Father Martin's Monthly Newsletter

Volume 1, No. 8	June Message	June 10, 1998

Critical Times

These days and months of 1998, there seems to be a long and slow but steady sunset all over the Roman Catholic Church of John Paul II. And no matter what he does; no matter how many prayers are offered day and night by the Saints in the Church; no matter how many authenticated appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary are granted us (often with manifest miracles); no matter how many seers and visionariesstigmatists among them bring us warning messages from beyond this cosmos; nothing, but nothing seemingly arrests the uncoming darkness of a night feared by every believing Christian soul alive today.

We would have to be blind not to see that our human day as Roman Catholics is declining inexorably into that ever-encroaching darkness. Nor is this anything like the welcoming darkness of night beckoning us to enter a well-earned sleep in preparation for a glorious and still more strenuous tomorrow. Far from it.

Rather, all the reliable signs tell us that this is the sepulchral darkness which will entomb a spent age. These are the shades of the charnel-house now awaiting us at the end of our Catholic Times. And has not our Blessed Mother told us that John Paul II is the last Pope of these Catholic Times? It all fits. So dreadfully. So sadly.

When it became abundantly clear, some 10 or 15 years ago, that our Catholic Day had been overtaken by this horrible sunset, many among us consoled each other by recalling another awful moment in our Catholic history. It was in the 4th - 5th century. A heresy called Arianism had polluted over 80% of the Church's Bishops; and in the words of one historian "the world woke up one morning to find itself Arian." But it was the ordinary faithful of those times who refused to go along with the heretical tomfoolery and the apostasy of their clergy. They thus preserved the faith for a later age.

But our misery today is precisely that we cannot count on the ordinary faithful to preserve Roman Catholic belief in the teeth of overall ecclesiastical default and clerical betrayal.

Diligently, quietly, methodically, the faith of millions of the ordinary faithful has been gradually distorted; unCatholic beliefs have been taught them as Catholic; literally, those millions have been and are being led by the nose and unsuspectingly out of the House of Catholicism. It has all been so frighteningly reminiscent of the way in which the once Roman Catholic population of England -- Our Lady's Dowry -- was Protestantised in the 16th and 17th centuries. As then, so now; the same diabolically clever assault mounted through a deliberately altered mass ceremonial; elimination of popular devotions; stripping churches of altars, of confessionals, of statues of Stations of the Cross, of crucifixes; displacement of the Tabernacle; vernacular hymns, replacing the old Gregorian chant; firmly asserted falsification of history; heresy taught by bishops, priests and theologians, the dispersal of monks and nuns. The script followed today was written and played out successfully by the Protestant Reformers 400 years ago.

Yet, not one of us here have lost our Roman Catholic beliefs and our reliance on the maternal love of God's Blessed Mother. And, therefore, at this low juncture of things, it would be good to cast an eye on the next 12 months of this world's life.

Between now and the beginning of spring 1999, there is only one possible event to be noted in any long range Roman Catholic view of history. This would be -- could be -- the end of Pope John Paul II's papacy, and the inauguration of a new papal regime. By death or by resignation, this could be John Paul's last year as pope.

Whatever does happen, or however the papal situation eventualizes, millions of pairs of Roman Catholic eyes are steadily fixed on a critical period of some months, March to May 1999 inclusively, during which the expectation of vast millions unshakably entail a firm hope that the downward curve of Roman Catholicism will receive a triple correction from the Providential Hands of Heaven.

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