March 2023
Long in construction by the central banksters, the interlocking global matrix now unleashed against humanity as a "Great Reset" exudes the pungent scent of sulphour. This summary of notable statements, some better known than others, provides a handy compendium for our own prayerful deliberations and endeavours.
It Is The Time Of Antichrist
In his homily for the Sunday of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Archbishop Viganò presented a strategic assessment of the Antichrist and his approaching reign in which his operational plan will be executed:
The epochal battle we are fighting against the globalist Leviathan has as its purpose – as we well know, by the admission of its own proponents – the systematic destruction of every trace of Christ’s presence from souls, families, and society, in order to replace it with the dark horror of Satan’s lordship and the reign of the Antichrist. In this battle we are not only besieged by powerful and unleashed enemy forces, but also by the fifth columns that, within the Church and even in positions of government, support the infernal plan of the New World Order due to self-interest, blackmail, or cowardice. Abortion, divorce, euthanasia, gender ideology, homosexuality, and neo-Malthusianism are nothing more than instruments with which to destroy society.
His Grace has consistently warned of the nature of our times and recently has been joined by other cardinals and bishops as outlined in the essay: The Katechon Deception. These public apocalyptic warnings commenced with that of Pope Saint Pius X in his encyclical E Supremi Apostalatus, dated 3 October 1903:
We felt a sort of terror, considering the disastrous conditions of humanity at the present hour. Can we ignore such a profound and grave evil, which at this moment much more than the past, is working away and leading to its ruin. You know what this malady is Venerable Brethren, it is abandoning of God and apostasy from Him. … Truly, whoever ponders these things must necessarily fear whether such a perversion of minds is not the sign announcing the beginning of the last times and that the Son of Perdition spoken by the Apostle might already be living on this earth.
In addition to the warnings contained in numerous authentic private revelations and apparitions, Church authorities have increasingly forewarned the faithful of the unfolding crisis.
REMOTE WARNINGS
The human race today is involved in a supreme crisis which will end in its salvation by Christ or its dire destruction.
- Pope Pius XII (2 June 1951)
The world is courting its ruin … all of it needs rebuilding from the foundations upwards.
- Pope Pius XII (10 February 1952)
Today the Enemy of God has seized all the levers of command.
- Pope Pius XII (14 July 1958)
The Church finds herself in an hour of anxiety, self-criticism, even auto-destruction. It is an interior upheaval, sharp and complex, which none expected after the Council … one must notice above all the sorrowful aspect. It is as if the Church was destroying herself.
- Pope Paul VI (7 December 1968, Lombard Seminary, Rome)
By some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: doubt, uncertainty, problems, anxiety, dissatisfaction, confronts us today. We believed that the aftermath of the Council would be a day of sunshine for the Church. But instead of sunshine we have clouds, tempests, darkness. How did it come to pass? An adverse power has intervened, the devil, that mysterious spirit.
- Pope Paul VI (29 June 1972)
The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world.
- Pope Paul VI (13 October 1977)
In an address given during the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia the future John Paul II, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said:
We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. I do not think that the wide circle of the American Society, or the whole wide circle of the Christian Community realise this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the Antichrist. The confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence. It is, therefore, in God’s Plan, and it must be a trial which the Church must take up, and face courageously.
PROXIMATE WARNINGS
On 11 November 1984, Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, held an interview with Vittorio Messori which was published in the Pauline Sisters publication Gesu with the Cardinal’s explicit permission. He revealed that he had read the Third Secret of Fatima which refers to “dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore (the life) of the world.” He said the Secret refers to the importance of the “Novissimi” (the Last Times), that “the things contained in this Third Secret correspond to what has been announced in Scripture and has been said again and again in many other Marian apparitions, first of all that of Fatima…”
In his commentary on Cardinal Ratzinger Speaks on the Third Secret of Fatima, Fr. De St Marie concluded: “It is understandable that the content of the Third Secret must be fearsome and that it is likely to cause a sensation.”
Frère Michel in his article, The Third Secret Revealed, quoted Sister Lucia:
It is in the Gospel and the Apocalypse. Read them. We are in the last times of the world.
And she indicated Chapters 8-13 of the Apocalypse. Several authoritative commentators have demonstrated that the Miracle of the Sun in 1917 was the fulfillment of Apocalypse 12, "a great sign appeared in the Heaven, a woman clothed with the sun". Pope Paul VI used these very words on 12 May 1967 to open his Apostolic Exhortation Signum Magnum to commemorate the golden jubilee of Our Lady’s visit to Fatima. And of course, the following chapter indicated by Sister Lucia, Apocalypse 13, deals explicitly with the Antichrist.
Again, Sister Lucia referred to the worldwide "diabolical wave" and "diabolical disorientation", clear references to the general apostasy. Additionally, Sister Lucia told Fr. Fuentes that this is the decisive battle and the final battle. The Fathers of the Church, The Catechism of the Catholic Church (675), together with St Louis de Montfort, teach that the final battle is that of the Antichrist.
