January 2008 Print

In one of the several outposts to which I have resorted for spiritual nourishment during this famine of faith, there was among the congregation a little old man who would frequently sidle up to me while I was sipping my coffee in the church basement after Mass. He always wore a knowing smile: not an entirely pleasant smile, but one that implied he saw something you didn't, a danger lurking over your shoulder of which you were oblivious and at which he was staring. As devout Jews of old looked for the kingdom of Heaven, he looked for the end times. And he did so eagerly, even hungrily.

"You got your blessed candles ready?" he asked me once.

"Blessed candles?" I asked, not knowing what he meant.

"They're the only things that will light during the three days of darkness."

"Really?"

"Yup. Get 'em ready. It's coming." And having delivered his advice and prophecy, he and his smile retreated.

His manner was unique, but his preoccupations were not. He desired the resolution of uncertainties, the release of tensions, in fact, the end of the world. I have seen such yearning among others engaged in this long and wearying combat with the enemies of the faith, the most pernicious of whom are within the precincts of the Church.

The situation is admittedly dire and tries one's patience.

When we meet someone who in the course of conversation lets it be known that he is Catholic, we cannot simply trust his admission. He may very well be Catholic in the way the vast variety of Protestants are Catholic: by assenting to some portions of the creed and rejecting others. We feel inclined to vet his convictions before granting his title. To those of us loyal to Tradition, these inquisitions of putative co-religionists can become tedious and unpleasant, and they inevitably bear in upon us how far is our own habitation from that in which dwell the members of what we call the mainstream church.

Now, it is a natural and wholesome thing to desire clarity. When we have difficulty distinguishing physical objects, we consult an optometrist; but when we have difficulty discerning the members of our Church, we can only squint in perplexity. And as we cannot cross-examine everyone who claims to share our beliefs, we cannot avoid a measure of uneasiness when a stranger includes himself in the mystical body. Such uneasiness is also exacerbated greatly when a prelate betrays by public statements or acts that what he holds to be true is in stark contradiction to what the Church has always taught. It is far less taxing for us to declare a fellow layman's proposition heretical should he claim, for instance, that the new covenant did not supersede the old covenant, than it is to level the same judgment against a cardinal or even a pope. Yet, our respect for office must bow to our loyalty to truth, and the judgment stand in both cases. But we must also admit the emotional strain of recognizing the denial of dogma by those whose duty it is to uphold it. They should carry the banner that we follow, not drag it in the mud and leave us leaderless.

There is a broad gulf between that which should be and that which is when it comes to the Catholic hierarchy and, as I say, we feel it deeply: it unsettles us; it discomforts us; it makes us long for a better state of affairs. We want clear lines of cleavage: Catholics on one side and non-Catholics on the other. We earnestly wish that those who lack faith should also lack mitres. But the murkiness we all deplore, the twilight in which neither sun nor moon gives light, persists. And though all of us want to escape the twilight, some of us hope to do so by blotting out the sun and moon along with it. Some yearn for the three days of darkness. Some, out of fatigue and frustration, want the angels of the apocalypse to fulfill their terrible office and pour out upon the earth their vials of plague, the sooner the better.

I have heard, with some pain, men whom I hold in high esteem speak with positive relish of the coming collapse of what remains of Western civilization. I have heard predicted, with seemingly solid conviction, that we are close to the breakdown of all those mechanisms whose continued operation provide us with the stability and comfort we presently enjoy. I have heard thundering prophecies that our economy is on the brink of a precipice and its plunge into the chasm of chaos inevitable. I know little about currency and market forces and investments, as my small income is almost entirely expended in keeping my family fed and sheltered, so I cannot explain the principles underlying such forecasts, but I dearly hope they are entirely mistaken.

I have also heard it predicted, with happy anticipation, that our supply of electricity will soon run out, casting us into a darkness that will paralyze the normal functioning of society in all its aspects. Again, the basis for such speculation eludes me.

There are also those whose visions of apocalypse are more cosmic and supernatural, as were those of my friend with his blessed candles; they dream of flood and famine and fire from Heaven.

Now, our faith enjoins us to believe that the world will end, and we have it on the highest authority that awful occurrences will precede that end. It is salutary to think of these things on occasion, as we are thereby reminded of the transitory nature of all that is worldly and of the abiding reality of the changeless God, in whose company we all hope to find ourselves when heaven and earth are no more; but a preoccupation with apocalyptic visions is not without its danger to our mental and spiritual health.

