The Season of Advent and the Signs of the Last Day

      In a Sunday homily a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the fact that we do not know “the day and the hour” of the end of the world.  That’s clear from the words of our Lord Himself. I was drawing attention to St. Paul’s admonition, in the second reading, to the Christians at Thessalonia that they were not to be “shaken out of [their] minds suddenly, or to be alarmed either by a ‘spirit,’ or by an oral statement, or by a letter allegedly from us to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand” – an important exhortation in our own times with all the fascination with the apocalyptic and the predictions of the end of the world.  Such things tend to only detract the Christian from his or her daily responsibility to live our Faith in hope, joy and love.

      Nevertheless, a couple of parishioners reminded me, after Mass, that there indeed are more general signs of the Last Day.  They were, of course, absolutely right.  What are they, these signs, these forewarnings of the coming consummation of all things in the return of Christ, the “Judge of the living and the dead”?  Here is a list of the more prominent ones, as recorded in the Scriptures and held by the Tradition: 

• The preaching of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
• The conversion of many of the Jewish people to Christ.
• The revival of the preaching of the prophets Enoch and Elijah, they who had never tasted death in this life and who will be martyred for bearing witness to the truth.
• The Great Apostasy, a wholesale abandonment of the true Christian faith by many in exchange for a worldly religion that caters to peoples’ desire for earthly well-being, foretold by our Lord Himself:  “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
• The reign of Antichrist, the “man of sin” who will seduce the nations, persecute the Church, and promise to build up “the Kingdom of God” on earth.
• Extraordinary perturbations of nature and a universal conflagration, whether natural or supernatural.
• And finally, the Sign of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens.

 

      The fourth sign (apostasy), I believe, is the most telling, most obviously prevalent, growing, and the one I would like to consider more particularly; for I run into it everywhere:  it is based on a now almost universal dogma in the First World.  Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman gave this mindset behind apostasy a most careful and telling description.  As one reads it, he can only recognize what he is supposed to adhere to, dictated to him by media, academia, and even from many a pulpit:

That truth and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that; that no one is answerable for his opinions; that they are a matter of necessity or accident; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess; that our merit lies in seeking, not in possessing; that it is a duty to follow what seems to us true, without a fear lest it should not be true; that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail; that we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure; that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not to the heart also; that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of Faith, and need no other guide – this is the principle of philosophies and heresies, which is very weakness. 

      And we are expected to hold to this mindset.  To refuse to do so is “evidence” of “bigotry.”  I am often informed by people that, “well, you and I worship the same God.”  Really?  “Tell me what God is like,” I respond, “and only then can I know whether your assertion is true.”  But this is dismissed as needless – and so very much tedious – nitpicking.  Again, really?  I most emphatically do not worship the god of Jihadists, the god who is identified with Nature, the god of secular might, the god of science, or the god and goddesses of neo-pagans.  I do not worship the god of Self, as delineated in pop-psychology.  Catholics worship the one, true God revealed fully and perfectly in Jesus Christ.  But we are expected, challenged to, it is demanded of us that we throw a piece of incense on the altar of Pluralism; but that we cannot do. 

      We are the skunk at the garden party.  So be it.  This has all happened before:  under the reign of Diocletian the Roman emperor, under the Arian heretics who ruled in the latter days of Rome, in England during the rule of Elizabeth I (“just sign the Oath of Supremacy that denies the headship of the Church on earth to the Successor of Peter and acknowledge the bastard daughter of Henry VIII as true of head of the Church in England, and you will have ‘peace’”).  And it is happening now.  But more subtly:  you are not nice if you do not compromise in order to “get along.”

      This mindset is pervasive, and it is the potential groundwork for much apostasy, even the Great Apostasy that ushers in the Last Day.  The Scriptures, St. Paul particularly, also refers to it as “the Rebellion,” rebellion against truth.  “A god there may be, definable according to my at-the-moment need of him?”  Yes, that’s good.  “But a God who is Truth and demands my conformity to that Truth?”  No, that would not be nice, too constraining, too much at variance with contemporary lifestyle and social expectations.  “We will not have this Man rule over us,” was the response to Christ, when Truth Himself became incarnate two thousand years ago.  This mastery of Truth over us is the very thing the modern world, en masse, rejects – the “perfect” setting for the appearance of Antichrist, the man of sin, the son of perdition, who will promise the kingdom on earth without the “inconvenience” of the truth.  Beware!