Later in 1987, on the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s Marian Year, Fr. Malachi Martin SJ wrote:
[T]he Catholic Church is in a shambles, sacramentally, theologically, missiologically, politically, devotionally. In country after country, there is already existent in shadowy outline a new Church whose prelates and priests and nuns eschew any real control and command of the Pope over the beliefs they profess or the morality they preach and practise.
The new Church is marked by what is known as ‘democratisation’; there is an overall effort being carried on quietly and determinedly to make local sections of the Catholic Church independent of Rome in all practical matters of government and practice, to create new bodies parallel to the traditional institutions of the Catholic Church, and to attract more and more of the ordinary faithful to those new creations, thus letting the traditional things ossify, desiccate, dry up, and finally fall into desuetude.
Fr. Martin continued: “His full and accurate knowledge of these worsening conditions constitutes the agony and anguish of John Paul II.”
His Marian Year undertaking must be understood as his answer to a desperate situation. Better than any other member of his Church, and certainly more bitterly than any one of us, His Holiness has accessible to him unassailable reasons to conclude that things have gone beyond the point of no return, have gone too far for any merely ecclesiastical measure or any series of ecclesiastical measures to recall and repair the damage.
The rebellion against papal authority by major Religious Orders is gone beyond papal recall. The enthusiasm for abortion and contraception and divorce is too widespread. The addiction of clerics to Marxism is too deep for him to cure it. The number of uncatholic teachers in seminaries and universities is too great to be handled by him. The homosexual network in the Church is too widespread and too well organised to be scoured out by him. The acceptance of New Age belief as the latest form of ‘ecumenism’ is gone beyond his reach. In sheer numbers John Paul has not enough hands to hold and govern it all. He has neither the language to counter the errors, nor the effective ecclesiastical sanctions, nor even the manpower, even to begin to correct this desperate situation, to unmask the new form of the Catholic Church foisted on the faithful. It is all too much. He has finally to rely on a divine intervention.
Hence his appeal to Christ’s Mother and his trust that the new era started by his Marian Year will witness that divine intervention under the sign of Mary, the ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun.
IMMINENT WARNINGS
Unlike the Remote and Proximate Warnings, the Imminent Warnings are specific, timely and relate to the current situation which has deteriorated far beyond that of the 20th century.
Archbishop Viganò
In his homily on the 2019 feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Francis said of Our Lady: "She never presented herself as co-Redemptrix. No, disciple. … When they come to us with stories saying we have to declare this, or make this or that other dogma, let us not get lost in nonsense."
Archbishop Viganò noted:
Pope Bergoglio once again gave vent to his evident Marian intolerance … having downgraded her to the "next door neighbour" or a runaway migrant, or a simple lay woman with the defects and crises of any woman marked by sin, or a disciple who obviously has nothing to teach us. … Pope Bergoglio has further impugned the August Queen and Immaculate Mother of God, who "became mestiza with humanity… and made God mestizo." With a couple of jokes, he struck at the heart of the Marian dogma and the Christological dogma connected to it.
To attack Mary is to venture against Christ himself; to attack the Mother is to rise up against her Son and to rebel against the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Papa Bergoglio uses the pachamama to rout the Guadalupana. The enthronement of that Amazonian idol, even at the altar of the confession in St. Peter’s Basilica, was nothing less than a declaration of war on the Lady and Patroness of all the Americas, who with her apparition to Juan Diego destroyed the demonic idols and won the indigenous peoples for Christ and the adoration of the "Most True and Only God," through her maternal mediation. … We are living in the "Gethsemane of the end times." … The advent of the Antichrist is inevitable; it is part of the epilogue of the History of Salvation.
In his "Appeal for the Church and the World" of 7 May, 2020, Archbishop Viganò warned of “powers deliberately creating panic with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restriction on freedoms, of controlling people and of tracking their movements. The imposition of these illiberal measures is a disturbing prelude to the realisation of a world government beyond all control."
His Grace saw the religious crisis ─ the apostasy, the diabolical Bergoglio, the deprivation of the Sacraments ─ as indications that “the arrival of the Antichrist is inevitable.” This, he explained, “would be preceded by the preaching of the False Prophet, the Precursor of the one who will carry out the final persecution against the Church before Our Lord’s definitive and crushing victory.”
Speaking of the Bergoglian apostasy, the Archbishop said: “we must not forget that the apostasy of the highest levels of the Church is a necessary part of the eschatological events [the events of the end times] that cannot be avoided.”
It was in November 1984 that Cardinal Ratzinger explained that the Third Secret of Fatima “corresponds to what is revealed in Scripture”, specifically, “i novissimi” the last things ─ the “eschatological events” of the end-time scriptural prophecies ─ the “apocalyptic texts” of Scripture.
