From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
Okay, I know that this is may be “edgy” given the fact it deals with prophesy, so hoping you can pull me back from the ledge. Am I crazy to think that Heaven is literally SCREAMING at us? I see so much about this crisis in the context of the temporal, but isn’t it really a supernatural crisis?
Here’s what I’m looking at:
1) Ven Bartholomew Holhauser’s “7 ages of the church” – we’re apparently in the (end?) of the 5th period.
2) St. Malachi’s prophesy of popes . . . 112th is the last one listed (I know, this one may be sketchy)
3) Marian Apparition after Apparition saying the same thing:– La Sallete
– Fatima
– Akita
– Our Lady of Good Hope
– Even the messages in Our Lady of AmericaSO, you read those and they all point to the same things . . . that are happening now:
– Apostasy in the Church
– Apostasy at the highest levels
– War on marriage and the family
– Coming Chastisement (if we don’t reverse course in a darned fine hurry.Have I crossed over the edge into the “crazy” realm? These are Church approved apparitions, venerated individuals, consistent with church teaching . . . Shouldn’t we listen to our Mother?
Would love you to comment on this. In the meantime, I’ll be over here praying the rosary!
I am sure that readers could add to your lists, and that they will.
Heaven is screaming at us all the time! Every time you go to Mass and read Scripture and feel movements in your conscience, heaven is screaming.
Every generation of Christians has sensed itself to be in the End Times. They have been right. We have been in the end times ever since Our Lord’s feet disappeared into the clouds… I love those medieval illuminations!
We are in the End Times.
But, I think we also have a sense that we are in The End Times.
We are probably witnessing the Great Falling Away. Sometimes I jest that when we see bloody sacrifice return to the Temple in Jerusalem, I’ll put on that hair shirt.
It seems to me that our response to this echatological spidy-sense must be to redouble our determination to live properly the vocations that God has given us.
God gave us something to do. Speaking of The End Times, before The Creation, God knew every single one of us, loved us, planned for us. He brought us into existence at a precisely place and time in his grand plan for salvation. Hence, we play a role in His plan. That means that, if we dedicate ourselves with true devotion to our state in life, He will give us every actual grace that we need to live properly and to fulfill His will… no matter what times we live in, peaceful, tumultuous, bellicose, dire, prosperous, whatever.
That we do as individuals. We must see to our identity and vocations in the sight of God.
Collectively there are things to do as well. It will not be a surprise if I direct your attention to what I am constantly harping about concerning our sacred liturgical worship of God.
Living our vocations properly is part and parcel in our fulfill our duties according to the virtue of religions. Collectively, the primary way we fulfill religion is in our collective sacred liturgical worship.
Our vocations are a gift from God.
Our liturgical worship is a gift from God.
Our traditional tried and true, slowly, carefully, organically developed perennial worship is a gift from God.
I will not make that claim about the newer-forms. First, they were rather artificially cobbled up and they were done so precisely in the way that the Fathers of the Council commanded to avoid. Also, the newer forms have no track record yet. The phrase “work of human hands” could not be more ironic.
But let that pass for now.
Our vocations are a gift from God
Our traditional worship is, itself, from God.
Our vocations are the means by which God wants us to be saved.
Our sacraments and the Church’s rites are the means by which God wants us to be saved.
Hence, we have to review and renew our vocations.
Hence, we have to review and renew our liturgical worship.
Going to the heart of each is necessary. What are the true duties of my state in life? What is our true form of worship as Catholics? How do we give ourselves more to both?
These are the questions that we should concern ourselves with.
We don’t know what The End Times will bring. Should we do some “prepping” in material terms? Maybe, but we should do a heck of a lot of prepping in spiritual terms.
And if we are not in The End Times, what harm have we do?
None!
We’ve done what we ought to have done, for God’s love, anyway.
Another note about our traditional liturgical worship in the light of the End Times.
The End Times are matters of both present concern and future fulfillment.
Tradition is a matter of both present concern and future fulfillment.
We live in the End Times since the Lord ascended. He will come again to fulfill definitively what He began.
Tradition was handed down to use from those very same days. Those who handed it on are now fulfilled in heaven. The End Times are ahead of us, and, in a sense, Tradition is ahead of us. The End Times are future and so is Traditional. Tradition isn’t “past”. It is present execution – proper use of what we have been given – and future fulfillment.
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When people talk about the “end times” I just remind them that every second of the day it is the end of time for a lot of people. They die and their end has come just like the rest of us, so live as if our end time will come at any moment.
When I was a teenager, about 15, my dad asked me, “If you knew you would die tomorrow, what is the first thing you would do?” I said, “Go to Confession!” His response was, “Then you aren’t living right.” He was trying to make my young brain think, think, think. It didn’t always work. :/ I didn’t always think before I jumped in.
