The Great Apostasy

From the Antichrist by the Rev. Paschal Huchede

http://theantichristhuchede.blogspot.com/

4. Antichrist Foretold and Prefigured

Before the coming of our Divine Saviour there were many prophecies and figures given of Him. It shall be the same for Antichrist. The prophet Daniel speaks of him in a literal and mystical sense in three different chapters, namely, 7, 9, and 11, while St. Matthew chapter 24, St. Mark chapter 13, St. John chapter 5, and St. Paul in his 2nd Epistle to the Thessalonians chapter 2, St. John in his 1st and 2nd Epistles, and especially in the Apocalypse chapter 13; etc. tell us of his future or coming event.

Since he will be the incarnate evil and according to the expression of St. Ireneus (c. 28, lib. 5), the maximum of malice, "recapitulatio universae iniquitatis," the Fathers are justified in applying to him all the passages in the Sacred Scriptures in which there is question of the actions of God and His Church.

We are therefore justified in asserting that Antichrist has been prefigured by the persecutions of the Church, by all the enemies of Jesus Christ, whatever may have been the form under which they have existed. Cruel persecutors such as the Caesars represent his future cruelty towards those who will remain faithful to God. Hypocritical persecutors such as Julian the Apostate are typical of his deception and consummate hypocrisy. Heresy and schism, but above all the incredulity and impiety of our time, are the prelude to the great Apostasy into which he will cause many to fall. Finally, those who give themselves up to their passions and who drink from the pool of iniquity form themselves to his image and likeness, which explains the words of St. Paul when he said. "For the mystery of iniquity already worketh." (2 Thes. 2:7).

. . .

4. His Means of Action

To insure the success of his enterprise, he will employ means that naturally secure the service of men, such as imposture, recompence, violence and miracles.

I. Imposture

By his deceitful craft he will detach the minds and hearts of all peoples from the religion of Jesus Christ. By his incomparable eloquence he will represent Jesus as an imposter; he will attack His doctrine and institutions, according to the teachings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Cat. 15), Damascus (c. 27), Jerome (in his work on the prophet Daniel).

After having weakened the faith of Christ in the minds and hearts of many, he will proceed to show that the law of Moses still prevails; he will re-establish the Sabbath and all the legal observances; and he will invite all the Jews to re-establish their nationality, after which he will declare himself to be the true messiah; he will endeavor to prove the truth of his assertion from Scripture - he will declare his design of rebuilding Jerusalem and the temple and of bringing the whole world under his dominion. The carnal Jews, finding these projects in perfect harmony with their own prejudices, will easily acknowledge for the Messiah the one whom they desire. And after having at first despised and scorned him, they will subsequently receive and proclaim him king. (Dan. 11:21). According to St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Cat. 15), he will win the esteem and attachment of mankind by his urbane and unbounded kindness.

From:

Rev. E. Sylvester Berry, D.D.

"16. The followers of Antichrist will be marked with a character [mark] in imitation of the sign that St. John saw upon the foreheads of the servants of God. This indicates that Antichrist and his prophet will introduce ceremonies to imitate the Sacraments of the Church. In fact there will be a complete organization ―― a church of Satan set up in opposition to the Church of Christ. Satan will assume the part of God the Father; Antichrist will be honored as Saviour, and his prophet will usurp the role of Pope. Their ceremonies will counterfeit the Sacraments and their works of magic be heralded as miracles. A similar project was attempted in the fourth century when Julian the Apostate counterfeited Catholic worship with pagan ceremonies in honor of Mithras and Cybele. He established a priesthood and instituted ceremonies in imitation of Baptism and Confirmation."

Rev. E. Sylvester Berry, D.D.
The Apocalypse of St. John
Discussion on Apoc: xiii, 16.
John W. Winterich, Columbus, Ohio, 1921

From:

The Testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ

http://bellesheures.wordpress.com/the-testimony-of-the-lord-jesus-christ/

"Such a secular, earthbound state [Israel] could easily become the political and military power base for the Antichrist when he comes. For the Antichrist will be in perfect accord with the ideals of such a Zionist state. Moreover, the State of Israel has demonstrated that it has the will and ability to go to war and win the secular goals to which its heart is attached. Thus when the Antichrist comes to power as head of such an efficient, superbly equipped, scientific State, founded on nationalism, race and blood, he will be able to conquer the rest of the world. He will be the first, the only Jew to reign with political, economic, military power over the whole world from his capital city, Jerusalem, the city in which Our Lord was crucified" (Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., The Antichrist, p. 152).

Rev. Paschal Huchede's view of the Antichrist

Rev. Paschal Huchede's view of the Antichrist

http://theantichristhuchede.blogspot.com/

Chapter 1- The Preparation

ARTICLE I-THE REMOTE PREPARATION

1. God's Design

God frequently punishes sinful man by delivering him up to a reprobate sense (Rom. 1 :28) and to the tyranny of the passions of his heart (Rom. 1 :24) as the reward of his contempt of divine love. When the whole world shall renounce Christ and reject the authority of His Church, when men shall say like the Jews of old, we will not have this man to reign over us, (Luke 19:14), We have no king but Caesar, Jn. 19:15), the vengeance of God shall be swift and terrible. His treatment of the world. shall be like to that of individuals. He shall respond to its criminal desires, which stifles the love of those saving truths, by the light of which the ship of state can alone be safely piloted through the siren dangers to which it is constantly exposed. He shall deliver it up to the man of sin who shall consign it to the darkness of vice and error since it rejected the light of truth and virtue. (2 Thes. 2). Satan shall have universal sway for awhile over all nations.