Additionally, in a Special Report by Catholic Family News on 24 November 2020, Archbishop Viganò described the role played by the “deep church in creating the theological premises and the ecclesial climate that would allow the Church to be the servant of the New World Order and to replace the Pope with the false prophet of the Antichrist.” Later, on 7 December 2020, he stated:
Those who want to demolish the Church of Christ and the Roman Papacy do so from the highest Throne, according to the prophecy of Our Lady at La Salette: “Rome will lose the Faith and will become the seat of the Antichrist.”
Archbishop Viganò consistently warns that the Antichrist is inevitable. For example, in an Op-Ed piece in Italy’s La Verità of 19 December 2020, he wrote:
The purpose has now been declared: destroying Nations from within by means of the deep state and the Church of Christ by means of the deep church, in order to establish the kingdom of the Antichrist, with the help of the False Prophet.
In an interview with Steve Bannon on 30 June 2022 he stated:
We are witnessing the demolition of Faith and Morals in the name of ecumenism and synodality, applying liberal errors in the theological sphere; and on the other hand the transformation of the Papacy and the Roman Curia into a politburo in which ecclesiastical authority is both absolute and also released from its fidelity to the Magisterium, following the modalities of the exercise of power in a communist-type dictatorship.
On 2 October 2022 at the Catholic Identity Conference in Pittsburgh, the Archbishop gave an interview in which he further addressed the crisis in the Church:
Certainly, it is the worst to date, both for the devastating proportion of the apostasy and for the narcotisation of the lower clergy and the faithful towards the Hierarchy. On other occasions, the persecution was more ferocious, but it found resistance in the bishops and opposition in the Catholics, who could look to the See of Peter as a beacon of Truth and an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist. Today the katèchon [1] has passed away, at least temporarily, and the Apostolic See is occupied by a declared enemy of the Church of Christ.
Bishop Schneider
In an interview on 31 August 2021, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, O.R.C., Auxiliary Bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, said: “It is clear that there is a program to vaccinate all the people in order to achieve a concrete political, social, or ideological objective.” He saw the mandatory vaccination of abortion-based vaccines as “the last step of Satanism … and world government” and the Covid situation being created “to implement a new dictatorship and control of the population … so you cannot work, travel, go to school without it.”
He concluded that implementation of a mandatory global vaccine derived from aborted babies would mark the world entering “into the time of the Apocalypse.”
At a Paris conference on 25 June 2021, Bishop Schneider referred to Cardinal Wojtyla’s insistence that we are now facing “the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the Antichrist.” Bishop Schneider explained:
I think now we have the confrontation of a Church against a Church within, in the midst of the life of the Church – the introduction of divorce in the Church through the text Amoris Laetitia. So it’s an anti-gospel; it’s against what Jesus said about marriage. ... There are very serious signs of the acceptance of idols, even in the Vatican during the Amazon synod, these signs showing that it was not the Gospel. Our Lord Jesus Christ would never have accepted to worship an idol. The apostles of “Mother Earth” – they were called by another name – collaborated with the whole abortion industry, with the fetus industry, and with close collaboration. So, these are just a few examples where we can see the confrontation that Cardinal Wojtyla was already talking about, but now we are in the middle of this confrontation.
In an exclusive 28 October 2021 interview with LifeSiteNews, Bishop Schneider warned of a growing “spirit of communism” in formerly free and Christian western nations. This recalls the 1946 interview between William Walsh and Sister Lucia wherein she told him the errors of Russia would spread, without exception, through every country. Walsh asked; “Even the United States of America?” Sister Lucia replied; “Yes.”
Bishop Schneider related the crisis in world government to the crisis in the Catholic Church, which he described as having a hierarchy that has been “infiltrated” by the materialist spirit. According to the bishop, the materialist direction of the Vatican can be seen in Rome’s focus on “Mother-Earth.” He remarked that Pope Francis himself is “behaving as if earthly realities, which are material realities” are “above the care of the soul.” This calls to mind the Apostasy and Antichrist, of which Cardinal Ciappi, Papal House Theologian, warned in 1955: “In the Third Secret it is predicted, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top”.
In a Rorate Caeli interview of 3 February 2016 Bishop Schneider depicted very clearly the crisis of the Church as a crisis of the Faith with severe words for bishops and cardinals: “acting in a very anti-pastoral way,” “unfaithful and capricious administrator(s)”. He referred to those who want to change the doctrine and discipline of the Church: “those clerics want another Church, and even another religion: A naturalistic religion, which is adapted to the spirit of the time. Such clerics are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, often flirting with the world. Not courageous shepherds—but rather cowardly rabbits”. He added, without excluding Francis; we live “in a time in which a great part of the holders of the office of the Magisterium are negligent in their sacred duty.”
