September 1981 Print

 

Vincent Miceli, S.J., The Antichrist.
West Hanover, Mass.: Christopher
Publishing House, 1981. 297 pp.

Father Miceli's project in The Antichrist is to examine the Church's teachings on the Antichrist and then to employ that doctrine to assess the crises in the Church and the world. The occasion for the book and the benefits to be derived from it are indicated in the Foreword by Malcolm Muggeridge (who, while not a Catholic, is more Catholic than many a Catholic you could name): "The havoc that has been made on the devil's behalf among Catholics and in their Church is so drastic and widespread as to leave an outsider like myself baffled and bewildered .... I thank God that there are priests and teachers like Fr. Miceli to act as His intelligence officer, and insure that the soldiers of Christ may know who are their enemies, however camouflaged, and where are the booby-traps and ambushes."

The Antichrist is an obscure figure, and Miceli approaches the subject gingerly. He cautions us that much will remain unclear, that irresponsible and sensational interpretations of the Antichrist abound, that the Biblical prophecies will not permit us to foretell dates and places with precision, and in general he lays out a conservative course for his study. Then he proceeds to a systematic examination of references to Antichrist in Scripture, of interpretations among the Greek Fathers (St. Irenaeus and St. Cyril of Jerusalem), among the Latin Fathers (St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory the Great), in medieval culture and among several medieval thinkers. This section of seven chapters ends with a précis of Cardinal Newman's perceptive thoughts on the subject, with which Miceli concurs.

In general Father Miceli concludes that the Antichrist is indeed foretold in Scripture, that he will be an individual person (i.e., not something like an evil social movement or idea), that he will not be the devil or an incarnation of Satan, that he will exercise worldwide political power, that he will work great destruction in the world and the Church, precipitating a huge apostasy, that he will arrive near the end of the world, and that, as there were forerunners of Christ under the Old Testament, so there will be, and indeed have already been, forerunners or prototypes of the Antichrist.

This major part of The Antichrist is fascinating, if a bit garrulous, and about as illuminating, one suspects as the obscure subject will permit. Another valuable part of the book is the final chapter, "Mary and the Antichrist." Mary, Miceli says, is doing for the Church through her apparitions what the prophets of old did for the Chosen People, with the exception that she offers no new Revelation. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Mary has come, particularly to Fatima, to rebuke us for our sinful ways, to identify the disasters we are courting, to plead for our conversion of heart, and to warn us of the terrible punishments God will send if we do not repent and worship Him. Miceli also reports that Mary is rather extensively venerated among the Muslims.

The remaining section of The Antichrist is disappointing. This is the one-third of the book in which Father Miceli employs the doctrine and legends about Antichrist to assess present conditions in the world.

Two things go wrong in this secondary but important part of the book. The first is that, having carefully defined the term Antichrist in the first part of the book, Father Miceli in this part uses the term very loosely. He had gone to considerable lengths to show that the term has a specific content referring to particular historical events and personages and is not just a colorful metaphor for any sort of wickedness. In his survey of the current scene, however, he abandons those specific meanings and uses the term practically as a synonym for "bad," or at most "very bad." Almost any kind of heresy, materialism, tepidity, false philosophy, political opportunism, failure of courage, etc., etc., etc., is declared to be somehow connected with the Antichrist.

Well, no doubt, as there is an economy of salvation, so there may also be an economy of damnation, so that all human failings, all diabolical operations in the world, and all the horrors of "the last days" are all of a piece and cooperate in a cosmic conspiracy against God. But until a demonstration of that unity of wickedness is made, it is really not very helpful to go about sticking the label of Antichrist on all wicked things. Father Miceli could just as well have gone through his catalogue of the world's evils and labeled everything unchristian, or sinful, or Satanic, or diabolical—and the value of the survey would remain about the same.

What is particularly disappointing about this failure is that we begin to wonder how solid and substantial his initial study of the doctrine was, if it falls apart so easily in application. Perhaps it is a good study; it certainly looks like it. But maybe the doctrine of Antichrist is one that is not serviceable for assessing the historical state of the world and the Church—although many eminent saints have used it in that way. Perhaps more useful guides for that enterprise are other doctrines, about which our understanding is clearer, doctrines like those concerning the sacraments, original sin, Biblical inspiration, the queenship of Mary, and the like.

Aside from the incautious use of the term Antichrist, there remains the question of just how valuable Father Miceli's survey is. Actually it is good, but not quite very good. Perhaps The Antichrist will reach an audience which is not familiar with the literature on the crisis in the Church, and those readers will find it an eye-opener. But for those such as readers of The Angelus are likely to be, Father Miceli's catalogue is mostly old, familiar stuff.

Sometimes his reprobation of these evils is scathing and courageous. He takes on Georgetown University and his fellow Jesuits there, and he does not hesitate to name names and to associate his colleagues with the work of Antichrist. In doing so, he makes a number of perceptive observations on the relation between faith and academic study and between academic freedom and the magisterium.

Another notable section is that on the modern state of Israel. Just after reading this, I heard Rev. Jerry Falwell on the radio praising the modern nation of God's Chosen People and defending its bombing attack on Iraq's nuclear facility. Falwell had assured the former terrorist, Menachem Begin, that Israel had no better friends in the world than fundamentalist Bible-believing Christians. Father Miceli points out, by contrast, that modern Israel is secularist (if not atheistic), socialist, expansionist, and racist—surprisingly like its arch-enemy, Nazi Germany. This is one of the few places where the doctrine of Antichrist is pertinent, for that monster is predicted to arise among the Jews. We are to watch, with trepidation, for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, for this will be another sign in the fulfillment of the prophecies about Antichrist.

