saint Paul calls them both “enemies” and “most dear” in the same verse! (Rom. 11:28) — and whose corporate return to God will be one of the great signs of the End Times. As Brother Francis said of the Jewish people in The Challenge of Faith, “They are a unique type of collectivity — a matter for history, not for sociology.” And by history, he clearly meant, “sacred history.”
The Ingrafting
For Mr. Sire to speak of “God’s promise to the Jews being transferred to the heirs of the Roman Empire,” while not strictly erroneous, misses the point of the great mystery revealed in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. What took place was not a “transfer” or a “replacement” (a word commonly used disparagingly nowadays, as in “replacement theology”), but an “ingrafting,” whereby the Gentiles who enter into the true religion — which stands in a perfect continuity back to our father, Adam — have joined that “remnant” of Jews who continued in it because they believed in Christ: Our Lady, Saint Joseph, the Apostles, the Disciples, the 3,000 baptized on Pentecost (Acts 2:41), the five thousand later added (Acts 4:4), etc.
In that Epistle — and I focus here exclusively on Romans, chapter 11 — the Jewish “Apostle of the Gentiles” (v. 13) says that God has not “cast away his people” (vs. 1-2), of whom “there is a remnant saved according to the election of grace” (v. 4). The Old Israel sought righteousness or justice but did not find it in the Mosaic Law, whereas the “election” (v. 7) — those Jews who became Christian — obtained justice by faith, while the rest of the nation became “blinded” by their own “unbelief” (v. 7, 19). They stumbled, but “their fall is not irreparable,” as the Haydock Catholic Bible Commentary notes, and that fall providentially occasioned the conversion of the Gentiles, of whom some of the Jews will become “emulous” and thus convert (v. 11). The Old Israel is the “good olive tree” (v. 24), which lost some of its “branches” (v. 17-18), while the Gentile believers in Christ were “cut out of the wild olive tree” of their heathenism to be grafted into it (v. 24), but they — we — must not “boast against the [Jewish] branches,” because that Abrahamic “root” bears us, and we partake of “the fatness of the olive tree” (v. 17-18). The Church stands in perfect continuity with the Synagogue, and we Catholics, the new Israel, must not boast against the Old Israel. But the Jews — or many of them, at least — will be converted to Christ, will turn away from their present “ungodliness” and “blindness,” and thus be “grafted in again” to the root of the true religion (v. 23-26). (This paragraph summarizes some of the contents of “A Slow Reading of Romans XI.”)
While those Jews who rejected Jesus Christ were themselves rejected by God — as we will be if we turn traitor (Rom. 11:21-22) — Our Lady’s prophesy has been strictly and literally fulfilled, namely, that, God “hath received Israel, his servant, being mindful of his mercy. As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed, forever” (Luke 1:55). Those Jews I mentioned earlier, who formed the nascent Church in Jerusalem, are the Israel that was received, and so are all those Jews after Apostolic times who have “obtained mercy” (cf. Rom. 11:31) and become Catholics. This thin stream of Jewish converts will become an ocean with the preaching of Elias and the collective conversion of the Jews toward the end of time, when God will gather together the congregation of the people, and receive them to mercy (cf. 2 Macc. 2:7, which the great Cornelius a Lapide says refers to the conversion of the Jews according to the “more common and convincing” opinion of Catholic commentators.)
The prophecies of the Old Testament foretold that, in the Messianic era, the Gentiles would come to the God of Israel. Isaias prophesied that the Lord’s house “shall be called the house of prayer, for all nations” (Is. 56:7), and that God’s Servant would be “the light of the Gentiles” (Is. 49:6). God’s plan was for Israel to be the priestly nation that would draw all other nations to the true God, which it did through that faithful remnant of which Saint Paul speaks. These Jewish Christians ventured into the Graeco-Roman world as missionaries — most spectacularly in the person of Saint Paul, the greatest missionary of all time, who was martyred in Rome.
I am aware that the Apostles went beyond the Roman world, treading pathways not built by the Caesars. Saint Matthew went to Ethiopia and Saint Thomas (if we are to believe an Ethiopian hagiography) went even as far as China. But it is important that all the ancient patriarchal sees — at first three (Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch), then five (those three plus Constantinople and Jerusalem) — were all within the borders of the Empire.
The preparations for this slow transformation of the Empire into Christendom begun roughly five hundred years after the time of Isaias and a bit more than a century and a half before Our Lord’s birth, when Judas Maccabeus made a league with the Romans — which led, ultimately, through a Hasmonean dynastic dispute, to the Roman presence in the Holy Land beginning roughly sixty years before Our Lord’s time.
Jesus Christ: The Predestined Son of God
And speaking of time, Jesus Christ is at the very center of it; not only that, He is its very point. Time and history would not exist without Him, for, as an indulgenced prayer says to Christ the King, “all that hath been made is created for Thee.” He was “predestinated the Son of God in power” (Rom. 1:4), and is the “the firstborn of every creature” (Col. 1:15) and the “firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18). That much is true of the Head of the Mystical Body. As concerns His members, those whom God foreknew, “he also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of his Son; that he might be the firstborn amongst many brethren” (Rom. 8:29). These predestined, He also, “called,” “justified,” and “glorified” (Rom. 8:30). God the Father “hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself” (Eph. 1:5), and He did so, “In the dispensation of the fulness of times, to re-establish all things in Christ, that are in heaven and on earth, in him” (Eph. 1:10).
