+Feast of St. James, Apostle and Martyr+
Introduction
For the past several months I’ve been ruminating about the precarious situation of the world today. I’m sure other people are having the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings. The one thing that keeps coming to my mind is, “Here is the faith and patience of the saints.” I’m not sure any of us understood how much faith we would need and how patient we would have to be. And I say that because it seems like we are so far from what we remember of what we had of the Church that it is almost impossible to describe it to anybody who didn’t once experience it. Especially younger people. I have great difficulty, even with modern-day technology, in conveying that sense of the Church as us older Catholics experienced it. And I think that’s very important to understand, because without that true sense, it is very hard to grasp what has really happened to the Church.
I’m going to be making some changes to my site and basically go to blog-only format soon. I’m not sure how long this is going to take. It’s going to require some maneuvering, but like many people, I’m kind of trimming things down — economizing and minimizing as I grow older, which is something that all of us wind up doing at this stage of the game. I don’t want anyone to think that the site won’t be available to them. It certainly will. But I think that I have provided all the proofs, or nearly so, about what happened to the Church. And I know there are plenty of broadcasters and podcasters, YouTubers and all kinds of people out there that are going to have different takes and different ideas. They are the ones who seem to be garnering most of the audience these days. And of course we are all free to publish these proofs — for as long as the powers that be allow it, that is.
Over the years — and this website is now 20 years old — I believe I have offered readers very solid reasons for why I believe as I do concerning the end times and what we’re going through now. And I don’t know that I can say that for everybody else. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can’t say that for everybody else because they often don’t have anything from Church teaching or Holy Scripture to back up how they are looking at certain things, especially when it comes to Antichrist and who is Antichrist and where we are etc. I’m not saying I’m the only one that can get it right. I’m not. I’ve made a lot of mistakes during my career — I corrected one in my last blog. I always try, when I realize I’ve done this, to make sure that readers know I’ve made a mistake and that I’ve corrected it. It’s almost always good-faith errors because either I wasn’t paying attention or I just copied something wrong. But I still have the obligation to correct them. And those who question something as not correct have the obligation of notifying me.
But mistakes aside, there are a lot of popular broadcasters out there that have some very convincing takes on things. And it worries me because the one thing I don’t want lost in all of this is what Scripture tells us and what we know from approved sources of what will happen in the last days. The spiritual must always supersede the material. I know a lot of people have various ideas as far as where Enoch and Elias fit in and the identity of the Antichrist. But in some ways, these have been made so fantastical that it almost seems as though they’re myths or legends and we know this is wrong. I am no different than everyone else — I’m speculating on a lot of these things myself. I just read again somewhere where we would be expected in these days to be able to read the signs of the times. And that is why nothing has been put down for us — we can speculate all we want, but only the actual fulfillment of the event will prove those speculations to be true. And even then, we are on dangerous ground here. How easy would it be to falsify the appearance of Enoch and Elias, a fake Antichrist, or the sudden appearance of a long-lost pope or bishop? We live in an age where deception has become the rule, not the exception, and the trusted principle of “when in doubt, don’t” must be invoked more and more frequently.
Antichrist’s coming and St. Jerome
Sometimes I think maybe all of us have it wrong. Something could come out of all of this that none of us are expecting. But all we can do is judge by what little we CAN believe and what we are CERTAIN that we see and take it from there. And I’m sure I’m not going to be too far off from some people’s thoughts on this. I’ve been reading St. Jerome lately; his commentary on Daniel. I know a lot of people have said, “Well, we don’t really know how much to trust about what’s in Daniel because we don’t know what applies to the Old Testament times or what applies to the New Testament times, or whether it applies to both.” There are differing opinions among the approved commentators on what does apply. But usually they agree that the Old Testament is kind of a prefiguration of everything that’s going to happen in the New Testament where the end times are concerned. They just differ on how much.
For we find this in the Douay-Rheims commentary on Apoc. 22:10: “We have no certainty when we apply these predictions to particular events. For as St. Jerome takes notice, the Apocalypse has as many mysteries as words, or rather mysteries in every word” (Now much of what appears in Apocalypse can be referred back to Daniel, so cross-referencing Daniel helps us better understand Apocalypse. In Dom Bernard Orchard’s A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, Reverend R. C. Fuller wrote, “All are agreed that the Old Testament as a whole prefigures the New Testament; some of the Fathers and early Church writers went further than this and interpreted everything in the Old Testament, even every phrase and word, as typifying the New Testament.” And I think that more and more we can see this is true the further we get down the end-times road.
