{"id":37752,"date":"2019-10-14T16:10:05","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T22:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markmallett.com\/blog\/?p=37752"},"modified":"2021-11-27T15:18:22","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T21:18:22","slug":"newmans-prophecy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markmallett.com\/blog\/newmans-prophecy\/","title":{"rendered":"Newman’s Prophecy","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"St. John Henry Newman<\/em>\u00a0inset by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
\nCanonized on October 13th, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FOR\u00a0<\/strong>a number of years, whenever I spoke publicly about the times we are living in, I would have to carefully paint a picture through the words of the popes<\/a> and saints. People were simply not ready to hear from a nobody-layman like me that we are about to face the greatest struggle the Church has ever gone through\u2014what John Paul II called “the final confrontation” of this era. Nowadays, I barely have to say anything. Most people of faith can tell, despite the good that still exists, that something has gone terribly wrong with our world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, we are living in what is known as the “end times”\u2014we have been “officially” since the Ascension of Christ. But that’s not what I nor the popes are referring to. Rather, we are pointing to a specific period of time<\/em> when the forces of life and death will reach a climatic struggle: the “culture of life” against a “culture of death,” a “woman clothed in the sun” vs. a “red dragon,” the Church vs. an antichurch, the Gospel vs. an anti-gospel, a “beast” vs. the Body of Christ. In the beginning of my ministry, people would look at me with a dismissive smirk and say, “Ya well, everybody thinks their times are the end times.” And so, I began to quote St. John Henry Newman:<\/p>\n

\n

I know that all times are perilous, and that in every time serious and anxious minds, alive to the honor of\u00a0God and the needs of man, are apt to consider no times so perilous as their own. At all times the enemy of \"\"souls assaults with fury the Church which is their true Mother, and at least threatens and frightens when he fails in doing mischief. And all times have their special trials which others have not\u2026 Doubtless, but still admitting this, still I think\u2026 ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. The special peril of the time before us is the spread of that plague of infidelity, that the Apostles and our Lord Himself have predicted as the worst calamity of the last times of the Church. And at least a shadow, a typical image of the last times is coming over the world<\/strong>. \u2014St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890 A.D.), sermon at opening of St. Bernard\u2019s Seminary, October 2, 1873, The Infidelity of the Future<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, the darkness that has descended at this hour is perhaps unlike anything the world has ever seen. Logic has been turned upside down. Good (such as the family, marriage, fatherhood, etc.) are now considered societal evils while immorality is praised and celebrated as good. The natural law is scorned while “feelings” are enshrined in law. Graphic violence and fornication are considered entertainment while school children are being taught to masturbate and explore porn. And the Church? Mass attendance continues to rapidly decline in the West as unbelief in the Eucharist surges. Wounded by sexual abuse scandals, weakened by modernism, and made impotent by compromise and cowardice, the Church is suddenly irrelevant to billions of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Where are we now in an eschatological sense? It is arguable that we are in the midst of the rebellion\u00a0<\/em>and that in fact a strong delusion has come upon many, many people. It is this delusion and rebellion that foreshadows what will happen next: and the man of lawlessness will be revealed<\/em>.<\/strong> \u2014article, Msgr. Charles Pope,\u201cAre These the Outer Bands of a Coming Judgment?\u201d<\/a><\/em>, November 11th, 2014; blog<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While it is much easier for us to make these judgments with the clarity of hindsight, St. John Newman said what \"\"is perhaps one of the most prescient things I’ve read from a churchman. In his sermons on the Antichrist, the saint wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

Satan may adopt the more alarming weapons of deceit\u2014he may hide himself\u2014he may attempt to seduce us in little things, and so to move the Church, not all at once, but by little and little from her true position. I do\u00a0<\/b><\/span>believe he has done much in this way in the course of the last few centuries\u2026 It is his policy to split us up and divide us, to dislodge us gradually from our rock of strength. And if there is to be a persecution, perhaps it will be then; then, perhaps, when we are all of us in all parts of Christendom so divided, and so reduced, so full of schism, so close upon heresy. When we have cast ourselves upon the world and depend for protection upon it, and have given up our independence and our strength, then [Antichrist] will burst upon us in fury as far as God allows him. Then suddenly the Roman Empire may break up, and Antichrist appear as a persecutor, and the barbarous nations around break in. <\/strong><\/b>\u2014Blessed John Henry Newman, Sermon IV: The Persecution of Antichrist<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And Newman was clear on what, or rather, who<\/em> was meant by “Antichrist”:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026that Antichrist is one individual man, not a power\u2014not a mere ethical spirit, or a political system, not a dynasty, or succession of rulers\u2014was the universal tradition of the early Church.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014St. John Henry Newman,\u00a0\u201cThe Times of Antichrist\u201d,\u00a0Lecture 1<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The reason his words are so startling is that Newman foresaw a time when the Church herself becomes an internal mess; a period when she will be moved from her “true position,” her “rock of strength,” and is “so full of schism” and “close upon heresy.” To his listeners in the 19th century, this might have sounded borderline heretical in itself, given that Christ promised that the “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”<\/em> [1]<\/sup><\/a>Matt 16:18<\/span><\/span>