Apocalypse Not Now!
Rome Fiddles While Church Burns

Martin Blackshaw
REMNANT COLUMNIST, Scotland

 

St. John's prophecy was fulfilled

1900 years ago?

(POSTED September 16, 2006 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) In her lifetime, Sister Lucy said enough about the content of the Third Secret of Fatima to leave us in no doubt that those twenty-five lines or so of text speak of catastrophic events, particularly within the Church.

She wrote, for example, in reference to the Third Secret, of a “diabolical disorientation within the clergy”, and even went so far as to identify the whole text with chapters 8 to 13 of St. John’s Apocalypse, thereby confirming what Catholics have always believed; vis-à-vis that the Book of Apocalypse is a Divinely-inspired prophetic delineation of events concerning the Church from its foundation to the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.

Strange, then, that Pope Benedict XVI should refer to the Apocalypse in his General Audience of August 23, 2006 as having been “inappropriately linked with impending disaster”, and attempt to reduce the prophecies contained therein to merely a “profound pastoral sensitivity” on the part of St. John for the persecuted Christians of the seven Churches of Asia towards the end of the first century.

This is precisely the error taught by the Bishops of England, Scotland and Wales in their recently published ‘Gift of Scripture’, which enjoyed the support of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and which has since been ratified by him as Pope, namely that the visions of the ‘Seer of Patmos’ addressed only contemporary, not future, events.

But, get this: Further into his discourse, His Holiness makes this most astounding interpretation of St. John’s prayer at the end of the Book of Apocalypse: “He invokes the Lord’s final coming “Come, Lord Jesus!” “…Above all it implies, of course, the awaiting of the Lord’s definitive victory, of the New Jerusalem, of the Lord who comes and transforms the world.

Note the words “final” and “definitive” in the Pope’s statement, as in the second coming of Christ, and note how he associates these words not with the Church triumphant in heaven, but rather with a transformed world.  A paradise on earth?

Did not the Jews in Our Lord’s day also believe that He had come to reign over an earthly kingdom? And did not Our Lord negate this great error with such utterances as “My Kingdom is not of this world” and “Heaven and earth shall pass away”? So, what makes the Vicar of Christ think and speak thus?

It is the “diabolical disorientation” spoken of by Sister Lucy at the highest levels of the Church, the same disorientation that has slowly replaced our God-centred religion with a man-centred equivalent by means of a new Mass, a new ecclesiology, ecumenism and now the undermining of Sacred Scripture.

Heartbreaking as it is to admit, there is no question that the intelligence of our modern Popes and bishops has been bedimmed by the devil so that in their theology they now almost deserve that woeful truth ascribed by Our Lord to the Pharisees and Sadducees, “blind guides”. 

By refusing collectively, definitively and steadfastly to respond with humble obedience these past forty years to Our Lady’s request for a public and solemn Consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, Our modern Popes and bishops have fallen deeper and deeper into the mire of intellectual and spiritual pride, so that today they scarcely resemble, in their words, actions and beliefs, their venerable predecessors.

Hence, despite forty years of utter devastation of our Holy Faith since Vatican Council II, Pope Benedict XVI, like John Paul II and Paul VI before him, failing to see the rotten fruit of apostate modernism, looks out over a dying Catholic world from atop the rubble of Christ’s ‘time-bomb’ blasted Church and proclaims that all is well with the new religion.

Incredible as it may seem, such blindness on the part of the Church Hierarchy is not altogether unexpected, for in a vision to Sister Lucy before Vatican II, Our Lord, complaining of the refusal of His Pope and bishops to make the Consecration of Russia to His Mother’s Immaculate Heart, warned of the punishment to come.

Likening their stubbornness to that of the King of France’ tardiness in Consecrating that nation to His Sacred Heart some centuries before, Our Lord said: “Since, like the King of France, they will not obey, then, like the King of France, they will fall into misfortune.”

Here is where I believe the prophecy of St. Paul finds its fulfilment: “There will come a time when they will not endure sound doctrine but according to their own desires will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth but will be turned unto fables.”

If ever the devil infiltrated a fable into the hearts and minds of Catholic men in order to turn their ardent charity and zeal for Christ to cold indifference, it is this fable of ecumenism, of the notion that all religions are more or less pleasing in the sight of God. It is the fable from which all other Post-Concilliar deviations have sprung and which leads ultimately to the ‘abomination of desolation’.

Who can fail to see and feel that spirit of abomination and desolation in every mainstream parish church around the globe today, particularly in their Post-Concilliar liturgical services, while the Pope nods in general approval? Truly, it is a mystery of iniquity.

Yet we need not despair nor give place to such extremes as Sedevacantism, for just as in the Acts of the Apostles we read that Peter was imprisoned in chains at the behest of the wicked Herod, but soon released by an angel of God in response to the prayers offered up by the whole Church, so it will be through the prayers of faithful Catholics today that our Pope will eventually be freed from his imprisonment in modernist thought and the bonds of false ecumenism.

To this end, the General Chapter of the Society of St. Pius X concluded in June with unanimous agreement to solicit the prayers of the faithful with the intention of presenting one million rosaries in a spiritual bouquet to Pope Benedict XVI at the end of October.

It is a noble, charitable and loyal resolution on the part of the SSPX, whose Superior General, like Archbishop Lefebvre, has never deviated from the Society’s principle threefold goal to form good and holy priests, to see the true Mass restored to all the clergy, and to help bring about the triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart.

 

Therefore, let those who are determined to wallow in a spirit of bitterness against the Holy Father do as they will. God will be their judge. But let all others who proclaim loyalty to the Papacy and love for Christ and His Holy Church join in this great act of petition to Our Heavenly Queen so that we may finally witness Her triumph and a restoration of all things in Christ.