In a lot of ways, I think that we have not given enough credit to what is written in the Old Testament and how it applies to the New Testament. And that’s because we’re not Scripture scholars and we are not like the Protestants, who often seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New. Also, reliable Scripture commentaries are hard to find. A lot of things were destroyed, I believe, when the Novus Ordo came in. I know I rescued several boxes of books from St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado that were being taken to the trash. I don’t know how often that happened but I know that it did happen. So what all we lost, we’ll never really know. I just hope it’s not things that could be really critical to what we’re going through now, but I ‘m afraid it could very well be.
I have a copy of St. Jerome’s commentary by Archer on the Book of Daniel, Catholic versions being unavailable. Although it is not imprimatured, I think it’s a very valuable work, because St. Jerome pretty much goes into everything that applies to us today. He more or less says that almost everything in Daniel that has been attributed to Antioch Epiphanes should be attributed to Antichrist. He was an early Father of the Church, so we can take his word for it. And we’re bound to believe what he says over any modern commentator simply because he is a saint and a Father of the Church. His work doesn’t amount to a unanimous opinion, which we would have to adopt as our own, but nevertheless, he was known for his expertise on Holy Scripture, and according to Rev. Graham’s work on Where we Got the Bible, he was the saint responsible for the creation of the Septuagint. We are living in a time when the final fulfillment of Daniel will be realized. If we take this book and Apocalypse in a collective sense, it is clear that not only does it predict the rise of spiritual Antichrist, THE Man of Sin, but also the head of Antichrist’s system, collective Antichrist — the Wild Beast — at work throughout the ages (Apoc. 1: 1). Spirtual Antichrist, the Man of Sin, has come and gone, but who he served, and the system they created together lives on. These are Satan and his sons, who encompass the camp of the saints at the very end: “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you shall do… He is a liar and the father thereof” (John 8: 44).
Russian conquest?
What also what disturbs me is some of the trends that to be in the works now. And one of them is a gravitation towards Russia as a “non-Communist” country — a dictatorship — and its Orthodox state religion. Statistics show a massive influx of converts to this sect. I understand how that might attract some people, because our own Church is no longer visible, although Christ keeps it alive as the Invisible Head. We’re its members — members of his Mystical Body and the Church militant on earth. And what complicates matters further is our own government’s move towards a totally non-Christian religion and joining together with it in defense of this country, which is frightening. There may be other nations that perceive this administration’s favoring of Israel as a threat to their beliefs and their military position, simply because of some of the statements that Israel has made about what they intend to do if anyone should come after them.
Some people are thinking that in the event of an all-out war, Russia could possibly invade the United States on the pretext that they’re delivering us from a government that basically has violated our own Constitution, which it has. I don’t know if that is going to happen. I don’t see how people figure that Russia would be an improvement, whether in its religion or its political aspect, over what we have. There is always the possibility that Communist rule could be resurrected and we would then live in a Communist state, (although what we have in way of government now is not too far removed). We have to remember here that Russia also plays footsies with Communist China. That influence cannot be dismissed and would no doubt have bearing should we ever find ourselves in Russia’s orbit.
So let’s say Russia gets involved in the Middle East, they help Iran go after Israel, which I’m not sure they would do because they think it’s not in their best interests. But let’s say they do that, and the United States rushes in and starts a war with Russia, and given our depleted oil reserves and dwindling military weapons reserves, we go into this war on the puny side. It is quite possible Russia has a lot more weapons-wise than we realize they actually have, and they’ve been holding it back in their war with Ukraine because they figured that eventually they will go after Europe, or the Israel /US thing will come up. Let’s assume that Russia wins this war. So Russia comes to what’s left of America and acts friendly. Well, that’s the best-case scenario. But what’s Russia going to want out of America? Are they going to want to annex us? After all, Alaska is a connection to Russia. Will they require us to convert to Orthodoxy something a scared, hungry and battered people might find acceptable, given the alternatives?
Conquest from within?
