I saw a beast coming up out of the sea

 

Abominations desolate

In October 7th 2019 that South American idol was put in a place of honour in St Peter’s basilica. On 27th October 2019 the pope placed a bowl used for the worship of this idol onto the papal altar in the basilica, and shortly after this altar ceased to be used. Yesterday all the side-altars were deprived of the Mass.

 

The shadows lengthen

Just before the recent presumed coup safest election in American presidential history, Archbishop Vigano expressed his opinion that President Trump was (however improbably) the last remaining katechon. If he was correct, then we can expect to see things deteriorate rather rapidly. For myself I can’t help feeling that both Queen Elizabeth II and ex-Pope Benedict XVI exercise some katechontic influence, however weak. But at 94 and 93 respectively, how much longer can they last? When they’re gone, they’re gone.

 

South American Jesuit Provincials

Josef de Acosta (1540-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit who became a missionary in South America, and was elected as provincial of a vast part of that continent. From what we read in Cornelius a Lapide, he seems to have been the first person to propose that the ‘beast from the land’ in Apocalypse 13 would be an apostate bishop. I just thought I’d mention it.

 

The Sixth Trumpet

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.

 

Yeats and the Habsburgs

I was interested to read today that Yeats wrote his poem on ‘The Second Coming’ in January 1919, just after Blessed Charles of Austria announced that he was relinquishing his involvement in public affairs.

 

The Great Eagle

If Archbishop Vigano is correct, the battle being fought in the United States of America is not so much political as cosmic: the holy and the fallen angels, that is, who at all times are in conflict over the souls and cities of men, are fighting, he believes, with particular intensity now and in that land.  The mantle of prophecy seems to be upon him; at least, I know of no one of comparable rank who is currently telling so much truth.  When he speaks, for example, of the convergence of a ‘deep State’ and a ‘deep Church’ – or, as we might say, of the synergy of the two beasts of Apocalypse 13 – he is surely pointing to an obvious fact.

Yet I wonder whether the United States of America might not turn out to be the ‘great eagle’ of Apocalypse 12.  It is curious how lacking is a consensus on the meaning of that symbol.  It designates, after all, something of the first importance: a power, apparently not God or Christ, which delivers the Church from the fury of the enemy so that she may survive in solitude.  Fr Herman Kramer, in his long commentary on the Apocalypse, points out that the symbol seems to allude to the Book of Ezekiel, where in chapter XVII Babylon and Egypt are represented as two eagles: the symbol, then, denotes a sovereign power distinct from God’s people.   It is not an apostate power, since apostasy is stigmatised in Scripture by some opprobrious image, such as that of the harlot, not represented by a magnificent bird.  Fr Kramer writes: “The great eagle, therefore, as a nation, has never been Catholic […] This eagle will protect and shelter the Church during the reign of the Beast.”  In particular, it will protect her against the river which comes forth from the mouth of the serpent, a river which in Scriptural terms, seems to represent slander and other evil speech.

This prophetic image fits the United States well.  The European powers have all been Catholic, and the countries that have been included in their several empires may be said to have participated, even if sometimes guiltlessly, in their apostasy.  That leaves hardly anywhere in the world, apart from China, Japan and the United States.  It does not seem likely at the moment that either of the first two countries will become the ally of the Church against the enemy, and both of them have had governments which have martyred the faithful.  America, on the other hand, though never formally Catholic, has been marked from the start, in the persons of many of its citizens, by a reverence for the bible and by a sincere desire to follow Christ.  It has even adopted the eagle as its national emblem.  What the ‘two wings’ might be, by which the eagle gives flight to the Woman, I do not know.  If they represent the forces by which a nation is set in motion, perhaps they are the people and the executive; or else, if suggestion lacks symmetry, two cohorts of the people.  In any case we should no doubt take ++Vigano’s advice and pray for America.

 

Adam in the martyrology and the bible

Some of the fathers of the Church speak of Christ and the saints reigning on earth for a thousand years, once six thousand years of history have passed; some others speak of the antichrist as due to arrive after six thousand years.  Is there any way to reconcile this?

The Roman martyrology gives 5199BC as the date of creation.  As I have mentioned before, Venerable Mary of Agreda says that the Blessed Virgin Mary told her that this date is correct.  On the other hand, calculations of the date of Adam based on taking the genealogies of the bible at face-value yield a date of somewhere around 3950-4000BC.  Is there any way to reconcile these?

We are given no indication by Holy Scripture of how long Adam remained unfallen.  We are likewise not told anything about the nature of the ‘sleep’ into which God casts Adam before the creation of Eve, although the Septuagint calls it an ‘ecstasy’ (ἐπέβαλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν Αδαμ*.)

Presumably Adam’s life before the Fall was a contemplative life of an exalted kind.  St Ambrose says in his commentary on St Luke’s gospel, chapter 10, that he enjoyed an untroubled beatitude (inoffensa beatitudine perfruebatur).  Presumably, too, the more closely one is united to the eternal God, the less sense one has of time passing.  Could it be that Adam, or both of our first parents, were rapt by God before the Fall into ecstasies that coincided with the passing of hundreds of years in the outside world, somewhat as an angel can stay fixed on the same thought for an indefinite period of time?  If so, that would explain why the martyrology mentions a higher number of years than the bible, the latter reckoning Adam’s age only from the day on which he began to be a mortal man.

In this case, it would be possible to reckon ‘six thousand years’ from two different starting points, thus reaching two different ending points.

It is very striking, as I have also mentioned before, that exactly six thousand years after the date of creation found on the martyrology, the first holy Roman emperor was crowned by the pope, inaugurating a line that lasted a thousand years.  We, or those who immediately follow us, will see what happens when the six thousand years based on a simple reading of the biblical genealogies have certainly finished.

 

* I don’t know why gaps appear in the Greek when one copies and pastes.

 

Regalia of Modernity

The Crown of Luther

The Sword of Rousseau 

The Orb of Descartes

 

“The drastic and disproportionate security measures … appear almost globally orchestrated along a precise plan.”

Bishop Schneider speaks.

And Chris Ferrara makes a reasonable request: “Show me the numbers that justify worldwide panic and suspension of civil liberties over a virus that has not killed even a tiny fraction of the people who are dying of the flu all over the world right now.”

See the whole article.