THE COLUMN: American Caesar

What do Julius Caesar and Pope Leo XIV have in common?

Surely no Catholic of the Boomer generation ever expected to see an American pope in his lifetime, despite the important role the Church has played in the development of the United States, especially as represented by the waves of Irish and Italian Catholics who flooded into the country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish Catholic archbishops from Dagger John Hughes to Francis Spellman to cardinals John J. O'Connor and Timothy Dolan established the primacy of the Diocese of New York, advising presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump, influencing such epochal events as the American Civil War, foreign policy during World War II, as well as delivering invocations at the inaugurations of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, underlining both their spiritual and political importance.

Catholicism and its moral suasion over a growing segment of the American population fascinated the largely Jewish moguls of Hollywood, who produced movie after movie for American Catholics, from the multiple Oscar-winning epic Ben-Hur in 1959-- the tale of a Jewish prince who falls and then rises from galley slavery to defeat his boyhood Roman best friend and find salvation at the foot of the cross -- to the bittersweet musical Going My Way, to Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) a tale of last-second moral redemption masquerading as a gangster movie. Note the last shot of James Cagney's face just before his character of Rocky Sullivan, the tough Irish gangster, goes sniveling to the chair-- an ironic callback to Cagney's star-making turn as Tom Powers, the unredeemed villain of The Public Enemy from seven years earlier:

Persecuted by emperors from Nero to Diocletian, the Church was legalized under Constantine the Great in 313 A.D., and adopted as the official religion of the Empire in 380. As I argue in my new book, A Rage to Conquer, the Church effectively conducted a hostile takeover of the Western Roman Empire before the latter's official demise in 476, turning back the last official challenge to its supremacy with the death of Julian the Apostate in 363 at the Battle of Samara. His last words: Vicisti, Galilaee “You have won, Galilean.”

In the history of both the rise of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Empire (the two are practically coterminous), events in one mirror inversely events in the other. Instinctively, Constantine grasped this. With paganism waning and the Empire fracturing, he saw waxing Christianity as one element that would help preserve the imperium. When Constantine embraced a form of Christianity at the Milvian Bridge, already some 5 percent of the Empire’s population of sixty million souls were Christians, and their numbers were growing rapidly; during the first three hundred years of Christianity, its numbers are said to have grown by 40 percent every decade.

Still, it seemed to American Catholics who had watched Pope (now, inexplicably, St.) John XXIII destroy a millennium and a half of the Latin Mass and other essential aspects of Roman Catholicism ritul and dogma in the interests of "modernizing" a faith that needed no such thing via the Second Vatican Council (1962-65, an event that will live in religious infamy), that the influence and moral authority of the Church was waning. Church attendance plummeted, lifelong Catholics abandoned such staples of the faith as confession and weekly attendance at Mass. Increasing American secularism, which at first celebrated hedonism and then turned neo-Puritanical, transformed cinematic priests from heroes to child molestors, and it began to seem that perhaps the Eternal City and its adopted faith weren't so eternal after all.

The pontificate of Francis, which ended with his death in April, only deepened the discouragement. An Italian Jesuit born in Argentina, Francis's papacy was seen in secular American eyes as frankly leftist in its purpose, with his insistence on the pursuit of peace and helping the poor regardless of nationality -- dogmatically, highly "conservative" in the spiritual sense -- and his misguided perception of "climate change" that triggered an extreme form of eco-liberalism. His open hostility to the Latin Mass, which very nearly caused a schism, was also unacceptable to faithful Catholics.

But examining popes through a partisan political lens is a fool's errand, although one the irreligious and jejune American and British media immediately leap to. Although the popes assumed a political role for nearly 2,500 years, from the collapse of the Western empire to the end of the Papal States in Italy in 1870 (and one that continues to this day with their political control of Vatican City), their primary purpose has remained the defense of hard-argued Catholic dogma, which cannot and should not change according to modern fancy. Indeed, the attraction of Catholicism -- especially when compared with the bare ruined choirs of contemporary Protestantism -- has always lain in its immutable liturgy, customs, and quasi-theatrical services.

The early indications, therefore, are good that Leo's papacy could be both transformative and restorative. The name hearkens back to Leo I, the Great, who faced down Huns and Vandals in the fifth century and eased the Church's transition during the tumultuous transformation that followed the conquest of Rome by Odoacer in 476. That his first official Mass was conducted in Latin, with remarks from the pulpit in both American English and Italian, is encouraging, as was his use of traditional papal robes and choice of residences at the Vatican.

Best of all, the current resurgence of religiosity among young men means the Pope can both catch the wave and steer it. The entirely predictable collapse of "fourth wave" feminism from licentious hedonism to vengeful litigiousness has led to widespread unhappiness among Western women as they finally realize they cannot have it all, that traditional sex (not "gender") roles are traditional for a very good reason. This will inevitably lead them to follow their men back into something larger and more fulfilling than the empty promises of a cubicle, meaningless sex, zero domestic skills, and the possession of multiple cats which have been on offer since the 1970s.

For all its faults (and I take a deep dive into them in Rage), the Church has survived from its own fraught early history including the break from Judaism and the wrangling over doctrine, to its adoption by empire, to its preservation of Greco-Roman civilization throughout the so-called Dark Ages as modern Europe was forming, to the glories of 18th- and 19th-century European high culture, and hopefully through its post-World War II nadir to emerge more Catholic, and catholic, than ever.

May Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born Cubs fan, polyglot missionary, dual American-Peruvian citizen, and now Leo LIV, pontifex maximus -- "bridge builder" -- seize the moment. It does us well to remember that that was Julius Caesar's title as well.