Introduction
As conflicts between nations continue to impact our life and threaten the fragile stability of the world, conflicts within the Church weaken the Church’s mission to call the world to conversion and to the truth of the Gospel. The purpose of this article is to make available and accessible some key texts from the teachings of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI before their papal tenures, and three paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that may help us to navigate the turbulent waters of a storm that now rages with seemingly more intense ferocity. Many, if not most Catholics are unaware of these texts, and yet in my studied opinion, they are very helpful or perhaps even essential to an understanding of current events in light of the Catholic Faith and Catholic eschatology. Eschatology is the part of theology that concerns itself with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell, and the final destiny of the soul and of mankind. As such, it deals with our ultimate meaning, purpose and destiny. Not much is heard about these realities but it is unwise to ignore eschatology or to be unconcerned about its content for then we risk the danger of living a meaningless and purposeless life.
The Eschaton or Second Coming of Christ
In chapter 24 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Our Lord speaks of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and of His return at the close of the age. ‘And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed: for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginnings of the sufferings’ (24:6-8). What age, it may be asked, has not had to ponder the meaning and import of these words? Sinful humanity is plagued by the ferocity of homo necans, ‘killing man’ and the staggering statistics surrounding abortion and what is euphemistically referred to as medical assistance in dying particularly in our own nation indicate that the conflict is an internecine one in the which ‘victors’ in this unequal war, if one may speak of them as such, if unrepentant, condemn themselves to eternal damnation. The violence of our times, the rumours of wars and of wars being waged also compel us to ponder Our Lord’s words as others have before us. Less than a century after the end of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, we live within living memory of the bloodiest century in human history with its genocides, and wars of annihilation waged in the name of hateful ideologies, and of cold wars of mutually assured destruction. No less insistent is the Islamic imperative to conquer and subjugate the world at large.
Violence in Our Cities
Calls for genocide have become all too common in both cyberspace and on the streets of our cities; this includes the normalization of anti-Semitism, hateful rhetoric and even violent acts directed against the Jewish people, the race of Christ. The Church of Christ is also under attack from within and without; in Nigeria, Christians are persecuted as they are also in the Middle East and in the many other nations under Islamic rule. In our own nation church burnings are not a rare phenomenon; dismissed as ‘understandable’ on account of a blood libel levied against Christian educators. Christian morality is deemed intolerant and hateful; and references to scripture passages deemed offensive to modern ears may now result in criminal charges. It is quite astonishing that all of this has developed in so short a period of time. The virulent anti-humanism of our times espoused by self-professed humanists and at face value, enthusiastically supported by an unenlightened or wilfully blind electorate is arguably indicative of a diabolical disorientation afflicting a considerable sector of humanity. What can be said with certainty is that the devil hates Christ, the Church of Christ and the race of Christ. This may help us to understand why the ancient hatred against the Jewish people never seems to disappear. As bearers of Sinai’s moral code, they are blamed for the restrictions that safeguard fallen and sinful humanity. The spiritual battle is never ending. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (Jn. 3:19).
A Spiritual Battle
In his Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul further provides an explanation for this spiritual battle. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12). Is it possible that there is more to the events of our times than the constant persecutions the Church endures through time? Is it possible that our experience of suffering at this time in history has a truly preternatural origin and significance? What can be said of the confusion afflicting the Church? Every Catholic should be concerned about these signs of the times because our salvation depends on our fidelity to the integrity of the Faith. The atheism of indifference that characterises our age has not so subtly influenced the attitude of many Catholics who have allowed themselves to fall into the illusion of assured salvation; simply put, that everyone goes to Heaven, regardless of behaviour, an equality of outcome that makes a mockery of the Commandments and the moral law. It has been said that modern man does not repent of his sin; he devises a theology to justify it. And so it is that having lost the sense of sin, the omission of the Confiteor altogether or a truncated form of the Penitential Rite of the Mass has now become a feature in many parishes in different countries, ours included.
In this dystopian and disoriented world, a world in which man has become the ultimate measure of all things, those who believe that God is the measure of all things and that His Divine Son, Jesus Christ is Way, Truth and Life and the Lord of history are now a persecuted and despised minority. Nevertheless, this minority continues to persevere in the Faith and Truth of Jesus Christ. Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus (Rev. 14:12) This dystopian and disoriented world challenges us all the more to remain steadfast in the truth of Christ and so to order our life that the truths revealed to us in Sacred Scripture not only govern our life but also help us to interpret and to understand in the light of the liberating truth of Christ what we are living and experiencing. ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (Jn. 8:32).
What follows are two ‘prophecies’ spoken by two popes before their elevation to the papacy. These inspired utterances appear to confirm prophecies about our times attributed to Saints and even the Blessed Virgin Mary. Their words reproduced below, and three paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church may very well be the information we need to interpret what the Church is now experiencing. As what is perhaps best be described as a civil war being fought in the Roman Catholic Church, the inspired words of learned and holy men who knew experientially the horrors of a world in which God is banished may help us to navigate through the storm now upon us, because ours is a world that has forgotten God and which makes every effort to banish God from the public square. Yet, before we consider their words, it may help our understanding and discernment also to consider these words spoken by Pope Paul VI in 1978 a few months before his death, as he lamented the auto-destruction of the Church and the nearly wholesale collapse of the Church’s devotional life: ‘We would say that through some mysterious crack – no, it is not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God.’