At that point in time, the American government would no longer exist, and some actually believe that that might not be a bad thing. They could be correct. But what can people expect if our current leaders continue down the path they are on? Just recently, a case has gone before the Supreme Court where one city was prohibiting Jewish people from meeting in their homes and praying. They wanted to invite 12 people into one home to pray, and the city said, “You can’t do that because it’s not a church,” or something to that effect. So this Jewish man took it to the Supreme Court, and now the court will decide whether you can pray in your own home. When I lived in Colorado, I had a discussion with our county co-administrator, I guess you could call her, and she said, “Oh, yeah, if they wanted to, they could forbid people to use anything on their property as a church and invite people in.” This was during COVID, so I don’t know whether that had something to do with COVID or what that was, but that was alarming to me. And it’s like, well, you know they have that power. We’ve seen it exercised.
And then I read a blog that said that if they ever impose Noahide laws — which seems like it could happen — they could order us to remove crucifixes, holy pictures and statues from our homes. The first Noahide law is — and I’ve spoken about this before — “You can’t have idols in your home.” So are they going to take away all our statues? Are they going to take away the crucifixes? Are they going to forbid us to do these things because they consider Christ an idol since he wasn’t their Messiah? This is not unlike the persecution the early Christians faced. Rome fell as an empire because of wars and invasions, an unstable economy, too great a reliance on slave labor, military overspending and overexpansion of their empire, government corruption and political instability, migration issues, loss of their moral and cultural identity, and a weakening of their military owing to a lack of recruits and diminished loyalty to the empire. History is repeating itself in new Rome, and enough of the lies have been exposed that people can now see it moving inexorably forward.
Natural disasters will probably play a part in this downfall of our country as well, as mentioned in previous articles. There are maps out there that show that if we ever had any kind of a major shaking up — whether it be an EMP or pole shift or a nuclear bomb dropped somewhere, for that matter— it could trigger earthquakes that would destroy the West Coast, parts of the East Coast, and leave only the Midwest and some of the East Coast intact in this country. Our own government has had the ability to trigger earthquakes for decades, and the Chinese experimented on their own population with this technology in the 1970-80s. There seems to have been an increase in earthquake and volcanic activity recently, but scientific reports deny this. And that would be all the more reason to wonder if suddenly there was an uptick in earthquake activity. It’s also very likely that we’ll see more destruction in this country than we could possibly imagine, even civil war. And that’s sad, because we love our country, regardless of what’s going on right now. We just want it to be Catholic.
Conclusion
One thing that I can say about certain podcasters today is that they have done a good job of exposing the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to the best of their ability, something Catholics have been aware of for almost 300 years. And we know as Catholics that it is a conspiracy to seduce the nations, destroy religion and control the world. I think the hardest thing for all of us, but especially young people to understand is how badly we’ve been betrayed and lied to all these years. For young adults it’s a shocker, because they generally do not know how long this evil has been around. But now they see it’s undeniable influence and results in their world, and so they ask, “Now what do we do and who are we supposed to believe?” How do we help them to cope? How do they digest all this? It’s a really sad situation. And the only solution is to set aside all the noise, all the media outlets, all the cacophony of opinions around us and concentrate only on daily duties, our prayers, and strengthening our faith. But young people brainwashed all their lives by materialism and false religious practices and beliefs have a tough time accepting this and practicing it, as do many older adults. They are not attuned to physical or spiritual suffering for Christ’s sake and may not be able to withstand the coming persecutions.
And they will come. At some point we may very well be asked to abandon our homes and our possessions — give up our lives — as did the early Christians, Catholic martyrs throughout history. We must prepare ourselves for that by refusing to be drawn into the intellectual traps and the use of AI to create visual phantasms to further deceive us regarding the events we see unfolding. All I can advise is what Holy Scripture advises: “But prove all things, hold fast to that which is good. (1 Thess. 5: 2); also, “Stand fast: and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:14). And when in doubt, refrain from acting until the doubt can be cleared, by those means approved by the Church. And if they cannot be cleared, one must always continue to refrain from acting, most especially when it concerns a doubt regarding the validity of the sacraments, something which is absolutely necessary for salvation, that is, when there is risk of losing one’s soul. (Rev. Dominic Prummer, Handbook of Moral Theology, 1957).
Faith and patience may sometimes make us miserable and anxious in the short term, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it will make us saints forever in Heaven.