Jesus Christ was predestined to be the Man-God, the supreme Glorifier of the Holy Trinity, but His humanity was not created ex nihilo for the purpose — which it could have been. Rather, He was born of a specific lineage: “the son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1), and, therefore, the son “of Adam, who was of God” (Luke 3:38).
Mary: The Predestined Mother of God
The divine plan included the Virgin Mary, that blessed “gate from whom into the world, a light has arisen.” She was, by Her Immaculate Conception, providentially prepared to be the “worthy dwelling-place for [God’s] Son” (Collect for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception), for, as Blessed Pius IX tells us in Ineffabilis Deus,
From the very beginning, and before time began, the eternal Father chose and prepared for his only-begotten Son a Mother in whom the Son of God would become incarnate and from whom, in the blessed fullness of time, he would be born into this world.
Indeed, the Blessed Virgin’s arrival constituted that “blessed fullness of time” that Pio Nono speaks of, clearly referencing the Apostle: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law…” (Gal. 4:4) — which reminds me of the lovely liturgical hymn which begins, “Mary the dawn, Christ the perfect day.”
Later in that same encyclical, Blessed Pius IX writes,
And hence the very words with which the Sacred Scriptures speak of Uncreated Wisdom and set forth his eternal origin, the Church, both in its ecclesiastical offices and in its liturgy, has been wont to apply likewise to the origin of the Blessed Virgin, inasmuch as God, by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom.
That “one and the same decree” predestining the Man-God included the Blessed Virgin’s fiat at the Annunciation. It was determined “before time began,” yet this divine decree did not interfere with the Holy Virgin’s free will. Behold, an incomprehensible mystery of grace! Thus, I could not agree more with Henry Sire when he writes, “In reality, there is only one reason why God became incarnate in the reign of Augustus and not in the Bronze Age or the twenty-first century: it is that a young girl in Galilee said the words: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.’”
Admittedly, I have reframed Mr. Sire’s statement in the context of my own understanding, which is that the Incarnation was indeed the fulfillment of a predestined divine plan that Our Lady’s free-willed fiat effected in time.
The Israel of God is Roman
Now, this is entirely speculative, but, had the Jewish leadership and most of the Old Israel not rejected their Messias, the natural branches would have remained on the tree, but the wild olive shoots (the Gentiles) would still have been grafted in, because God’s salvific will is universal (1 Tim. 2:4) — and this is the mission of the Church Catholic: to bring His salvation to “all nations” (Matt. 28:19). However, the Gentiles would have been grafted onto a tree that remained whole and flourishing with its original branches. The integration would likely have been more organic, proceeding from a believing Jerusalem and a converted Jewish people who would then fulfill their mission to be the light to the Gentiles. It would have had less the appearance of a “replacement” and more the appearance of a graceful expansion.
Yet — we continue our speculations — the decision of the Council of Jerusalem abandoning the kosher laws (Acts 15) would still have been made. Peter and Paul would have gone to Rome, where the Prince of the Apostles would have established his See. Had Jerusalem remained the center of the true religion, the transition from a national religion in the Old Covenant to a universal Church in the New would have been obscured. In other words, the New Testament would have been “New” under these circumstances — as was, in fact, prophesied in Jeremias 31:31. The capital of the universal Church would still have been established by Christ’s first Vicar in the center of the universal Empire, Rome.
As it is, the first Vicar of Christ, Saint Peter, was a Jew who wrote in Greek and established the Apostolic See in Rome, doing his part to accomplish exactly what Charles Coulombe described in “Which Christian Nation Are We Defending?”: “God became Man in Palestine, Judaism was fulfilled, and that fulfilment [was] explained via Greek philosophy and organised with Roman law.”
The mystical members of Christ form “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16), to whom Saint Paul declares, “And if you be Christ’s, then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). Indeed, the Catholic Church is the true Israel; and, further, given what was said earlier about Romanitas being the fifth note of the Church, the Israel of God is Roman!
Considered from the perspective of our membership in Christ by faith and baptism, we Christian Gentiles are more truly Israelites than those who have the very blood of Jacob coursing through their veins, but who reject their own Messias. To drive this point home further, when we partake of the Holy Eucharist, we communicate with the Semitic Body and Blood of the Man-God, along with His Soul and Divinity. Pope Pius XI’s famous statement, “Spiritually, we are Semites,” is no sentimental metaphor but a simple statement of Catholic doctrine. But note: One key difference between the Old Israel and the New is that the New Israel transcends all national, ethnic, and racial boundaries; here, “there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). As the four living creatures and the four and twenty ancients sing in the Apocalypse, “thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Apoc. 5:9).