Yet there is a decided failure in Father Miceli's treatment of a number of his subjects. This occurs when the causes which he uses to explain a situation, are either so close to it as to provide no perspective, or so remote from it as to reveal no connection. It is as if there is a certain territory he wishes to avoid. This is the second of the two things wrong with this part.

ONE OF THE EVILS of our day is that in order to understand what a Catholic author says, you have first to figure out what kind of Catholic he is. At one extreme are those who seem to think that Vatican Council II, and the spirit of Vatican II, repudiated all tradition, and who feel compelled to renovate all things Catholic until they are almost unrecognizable. These are the people in authority today and apparently the great bulk of the "faithful." At the other extreme is another set of crazies who believe that all authority in the Church has ceased to exist, so that we now have no more popes, bishops, or priests (I think they allow for a loner here and there).

Father Miceli seems to belong to a group nearer the center who are of a conservative and traditional disposition, but who refuse to admit that many of the Church's ills can be traced either to the documents of Vatican II or to official pontifical acts. They have no trouble admitting that a pastor in his pulpit may officially pronounce poppycock, or that a bishop in his cathedra, crozier in hand and ring on finger, may officially declaim vicious nonsense, but they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that Conciliar and papal acts may have the same reprobate character. This comes, I think, from an unsound notion of papal and ecclesial infallibility. It is dangerous, because that precious doctrine can be harmed by claiming too much for it as well as by claiming too little, as the progressives do.

Father Miceli is by no means the worst of his breed. Some of them spend their days poring over Council documents, not because they hope to find anything really profitable there, but because they hope to find traditional statements of the faith (which are easy enough to find) from which they can demonstrate that the mess in the Church comes from misinterpretations of the Council, not from the Council itself. Or they dwell lovingly on Pope Paul VI's Credo of the People of God or his Humanae Vitae (which is a good bit more limp that St. Pius XI's Casti Connubii on the same subject, by the way), and they totally ignore the progressive and liberal thrust of his pontificate.

They do not recognize that most of the troubles in the Church come from the successes of the Council, not its failures. The Council wished to democratize the Church by strengthening episcopal conferences and the implementation has succeeded in replacing hierarchy with bossism. It invited reformulations of doctrines, and many have been reformulated right out of our consciousness. It asked clergy and religious to re-examine their vocations, in any terms but the traditional ones, and the reformers have just about succeeded in burying priesthood among a hodge-podge of "ministries." It is not the failures to implement the Council which have the Spouse of Christ in tatters, but the successes. And the same goes for papal policy.

Father Miceli, as I said, is not among the worst of those with this disordered attitude, but his book does suffer from elements of it. In explaining what he calls "the New Church Catholics" for example, who propound heterodox opinions, he says they are of Antichrist. After all, they deny Christ, and also the Antichrist will deny Christ. So, therefore, don't you see? Shortly after this (p. 194) Miceli attributes some opinions of "new Church Catholics" to Teilhard's influence.

This is all quite unsatisfactory. Matters would become so much clearer if he could show how these Teilhardian ideas found their way into Council documents (e.g., that on ecumenism) and how they were promoted through official structures and official appointments by those who exercised the authority of Christ. After all, Teilhard's ideas are not the most formidable on the world scene, and they are certainly not the most seductive by a long shot. The trouble with them is not that they have a wonderful dynamism that gives them power over men's minds; the trouble is that pontifical and episcopal authorities, mainly through their officially sanctioned theologians, have forced them on the baffled faithful.

This failure to acknowledge that high officials of the Church officially teach and promote ideas and values contrary to the magisterium is particularly apparent in Father Miceli's treatment of the liturgy. Of his seven pages on the subject, four are devoted to an examination of the nature of the sacred in general; one paragraph enumerates deficiencies in the present liturgy, mainly in the form of rhetorical questions (i.e., implicitly rather than categorically); then there are several paragraphs on the lex orandi and lex credendi and on worship in the time of Antichrist; and a final paragraph on abortion.

Those who wish to, and do, destroy a sense of the sacred he calls "shadows of the Antichrist," "children of Satan," "shrewd masters of sedition," and the like, but he never tells who they are, as if they were a few renegades. Well, we know who they are, and Archbishop Lefebvre knows who they are, though he never used such language about them. They are none other than His Holiness Pope Paul VI, proud author of the Novus Ordo, and scores of other apostolic successors.

It is one thing to deplore a feckless liturgy. It is quite another to face the stupifying fact that the successor of Peter, armed with the power to bind and loose, in worldwide communion with the bishops, has bound upon the Church a liturgical form that mangles the worship of God and shrivels the faith of believers. That he and they have not also given solemn and unequivocal declaration to a manifest heresy is something for which we may be grateful to Our Lord's promise to Peter, but that they have done the very next thing should be perfectly clear to anyone who can recognize what a poor thing the Novus Ordo is, as Father Miceli can.

Before leaving this subject, please permit one more observation about the attitude I have tried to describe (which might be called clerical conservatism or conciliar traditionalism). Besides Father Miceli, they are people like James Hitchcock and like those at Christendom College, The Wanderer, and CUF. They are zealous Catholics and intelligent men, and I am personally an admirer of what they do to stem the liberal deluge. One must regret all the more that they cannot or will not see the stupifying fact. And it is just that, a fact, not an arch or abstruse bit of Lefebvre-ite argumentation. How to account for the fact, what consequences to predict for it, and how each might cope with it personally—these are things about which intelligent men of good will might disagree. But to ignore it? Impossible! This persistent near-defection of the official Church is the most significant historical fact of many centuries.

To continue to ignore it will do much more harm than the spoiling of an otherwise promising book.

Dr. Brennan is Professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He and his family are members of the Society of St. Pius X mission in that city.