Last Sunday after Pentecost
On this last Sunday of the liturgical year, Holy Mother Church fittingly places before our eyes the spectacle of the end of the world and the second coming of Our Lord. Next Sunday, first of Advent, she will again place the end of time before our eyes. This too is fitting because the only way to properly begin something is to know where you are heading. Let’s suggest, however, for pastoral purposes, a nuance in the approach between these two Sundays. This week, we will consider the end of the world from the perspective of its awesomeness and fearsomeness, the dies tremenda which we look to with apprehension and sing of in the Dies irae. Next week, we will consider the same events from the perspective of the longed-for day of the Lord’s return.
Today’s Gospel provides us with a number of details about the end of the world that should give us pause. The principal ones are the wars among nations and the shaking of the natural powers of the universe, the false prophets who will lead many astray, the persecution of the anti-Christ, and finally the general judgment of all mankind by Christ the King.
Regarding the first, while it is true that wars and natural disasters have never been lacking throughout history, their frequency towards the end of time will increase dramatically, to the point that men will shrivel up with fear of what is coming next. This is the biblical reason for which we have every right to fear a widespread nuclear conflict, as it would fit in very well with what the Lord has told us about the end of times. Furthermore, we know from St Peter that the world as we know it will be consumed by fire (cf. 2 Pt 3:7 and 12). Will this fire be one sent directly from Heaven as some of the modern prophecies tell us, or will it be the fire of man’s own making, by which he destroys the planet God gave him to cultivate?
Regarding the false prophets, here too there has never been any lack of them in history. Indeed, we can say that all the heresiarchs were false prophets, men who came along with a “new and better” Gospel, which was actually only its corruption. The big difference is the extent of their influence. The Gospels are clear that the false prophets will be so seductive and the people so uninterested in the truth that their success will be enormous, and virtually the whole world will run off after their machinations. Today the false prophets in the Church are easily identified. They are the ones who teach partial truth and partial error, such as those prelates who openly profess the Catholic faith and then just as openly deny some of its tenets, such as the morality of the death penalty which has been firmly established in Catholic dogma for centuries, or the unicity of the one true religion as a path to Heaven, or the inviolability of the negative precepts of the natural law, which entails that the individual conscience is never in a position to decide how much of God’s commandments it is capable of practicing, or that any form of worship is fine except the one bequeathed to us by Tradition, or that the Church needs a new kind of synodal constitution..… False prophets are deceptive precisely because they look like prophets in their dress and the use the words of the Gospel as a prophet would be expected to do, but twist them to their own crooked teachings.
Concerning the antichrist, it is clear that from the beginning the antichrist has already been at work, as St John tells us in his first epistle. Anything or anyone that dissolves Christ is already a form of antichrist (cf 1 Jn ch 2). This being said, THE antichrist is a real person who will appear on the scene towards the end of time. His goal will be to draw people away from the true Christ by the subtleness of his tactics. The antichrist will not have horns, nor will he wear a red suit and have a tail. No, he will be a slick-talking, well decked-out gentleman who will be the admiration of the world. And all the earth was in admiration after the beast (Rev 13:3).
There will be a great religious deception at the end of times, which will at once reject true religion and give men something that will satisfy their need for religiosity, but will in reality lead them to worship, not the true God and His Only Son, but the devil himself. He seduced them that dwell on the earth, for the signs, which were given him to do in the sight of the beast (Rev 13:14-15). This point is of great importance. The antichrist will not announce the death of God as did Marx and Nietzsche. The real antichrist will not decry religion as such. He will propose a form of religion palatable to all, a religion that will flatter the passions and make it possible for people to live as they please while satisfying the innate desire every person has of worship. This is what is so seductive and destructive about it.
This is the reason for which Our Blessed Lord tells us that because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold (Mt 24:12), and also there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. (Mt 24:24), and that unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened (Mt 24:22). In other words, the trial will be such that even the elect will be on the verge of falling. St Peter seems to echo this when he writes: if the just man shall scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? (1 Pt 4:18).
All of this terrifies us, all the more in that the possibility of the coming of the antichrist approaches with the efforts to achieve a one world government and a one world religion. When we see the abomination of the desolation, that is to say, heresy, in the house of God which is the Church, it terrifies us, and it should, especially when Our Lord Himself tells us that those final days will be so evil that even the good and holy souls alive at that time will barely persevere, and this only thanks to a special intervention of Divine Providence to shorten the days.
How then are we to prepare for such a trial? How can we be sure to persevere and remain faithful to the true God and the true religion in that critical era? One thing is sure: it is not by any strength or intelligence of our own that we can counter the Prince of Darkness who will be given control of the world at that time. There is only one thing that checkmates Lucifer and his satellites, and it is not wits or muscles or astute preparations, or hidden bunkers and stores of food, or even private chapels in the catacombs. None of that is to be neglected, for sure, but in an of itself, it is laughable, for we are no match for Satan. There is one thing, and only one that that checkmates the Enemy, and it is the virtue that he scorned, namely humility. The saints tell us that Satan can fake all the virtues, but he cannot fake humility. This is because pride is his great fault, his capital vice that controls all the others. It is not possible to conceive of a being more proud than Satan, and therefore it is not possible to fight him except through its contrary, namely humility.
So humility is the assured way of being prepared for the persecution of the antichrist and persevering amidst its horrors. If you are truly humble, Satan and his minions can attack you; they can make you suffer; they can terrify you and make you tremble; they can even put you to death. But they cannot conquer you. The reason for this is that humility is an impregnable citadel that Satan has no entrance into. Humility is the narrow path that leads to God. But is it that narrow? St Teresa of Avila, in a moving passage of her autobiography, wonders aloud. She speaks in these terms to Our Lord:
“I do not see, Lord nor do I know how the road that leads to You is narrow. I see that it is a royal road, not a path; a road that is safer for anyone who indeed takes it. Very far off are the occasions of sin, those narrow mountain passes and the rocks that make one fall. What I would call a path, a wretched path and a narrow way, is the kind which has on one side, where a soul can fall, a valley far below, and on the other side a precipice: as soon as one becomes careless one is hurled down and broken into pieces. He who really loves You, my Good, walks safely on a broad and royal road. He is far from the precipice. Hardly has he begun to stumble when You, Lord, give Him Your hand. One fall is not sufficient for a person to be lost, nor are many, if he loves You and not the things of the world. He journeys in the valley of humility.
“I cannot understand what it is that makes people afraid of setting out on the road of perfection. May the Lord, because of who He is, give us understanding of how wretched is the security that lies in such manifest dangers as following the crowd and how true security lies in striving to make progress on the road of God. Let them turn their eyes to Him and not fear the setting of this Sun of Justice, nor, if we don’t first abandon Him, will He allow us to walk at night and go astray” (Life ch. 35).
In other words, humility demands that we make ourselves small to enter the way of God, but if we persevere, our heart becomes enlarged and we begin to run with joy in the way of God’s commandments. Pride, on the contrary, locks people up in their tiny little universe where they suffocate, both spiritually and physically, because we are not made for this earth, but for eternity.
May Our Blessed Lady, humblest of all, teach us her secret, and in so doing, prepare us to stand with assurance before the Eternal Judge.
