The smaller the mind, the broader the brush......
The Church is a battlefield unlike any other in a war between good and evil which has been going on for eons. And you're surprised that that there are casualties?
Focus On Pope Is Also Focus On A Church That Mystic Foresaw Attacked By Devil
By Michael H. Brown
It could not come at a more dramatic time -- with celebration of an infirm, aging pontiff's 25th anniversary, with an historic gathering of cardinals, with the Church still reeling from the abuse scandals, with all eyes on the Vatican: the astonishing realization that mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich foresaw a special period of testing, of evil, afflicting the world and the Church beginning around 1950.
Decades before the same notion was pronounced by Pope Leo XIII -- who had a similar vision in 1884 (and by seers from LaSalette, France, to Medjugorje) -- Venerable Emmerich, in the news of late because she is heading for beatification, accurately foresaw Satan attacking mankind "fifty or sixty years" before the year 2000.
Looking back to those decades, we see how evil moved from a focus on specific people like Adolf Hitler and moved into a general, tsunami-like spread into the Church and the general populace.
As we have pointed out before, a survey by The New York Times indicated last winter that "most priests accused of abuse were ordained between the 1950s and the 1970s, a period of upheaval in the Church, when men trained in the traditional authoritarian seminary system were sent out to serve in a rapidly changing Church and society."
In point of fact the first serious cases often trace back to a few isolated ones in the 1940s and 1950s, but then 256 known cases in the U.S. in the 1960s, 537 in the 1970s, and 510 in the 1980s before declining in the 1990s.
Thus we see how the pattern was shoved into high gear around the time indicated by Emmerich, a German mystic who died in 1824. Beginning in 1967 -- ironically, the year after the church of Satan was inaugurated in America -- priests began to leave their vocations in droves.
Compare this to a vision by Emmerich in the 1820s during which she saw hell, and in the center of it, "a dark and horrible-looking abyss, and into this Lucifer was cast, after first being strongly secured with chains; thick clouds of sulfurous black smoke arose from its fearful depths, and enveloped his frightful form in the dismal folds, thus effectually concealing him from every beholder. God Himself had decreed this; and I was likewise told, if I remember rightly, that he will be unchained for a time fifty or sixty years before the year of Christ 2000."
That Emmerich would use terms like "thick clouds" and "sulfurous black smoke" is doubly astonishing when compared with a later statement of Pope Paul VI -- who after Vatican II feared that the Council would be used for the wrong purposes and reportedly fretted in a homily on June 29, 1972:
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"We believed that after the Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness ... And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil. It is as if from some mysterious crack, no, it is not mysterious, from some crack the smoke of satan has entered the temple of God."
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Venerable Emmerich's prophecy likewise coincides with a vision by Pope Leo XIII, who six decades after Emmerich saw Satan allowed to test the Church for 75 to 100 years, and dovetails with an alleged prophecy from the Church-approved site of LaSalette -- where a girl named Melanie Calvat claimed to have been told twenty years after Emmerich that "Lucifer, together with a large number of demons, will be unloosed from hell; they will put an end to faith little by little... they will blind them in such a way that, unless they are blessed with a special grace, these people will take on the spirit of these angels of hell; several religious institutions will lose all faith."
While that prophecy seemed off in its time frame (predicting this happening in 1864), or perhaps pertained only to locales in France, Emmerich's prediction has struck what appears to be a bullseye -- one of the most remarkable prophetic items since the revelation of the Third Secret of Fatima.
For indeed it was in that period around 1950 and then in the 1960s and 1970s that something new entered the Church, something dark, something sinister and sinful -- leading not only to priestly abuse, but also to changes that demystified the Catholic Mass, stripped it of the prayer to St. Michael, paved the way for a modernistic approach to church architecture -- an approach that created a profound spiritual sterility -- and led to both an emptying of the pews (a decrease of registered Catholics to13 percent in nations like Holland and weekly Church attendance in the U.S. dipping to 41 percent, by some estimates less) and the huge exodus of clergy.
Accused priests first became a significant proportion of ordination classes in 1956, the Times study found. "In the 1940s and 1950s, when you were talking to a priest, it was like you were talking to Jesus Christ Himself," noted one abuse victim. But as the Times said, "By the mid-1960s young priests emerged from their cloistered seminaries and stood blinking at a world changing around them."
What was going on in society? And how did evil enter there? We'll be exploring that next week.
But it is a time for now to think about the Church, whose slide has been stanched by the heroic efforts of John Paul II.
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