I am persuaded by the interpretation of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse (chapters 8 & following) which sees them as announcing seven great events in sacred history from the time after the persecution of Diocletian (itself alluded to in Apoc. 7:13-15) until the coming of antichrist. More exactly, they refer to seven great assaults of the enemy against the Church and Christendom. On this reading, the first five trumpets announce: the barbarians devastating the empire; the emergence of Islam; the Photian schism; the dimming of faith and the supernatural spirit toward the end of the Middle Ages; and the Protestant Reformation (I have written about this here.)

Hermann Kramer, the priest from whom I draw this interpretation, professed himself uncertain about the sixth trumpet. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, he thought that it might have something to do with Communism. I think that he was right, but from our vantage point a hundred years further on, it seems possible to gain an even clearer view.

This is how it begins:

And the sixth angel sounded the trumpet: and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before the eyes of God, saying to the sixth angel, who had the trumpet: “Loose the four angels, who are bound in the great river Euphrates”.

The river Euphrates, in Scripture, is a symbol of the limits of the domain of the chosen people, and later of the limits of the Messianic Kingdom. In Deuteronomy XI, Moses tells the Israelites: “From the great river Euphrates unto the western sea shall be your borders.” In Psalm LXXI, we read: “He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth”. Under the New Covenant, therefore, the Euphrates must stand for the border between the Church and the unbelieving world. To loose the destroying angels who are bound there is thus to open the Church to destructive activity from outside.

What of the golden altar? St Methodius, who died in AD 311, says that it has been handed down that it represents “the assembly of the chaste” (Banquet of the Ten Virgins, V.6). Fr Kramer glosses this by saying that it may represent the religious orders, especially those leading the contemplative life. ‘Horns’ suggest power or authority, while the number four is commonly used to express the whole world. For a voice to come from the four horns of the golden altar, with an order to release the destroying angels, perhaps means, then, that the world has not profited by the graces which the religious orders, being “before the eyes of God”, have the power to obtain for it by prayers and sacrifices, and that therefore the world must be chastised.

The apostle goes on:

And the four angels were loosed, who were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year: for to kill the third part of men.

No such precision, in regard to the starting point of the chastisement, is given for the other trumpets. This is understandable, on the interpretation proposed: one cannot say of any one day that it was the day of the barbarian invasions or of the Islamic conquest or of the Reformation. I suppose that even the Photian schism took a while, as schisms generally do. Here, by contrast, we are bidden to look for an event so discrete that it can be assigned to an hour of human history. Whatever it is, it leads to a third of mankind’s being killed.

He goes on:

And the number of the army of the horsemen was twenty thousand times ten thousand. And I heard the number of them.

Fr Kramer observes that St John must have been aware that the event which he was witnessing was well in the future, since the empire in his time didn’t have 200 million people in it, which is also, he thinks, why the apostle emphasises that he hasn’t got the number wrong. But perhaps we are also meant to be reminded of the army with 10,000 that confronts the army with 20,000, in one of our Lord’s parables (Lk. 14:31), itself an image of the battle between simplicity and duplicity. When the duplicitous multiply their power by the aid of the simple, do we not have an army of twenty thousand times ten thousand?

These horsemen sit on horses with mouths like lions, and fire, smoke and brimstone come from their mouths to kill one third of mankind. This suggests that they destroy by speech. Fire, in Scripture, can mean various things, some good and some bad. Here perhaps it symbolises lawless passions. Smoke makes us think of “the pride of those who hate you”, which the psalmist tells God “ascends forever” (Ps. 73). Sulphur naturally suggests Sodom and Gomorrah. The horsemen and their horses kill, then, by a powerful propaganda which unleashes human passions, giving rise in turn to hatred of God and finally to unnatural vice. This seems like a pretty good description of the revolution against natural law fostered by many diligent horsemen in the media, schools, entertainment industry, parliaments, courts and elsewhere. As for a third of mankind getting killed as a result of their activity: how many pregnancies now end in abortion worldwide? Estimates vary, but I read recently of a study produced by the Guttmacher Institute in 2012 and published in the Lancet which calculated that in Europe it was roughly one in three.

All this helps us to understand what is meant by saying that “the duplicitous multiply their power by the aid of the simple”. The propaganda fuelling this revolution has often deliberately concealed its true goal by the use of slogans designed to appeal to those who had till then been simple and decent: “every child a wanted child”, “safe, legal and rare”, “ending stigma”, “marriage equality”, ” the population explosion”, “diversity is our strength”.

We are looking, then, for an event which can be dated to a year and a month and a day and an hour, when the border wall between the Church and the world was brought down, and which was followed by widespread, successful propaganda against the natural law and the deaths of countless human beings. It is hard not to think of the Second Vatican Council, and possibly John XXIII’s opening speech or else his decision to accept the Rhine Group’s insistence that all the prepared documents bar one should be scrapped. In the year of our Lord 1962, the mysterious sixth trumpet was sounded in heaven; while Pope John, all unwitting, played second trumpeter on earth.