And Our Lady of Revelation in Rome. She specifically talks about this Pope. Pope Pius XII approved this apparition, it’s an extension of Fatima. There is a great series about her that I just discovered recently on sensus fedelium by Father Wolf. Search,’Our Lady of Revelation,’ on you tube.
@MrsMacD thank you for that suggestion.
Speaking of liturgy, we recently moved to an area where there’s no FSSP parish (a group of us is working on it) and the one young priest in the region who knows the Latin Mass had to stop after doing a couple because his senior pastor told him to stop. There’s an SSPX parish about 45 min away. I’ve always avoided SSPX and I wouldn’t take Communion there, but I’m thinking of going on occasion with our kiddos just to get our fill of the TLM. We really need it in these days.
I tend to think of our times as an end to an era, as even the once-Catholic (though he may have died a Catholic) writer James Joyce wrote about in “Finnegan’s Wake”; which, though almost impossible to read, relied heavily on the philosopher Giambattista Vico: https://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/doku.php?id=vico:giambattista-vico-and-finnegans-wake
Vico was a Catholic. Our Lady’s message at Akita was about a major chastisement, not the “End Times.”
Are we in the end times? In a sense, yes. I read once somewhere that we are living in the brief pause between the lightning flash of Christ’s first coming and the thunderclap of his second coming. In terms of the age of the Universe, Christ’s incarnation just over two thousand years ago happened an infinitesimally short time ago! The bridegroom is coming and we’d better be ready with our lamps full of oil and wicks trimmed. We’ve been warned.
Due to our reliance on science (how’s that for a rhyme?), we’ve lost our sense of the supernatural and the mystical. Not that everything that happens is God trying to tell us something; but a lot of things are.
Lightning hits St. Peter’s – “Oh, it’s just a thunderstorm.”
People die in floods – “Oh, it’s just a hurricane.”
The weather goes nuts – “Oh, that’s Global Warming.”
What does God have to do? Slap us upside our heads?
If the Heavens were to open up this afternoon and we were to see the angels and hear the trumpet blasts – how many of us would go around (at least for a short time) thinking, “Wow! Great hologram!”
We have ears, but we’re not listening. We have eyes; but we’re not seeing.
@LarryW2LJ “And he said to him: If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe, if one rise again from the dead.” Luke 16:31
One could also say we entered the Latter Days when Our Lady of Guadeloupe appeared pregnant surrounded by an apocalyptic sky. So, yea, it can be a matter of degree as to “how late is it now”?
Our Lady of Good Success [Quito] did a rare thing and put a date on the beginning of the worst crisis the Church has ever seen: starting in the mid-20th century. We saw this predicted chaos in the 1960s. Typically prophecies are vague in time, sequence, or exact details of ‘what, how’. Our mother really wanted us to know. Our Lady also made these mid-1500’s revelations before the Freemasons got a grip on the Church and suppressed so many of her messages through later apparitions [La Salette, Fatima, etc., and various unknown desperate messages]. Our Lady of Good Success predicted that the book containing the details of her messages would be hidden at the convent until the convent returned to Franciscan authority [the book remains hidden in spite of renovations over the centuries and the convent is under the State]. This was to preserve her words for us from the Freemasons who certainly would have destroyed the book.
So one could theorize that if we ARE nearing the latter days, “they” don’t want us to know, so its hard to find proof.
I too have considered the “climate change” propaganda. The propaganda hides from the world that nature is in upheaval because of the sins of mankind, and that we are way deep into our punishments. If mankind saw the changes in reality, whoa, we might change our ways, as Nineva did. In a way then, ha, yea climate change is man-caused…but not because of tearing down trees and insufficient oxygen generation but man-caused because of raging sin.
The Book of Daniel can give some insight as it contains many prophecies of the future of the Church. One important phrase is “the abomination of desolation in the holy place” – when we see that happen, it is time to get outta’ town. Over the centuries, what exactly that is or where it is, has been only theories. But apparently when it happens, we will recognize it. So there’s a marker to look for as proof.
In order to stay calm, we must trust in God. He made heaven and earth after all! God can change things in the snap of a finger.
We must follow Our Lady’s orders: pray the Rosary for the triumph of the Immaculate Heart. She will take care of the details – and certainly her triumph will be miraculous, unmistakable and thorough. Can you imagine the details? A humbled Pope and cooperating bishops worldwide? Atheism crushed. Criminal infiltrators flushed out of our schools, government, military, families…Give it all to Our Lady as she asked.