Archbishop Karol Wojtyla
Fifty years ago, as the United States of America celebrated its bicentennial, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Archbishop of Krakow, Poland visited several cities, including Philadelphia, chosen that year to host the International Eucharistic Congress. Less than two years after this event, he would become Pope John Paul II. Near the end of his visit, the Cardinal who knew from his own experience of life what persecution entails uttered these stark words:
We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence; it is a trial which the whole Church, and the Polish Church in particular, must take up. It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church, but, in a sense, a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations. (emphasis mine)
Father Joseph Ratzinger
A few years earlier, in 1969, in a radio interview, Fr. Joseph Ratzinger who in 2005 was elected to the papal office and who took the name Benedict XVI spoke these words:
The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves.
To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered.
If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death. (emphasis mine)
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
In view of these weighty and sobering words, it is somewhat easier to begin to understand the following three paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Before Christ’s second coming, the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh (675).
The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification on the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the ‘intrinsically perverse’ political form of a secular messianism (676).
The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in His death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendency, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause His Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final upheaval of this passing world (677).
Prayerful Reflection and Discernment
For the good of our souls and for our perseverance in the truth and faith of Christ, Our Lord and Saviour, we do well to take these prophecies and articles of the Catechism to prayer and if possible, to reflection and discussion with other men and women who seek to do the will of God, to serve the cause of salvation and who desire nothing more than to further the establishment of God’s Kingdom in the hearts and minds of all men. The Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, a model of heroic virtue and love for the materially and spiritually poor observed that excess comfort has deformed us. I have pondered these words ever since I first learned of his heroic life a few years ago; and I have found them incisive not only because they rightly challenge one to examine and reform a personal life that can be all too comfort driven but also cause us to reflect on whether our approach to the truths and mysteries of our Faith has also become comfortable and therefore lukewarm; placing us in a state in which spiritual growth is ignored and a truce is made with the greatest enemy of the spiritual life, acedia, spiritual sloth that leads to indifference. If indeed, as Pope John Paul observed, we are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel, it is all the more imperative that we resolve not only to renew our commitment to living the Christian life in its fullness, but also to awaken others to the spiritual battle now raging in both the world, the Church that is fragmented and divided, and the battle waged in the microcosm of the individual soul. Like an undetected cancer destroying an organism, acedia weakens the soul in such manner that imperceptibly and perhaps even with willing cooperation, the end result is a rejection of the demands of Christian discipleship.
‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ (Mt. 16:24) Following Christ along the way of devout humility is man’s greatest good; and those who have undertaken the path of Christian discipleship with heroic effort, are the greatest men and women that have ever lived. They are the saints that we venerate and that we seek to imitate, however feebly and imperfectly. Despite our weaknesses, we soon discover that there is no greater joy and fulfillment than to follow Our Lord, even though the path is often a difficult one to tread. In what may be considered a spiritual classic, Prayer for All Times, Pierre Charles wrote: And yet, those who have obeyed you proclaim that they have never wanted for anything since the day they agreed to have you as their sole riches. Lord, do not let my cowardice appear to give the lie to their robust witness. Above all, on the pretext of making it more palatable, do not allow us to water down the Gospel, nor tolerate that our soft talk lull the souls you have ransomed into a sense of false security. The day on which we start to believe that a stop-go faith and perfunctory devotion are quite enough, and that total self-giving and vocations to absolute devotion are the exception leading to intemperate and fanatical zeal – on that day we shall be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, and we shall have blasphemed your Cross.
Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
In his prophecy, Father Joseph Ratzinger spoke of a Church that after the trial will enjoy a fresh blossoming, and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death. Spe salvi sumus. For in this hope we were saved (Rom. 8:24). St. Paul explains: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us (8:18). Whatever suffering we may have to endure, and for however long, we do well to remain firm in this hope; and given the indifference of so many, let us provide for ourselves a place of refuge, instruction and consolation in cenacles of prayer under the maternal protection of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Let us consecrate ourselves to this Immaculate Heart and faithfully pray the rosary every day. The apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima in 1917 provide us with a key to understanding the prophecies contained in Sacred Scripture and those spoken by the faithful witnesses of our own times. The message of Fatima has been for the most part ignored and at best managed but the present crisis in the Church and in the world can be understood and surely overcome only if Our Lady’s warnings and her call to penance and sacrifice are faithfully heeded. Practically, let us do what we can to form cenacles of prayer in imitation of the earliest disciples of Our Lord who persevered with one accord in prayer with Our Lady (Acts 1:14). In the prayerful communion of faith and charity, our courage and strength will increase and be a source of consolation to others. If indeed we find ourselves in the final trial that will shake the faith of many believers, let us encourage one another and build one another up guarding the deposit of Faith and adhering to it with the steadfastness of Our Lady and the faithful remnant at the foot of the Cross. We have Our Lady’s assurance that in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph; and this loving and pure Heart is our refuge and the way that will lead us to God. If we but do this, then we will have done our part; and the many little flocks of believers, cenacles of prayer and consecration will be seen as something wholly new and necessary. It may be that in these cenacles of prayer and charity where the Faith is preserved and sustained and God alone is worshipped in spirit and in truth that the prophecy of Pope Benedict XVI will be fulfilled; and when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
A More Spiritualized and Simplified Church
Throughout salvation history the little flock of believers, the faithful remnant has always been the means by which fidelity to the Covenants has been upheld, preserved and then renewed. To speak of a remnant is in no way elitist. The Church exists for the salvation of souls, and the salvation of souls is the supreme law and work of the Church. As faithful disciples of Christ, we recognize that this is also our work even and perhaps most especially in a time when the primacy of this work is not always acknowledged nor confirmed by the hierarchy. At Fatima in 1917, Our Lady reminded us of this fundamental task; and specifically asked for prayer, penance and sacrifice for the conversion of poor sinners. This is our work and everything that we do as disciples of Christ whether individually or collectively must be at the service of this work because it truly is the one thing necessary. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? (Mk. 8:36).