The history of the Church is punctuated by outbreaks of what might be called the end-times ecstasy. The first notable occurrence dates to the second century figure of Montanus, who retreated to Pepuza with his two prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, and announced that the new Jerusalem would descend on the spot where he and his entourage had encamped. Needless to say, some disappointment followed, but that did not discourage the recrudescence of such vagaries. Each age appears to evoke in those so predisposed new forecasts of the imminent end of time. The Church, whose dogmatic councils make no pronouncements without serious cause, deemed it incumbent upon Her to anathematize the setting of dates for the dissolution of the world. Our Lord implies such a prohibition when He tells us that it is not given to any man to know that day and time. He counsels us to be perpetually in readiness for His coming, not to engage in calculations about its exact moment.

So one can say that a man who predicts, even in a broad manner, a time frame for the apocalypse is not thinking with the mind of the Church. And while contemplating the fleeting quality of all that is temporal helps to fix our hearts on that which is eternal, a longing for the destruction of the world is not similarly beneficial. Quite the opposite.

A man's motives for avidly looking forward to the Second Coming may be righteous. After all, St. John ends the book of Revelation with the words: "Come, Lord Jesus, come." This invitation might be described as a kind of holy impatience arising from a desire to see the face of the Savior. It is akin to the feeling we have when we intensely desire to see again the face of a loved one from whom we have been separated for a long time. But I fear that there are among us those whose preoccupation with the end times is rooted in feelings of a different nature.

Some languages express an aspect of the human psyche better than others. We recognize this when we make use of foreign phrases in certain instances when English falls short of the precision and connotation we are reaching for. For instance, the "joy of life" lacks the animation and sonorous power of "joie de vivre"; likewise, we have no comparable set of words that compresses all the meaning that is packed into the German compound, "schadenfreude." The usual translation is "joy at another's sorrow," but such translation merely verifies the adage that to translate is to change.

In some of us, a relish for the end times may be liberally spiced with schadenfreude.

It can be maddening to see wicked people flourish. The spirit of justice rears up in us and demands that they be held to account, and we do have a limited license to exact justice in this world. First, in our families, as we teach our children right from wrong through punishments and rewards. Second, in society at large, that collection of families, in which we set up courts and prisons and even execution chambers so that men who do evil will pay the corresponding penalty. But a great deal goes on in this life that falls outside the jurisdiction of the family and the courthouse. There are entirely legal ways to behave as a scoundrel.

Our society, for instance, sets no limit on the satisfaction of certain morally illicit appetites. A man may amass a fortune of obscene proportions and use his financial power to ruin other men, and far from being held in contempt by the public at large, he is likely to be admired, envied and emulated by those who subscribe to the perverted values of a commercial culture in which worth is measured by wealth.

Likewise, those who have been blessed, or possibly cursed, with a prepossessing physical beauty often use their allure to fashion careers in film and television that excite lust and encourage vanity. Again, their bad behavior is not censured by general disapprobation but richly compensated by universal celebrity. They become stars, and their fans raise their less lovely heads to gaze upon them with fascination in the firmament of the media heavens.

But none of these examples rankles in our hearts as does that of a corrupt priest or bishop. That the world is wicked and, in varying measure, will always be so, we accept as the patrimony of Adam. But that the spotless bride of Christ should be wedded to faithless and feckless men we find an agonizing betrayal. Not that we expect any man, whether in or out of Holy Orders, to be sinless. We know that no one is exempt from the struggle against temptations to which our fallen nature has delivered us; but we do expect that there should be a struggle and that those who are the successors of the apostles should lead us in the contest. We expect that in this spiritual combat our churchmen should be among the most valiant, not the most easily vanquished. We expect them to teach the true faith and to live it. But our expectations have been cruelly disappointed.

And as we scan the horizon in search of deliverance in the natural order and see nothing but a blank expanse, we sometimes turn to the supernatural order and yearn to see Divine justice descend from the clouds and set all aright. But there is a danger in such yearning. Imperfect as we are, our wish to see justice triumph can easily slide into a wish to see vengeance worked. We may want to see the Church rectified, but we may also want to see those who have defiled Her suffer. And our Creed does not countenance such a desire.

Our Lord said many harsh things to the Pharisees and scribes, but it is impossible, even forbidden, to believe that He took pleasure in the thought of their eventual damnation; rather, we know that He would have saved them had they only come to Him, even under cover of night, as did Nicodemus. And we know that Our Lord wept over Jerusalem, she who killed the prophets and would soon kill her Lord. How He would have loved to gather His errant children under His wing and save them from their perverseness. But He made man in His own image, free. Free even to turn his will against his own salvation.