Meditate on the Book of Judith – really a story about Our Lady who sacrifices everything for the love of her people. She enters the tent of Holofernes and chops off his head with his OWN sword!
I imagine Our Lady is putting on her armor, “like an army in array” approaching the enemy, and we, like the Judith’s town, are in the background praying [the Rosary] and doing penance to further her triumph.
Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” This is a comforting meditation to consider how Mary will crush the serpent. As more and more evil is revealed and the faithful are more moved to horror [and action and conversion], the serpent indeed sees his time is short and can do nothing about it. Waits for the end. Lucifer intends to sit on the chair of Peter and now rushes to his objectives, revealing his cohorts, bitter and in denial, Lucifer knows the heel of Our Lady approaches.
Sister Lucy of Fatima was told by Jesus that the triumph must be completed by Our Lady, thus the imperative that we pray for her triumph, because by fulfilling this prophecy it is the most humiliating to Lucifer. He will be beaten by The Woman.
We live in thrilling times! We were put here precisely by our loving Creator. Graces abound like never before [consider how we Catholics still exist in this worldwide sewer, consider how the Sister Mariana de Jesus of Our Lady of Good Success dropped dead from shock at seeing the times after the 1960s – dead for 3 days – she saw unbearable occurrences that we daily take for granted and shrug off, yes unprecedented graces for the saints of the latter days to survive]. We have been put here at this time to fight like at no other time in history. Don’t faint away, but buck up. Grab that weapon your Rosary and join Our Lady. She is donning her armor. Let’s put on ours.
Dear Father,
Please tell our good readers to settle down. We are almost certainly NOT in the End Times. [Perhaps you have special information about this, but we have been in the End Times since the Ascension of the Lord.] What we are almost certainly in, is the full dress rehearsal and (likely) entrance of the Great Tribulation foretold in Ezechiel, among other books.
Please, please, please tell your readers that the St. Malachy prophecy about the popes is 100% false, fraudulent, and long ago was exposed as such in a book by Father M.J. O’Brien, an Irish Catholic priest, in his book “An Historical and Critical Account of the So-Called Prophecy of St. Malachy Regarding the Succession of Popes.” This book was originally published in 1880 (that’s right-eighteen eighty!!) in Dublin by M.H. Gill & Son, and was photographically republished recently; you can find it for sale on the Internet. This priest went on an extended sabbatical with the permission of his religious superior, went all over Europe investigating this bogus prophecy, and concluded that the St. Malachy “prophecy” was a Medieval forgery (that’s a literary genre, ladies and gentlemen) dating back no further than the 1590’s, and was salted into a library in an attempt to sway a Papal election (this effort failed).
Why intelligent, well-intentioned people still fall hook, line and sinker for that thing is beyond me.
That said, there is ample reason to believe that we are indeed at the end of the fifth age of the Catholic Church, which began approx. 1520 with the Protestant revolt against divinely revealed truth, and continued through wave after wave of Protestantism (everyone is his/her own Private Pope, and each of them is 100% infallible), false scientism, false rationalism, etc., etc., ad nauseum. [You are making the argument for those who think we are in the End Times.]
God in His wisdom and His mercy respects the free choices of His creatures. It would be most unbecoming for God to “rescue” us from the consequences of our own acts of free will, i.e., the choices we make and live by. While God can and does intervene in human events, generally speaking, by exercising mercy, it is more important for us, and for our salvation, that God permit matters to play out to the very end.
As responsible Catholic adults, it is time for each and every one of us realize that we are long past due to start acting as the grown-ups in the room, by testifying to the truth, taking the consequences. etc. Very few of us here in the USA have actually resisted the dominant Satanic uber-culture to the point of shedding blood.
Our duties as responsible Catholic adults at this time, where it appears that God in His infinite mercy has shortened these days for the sake of the elect (that is, He is permitting the decomposition, putrefaction, and implosion of the carcass of Western so-called civilization at an accelerated rate) are identical to those in days when everything is “sunshine and lollipops.” That is, remain in the state of sanctifying grace at all times so we can become ever more so, channels of divine grace, divine light and divine mercy in the blind darkness prevailing. Also, frequent the sacraments of confession and Holy Communion as much as possible; pray the traditional Catholic devotions such as stations of the cross, rosary, rosary of the 7 sorrows, etc. And, go out of one’s way to assist the souls whom God places in our paths towards Catholic truth, no matter the cost.
Finally, remember that the New Testament tells us that if even one other soul is saved by our efforts, this is a strong sign of our own predestination for salvation, and a multitude of our own sins will thereby be blotted out.
[Since Christ Ascended to the Father, we have been in the End Times. Christian End Time Radar weakens and strengthens in cycles. To keep our balance, we must attend to our vocations in the here and now.]