The Holy Catholic Church (the faithful remnant), which has fought the battles of Christ for eighteen hundred years, is therefore destined to pass through a persecution compared to which those that she has suffered up to the present time are insignificant. St. Augustine classifies them under three general headings. The first he calls violent, on account of the cruelty with which the early Christians were treated by the Roman Emperors, while at a later period the Church suffered from the deception of false brethren, a trial much more insidious than the former, as it was more dangerous. But the persecution of Antichrist will combine both forms and will consequently prove more redoubtable than when one form only had to be contended with.

It is a profound teaching of Catholicism

Let us make this clear before venturing onto the below. All men are called to salvation in Christ, Jew and Gentile alike.

It is a profound teaching of Catholicism that Jesus Christ took upon Himself flesh of ALL men from Adam on - subsumed from the Blessed Virgin Mary (see the genealogies of Christ from the Gospel of St. Matthew Chapter 1 and the Gospel of St. Luke Chapter 3). Therefore He is equally the Saviour of all men regardless of race or ethnicity. In contrast to this sublime truth is the lie that a particular race is the salvific hope of mankind and ultimately that a given individual of that particular race is a man-god and that race alone is human, such as the so-called Aryan Nazis and Hitler or 'the form of the elect of the nations' of Dr. Klausner and a "natural messiah" for them only and from them only – see below:

From:

The Point

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Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

June, 1957

THE REJECTED PEOPLE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

Why the Jews Fear the Bible

Why The Jews Fear The Bible (June, 1957)

The prime incentive for reading God’s word is always, of course, just that: it is God’s word — the thundering, inspired account of man’s long climb from Genesis to Apocalypse; how he fell from grace, how he was redeemed, what he must do to be saved.

But there is another reason also why now, particularly, we ought to take our Scriptures off the shelves. The notion has got around (at whose prompting, we will let you guess) that the Bible is a book which celebrates the Jews; and that since we Catholics are supposed to reverence the Bible, we ought also to honor the race to whom it is devoted.

The number of people who have been deceived by this artful dodge indicates one thing: how crass and colossal is our present-day ignorance of Holy Scripture.

No one could possibly read the seventy-two books which constitute God’s revelation and conclude that Jews deserve the esteem of Catholics. For albeit the Bible presents Jewish history, it is not the sort of history the Anti-Defamation League would approve. It is the story of how a few faithful Jews in each generation championed God against the rest of their race —a proud, stubborn, ungrateful, and unbelieving multitude. Far from promoting love for the Jews, the Bible is thus the font of Christian anti-Jewishness. No other book gives such a strong, sure taste of their perfidy.

It is in the New Testament that the Jews are shown at their ultimate worst — when they are confronted with the Messias, reject Him, crucify Him, call down His Blood as a curse upon them, and then do their utmost to prevent His gospel from being spread through the world. A partial report on this New-Testament portrayal of the Jews appears below. But even under the Old Law it is evident what the Jews are coming to. Prophet after prophet castigates them for their wickedness and warns them that they are going to be rejected by God in favor of the Gentiles; and prophet after prophet is killed by the Jews in defiant retort. As early as the book of Exodus, God has said to Moses: “See that this people is stiff-necked. Let me alone, that my wrath may be kindled against them, and that I may destroy them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” (Exodus 32:9)

Plainly, it is not for their own sakes, or for any goodness inherent in the race, that the Jews are kept at the center of the Old-Testament stage. It is, rather, because through some Jews — a holy, beleaguered handful, like Moses and Joshua and David and the prophets — the true Faith is kept alive down to the time of Our Lord. And the other reason for God’s sustained interest in the Jews is that eventually from their thorny midst there will blossom His one perfect creature, the Virginal Mother of His Son.

But if the Jews make such a poor showing in the Old Testament, how do they bear to read it? The answer is, they don’t. Their religious reading time is devoted to a post-Crucifixion book of their own devising, the Talmud. The Jews have rejected the first part of Holy Scripture as surely and as violently as they have rejected the second. Nor is it merely the treatment of their ancestors that the Jews object to; it is equally the Old Testament’s prophecies of the coming Messias, so blazingly and unmistakably fulfilled in Jesus. [Especially see Isaiah, chapters 52 and 53 and Daniel, chapter 11.]

Yet it should not be assumed that in shunning the Faith of Moses and David the Jews have abandoned all religious doctrine. Everyone familiar with Jewish practices knows that they still do believe most fervently in a Messias. And they profess this belief constantly — when they force Gentile merchants out of business and take over a city’s shopping district; when they take control of a nation’s newspapers and other means of disseminating ideas; when they demand that laws be passed forbidding anyone to speak against the Jews; when they drive a million Arabs from their homes and appropriate the land for themselves; when they insist that Western nations not only allow this outrage, but support it with their wealth and the blood of their youth — in all these ways and in hundreds of others, the Jews testify to their belief in a Messias.

And if anyone is still wondering who the Jews think the Messias is, Dr. Joseph Klausner, internationally recognized Jewish spokesman, supplies the answer. In his book, The Messianic Idea In Israel (Macmillan, 1955), Dr. Klausner declares that a personal savior has long since been an old-fashioned notion with the Jews and that, “Thus the whole people Israel, in the form of the elect of the nations, gradually became the Messiah of the world, the redeemer of mankind.”

It is out of that horrid racist idea of only Jews being human and elect of God that the Antichrist will emerge in his time.