One of the most moving accounts in the Gospels is the story of the woman taken in adultery. The enemies of Our Lord obviously know that He will not condemn her and intend to use His acquittal of a sinner to accuse Him of breaking the Law of Moses. But what gave them assurance that Jesus would not allow her to be stoned? Because they knew, from experience, that Our Lord always looked on the sinner with pity and forgiveness, with a desire for his reclamation, not his condemnation.

And with those simple words, "Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone," He saves the sinner and frustrates the machinations of His enemies. Still, He would have even forgiven His enemies had they been moved, ever so little, to repentance. And consider their malice. They would have used an act of mercy as a weapon to destroy the font of all mercy. Yet, it may be that some among them, or perhaps only one, was healed of his malice that day; that the tenderness of Our Lord toward an adulteress softened the hardened heart of a hypocrite. It seems probable to me, and we are told by St. John that not all that Our Lord did is recorded; that were all His deeds to be written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would have to be written.

It is also probable that some of His disciples, those sons of thunder, as Jesus called them in somewhat humorous reproof, would have preferred that He summon fire from heaven to consume those malicious men. But such was not Our Lord's way, nor should it be ours, for we are to pattern ourselves after Jesus, not the boanerges.

Now, if we are to imitate Our Lord in as much as we are able, this certainly means that we must not be eager to condemn the sinner and be impatient to see him punished, even if the sinner is hiding his dishonest head beneath a mitre and gripping in his traitor's hand a crozier. To sentence another to suffer is only licit when we are charged with the administration of justice, and even then, a certain regret that it must be so seems appropriate.

Under no circumstances are we to take pleasure in seeing a man writhe in pain, either in fact or fancy. Such pleasure falls under the heading of vengeance and is forbidden us. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay." Yet, Our Lord can always count on some unsolicited helpers here below.

Now, even those among us most avid for Armageddon are thankfully powerless to bring it about, save in our imagination. And some doubtless do imagine it. They envision corruption being swept away by the winds of the apocalypse, and evil men, particularly those who have betrayed their ecclesial offices, trembling in fear and saying to the earth, "Cover us" and to the mountains, "Fall down on us." And finally, all that is loathsome and pernicious being cast into the lake of fire.

And there are those aforementioned whose imagination is of a less biblical turn who envision with satisfaction the collapse of Wall Street and the great banking houses, the power grid switching off, never to be restarted, the high and mighty weeping helplessly in the darkness of their failed world. They want to see the bad men pale and tremble and, at long last, suffer greatly for all the evil they have committed.

Such longings are not consonant with fraternal charity and, if nurtured too long, they will make us forget that even the most forsaken soul is still beloved of God; that our office is to pray and sacrifice for our brothers and sisters, not delight in the thought of their destruction. Of course, such charity can only be effected by grace. Vengeance is natural; loving one's enemies is supernatural.

I don't think these end-times longings are usually shared by those of us with children to raise, but are rather reserved to people who no longer have a vested interest in the future. Parents, in most cases, do not want to see the cosmos become chaos, day become night, the earth shake and the seas rise and the stars fall from heaven. We rather hope that all will be well and our sons and daughters might live; and I think such hope justified.

I know that many signs appear to point to the end times: the apostasy of the nations, for instance, and the Novus Ordo Mass as possibly the abomination of desolation in the holy place. Devotees of the apocalypse can doubtless list many more. But a little knowledge of history informs us that doomsday prophets in previous epochs assembled quite convincing cases, too. Certainly, we have no experience at present as vastly impressive as the Black Death, which by some estimates carried away three quarters of the population of Europe in the mid-14th century. And, despite the sad divisions in the Church, we are undergoing nothing so awful as the Great Schism, in which all of Christendom was rent by rival claimants to the papacy, with even saints ranged on opposite sides. And as for the general wickedness of the world and the occurrence of natural disasters, when have we lacked these?

The world will indeed end, we know not when, and the saved will be separated from the damned. Justice will triumph, but it will be God's justice tempered by God's mercy, not our idea of justice conditioned by our resentments and anger. And as we wait for the end times, let's not look at the sins of others, but at our own failings, and pray that when we are judged, we will find in Jesus the tenderness He showed the woman taken in adultery, for all of us are at times unfaithful. And let us hope that our names are written in the Book of Life and that on the last day, when we are gathered together by Our Lord, He will wipe away all our tears. So let us join St. John in saying "Come, Lord Jesus, come." In your own good time.

 

Edwin Faust is a longtime contributor to traditional Catholic publications. In addition to being a news editor for a daily newspaper, he lives with his wife and three children in New Jersey.