Cardinals Burke & Eijk
At the 22 July 2017 Church Teaches Forum, Cardinal Burke said that the times “reasonably seem to be apocalyptic.”
Similarly, on a LifeSite interview of 28 May 2019, Card Eijk, commenting on the “completely incomprehensible” failure of Francis to maintain and transmit faithfully the Deposit of Faith, quoted from Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Church’s ultimate trial that will shake the faith of many believers … the price of apostasy from the truth … the supreme religious deception of the Antichrist. Previously, in 2017, the Cardinal accused Francis of “fracturing the Church.”
Cardinal Müller
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was unceremoniously removed by Francis as the head of the powerful Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, issued his Manifesto of Faith on 10 February 2019. His Eminence said:
To keep silent about these and the other truths of the Faith and to teach people accordingly is the greatest deception against which the Catechism vigorously warns. It represents the last trial of the Church and leads man to a religious delusion, “the price of their apostasy” (CCC 675) it is the fraud of Antichrist. “He will deceive those who are lost by all means of injustice, for they have closed themselves to the love of the truth by which they should be saved.” (2 Thess: 2-10).
On 18 January 2023, LifeSiteNews reported from their Vatican interview with Cardinal Müller on his book In Good Faith, which was set for release on 27 January 2023. The book sets out for Catholics a detailed “back to basics” catechesis that deals with problems concerning the Faith due to the confusion spread during Pope Francis’s pontificate. “With this book I want to help people who have a problem with this pontificate,” Cardinal Müller said, adding: “The Pope has no phone contact with the Holy Spirit.”
Criticising Francis’ preference for popular issues of secular politics, such as climate change, rather than things directly related to faith and morals, such as theology, Cardinal Müller stated: “Francis is closer to climate change and globalisation. He has another approach. He has said theology is not so necessary.”
on 5 February 2021, LifeSiteNews reported Cardinal Müller’s comments about the Great Reset promoted by the Davos World Economic Forum. He warned that two sides — “profiteering capitalism, big-tech giants of Western countries” and the “communism of the People’s Republic of China” — are today “converging and merging into a unified capital-socialism,” producing a “new colonialism.” The goal of this newly emerging force is “absolute control of thought, speech and action.”
Cardinal Müller's comments point to the importance of the digital world today and how it affects human life. He sees that a “homogenised man” is being created, and that such a man “can be steered more easily.” He explained:
The Orwellian world of homo digitalis has begun. Through mainstreaming, total conformity of the consciousness of the masses is to be achieved via the media.
Cardinal Pell
In Lent 2022, Cardinal George Pell called for the next pope to restore doctrinal clarity in faith and morals in an astonishing secret memo. Writing anonymously under the pseudonym "Demos," he was scathing of the “catastrophic” and “disastrous” papacy of Pope Francis. (See "Resurrecting the Nex Conclave," CO, April 2022). He said that under Francis, “Christ is being moved from the centre” and “the Christo-centric legacy of John Paul II in faith and morals is under systematic attack”. He warned:
Unless there is a Roman correction of such heresies, the Church would be reduced to a loose federation of local Churches, with different visions, probably closer to an Anglican or Protestant model than an Orthodox model.
In an article penned for the London Spectator just before his unexpected death on 10 January 2023, Cardinal Pell referred to the upcoming October Synod on Synodality as a “toxic nightmare”, “couched in neo-Marxist jargon”, “hostile to the apostolic tradition” which ignored Christian tenets such as divine judgment, heaven and hell. (See CO, Feb. 2023)
During an interview with EWTN on 12 January 2023, Cardinal Müller said that he and Cardinal Pell lived in the same house, had a lot of contact and “fought for the same side.” He agreed “absolutely” with Cardinal Pell’s line and both agreed that the Synod’s working document is “absolutely not Catholic” and constitutes a shift to a not-Catholic understanding of revelation and the Church. Referring to Cardinal Pell’s description of the Francis pontificate as a “catastrophe”, and recalling his own Manifesto of Faith published on 10 February 2019, in which he warned of the fraud of the Antichrist, Cardinal Müller added: “we have to react” because “we have to follow Christ and not the strange ideas of those people who want to make a great reset of the world.”
On 6 December 2021, Cardinal Müller told Alexander Tschugguel of the St Boniface Institute that the Great Reset agenda is “based on fraud” and explained that the fraud consists in the idea that men can, “through modern technology or modern communication, bring forth a new creation, create a new man in their image and likeness.” In the same vein, the EU Times of 14 December 2021 reported the Cardinal as saying the pandemic has led to “chaos” and “turmoil” in part due to elites wanting to “snatch an opportunity to bring people in line” via a global “surveillance state” which “has nothing to do with democracy.”
Cardinal Sarah
The Cardinal recently warned that Christianity is on the decline and western society is “lost” because “if we are cut from God, we are lost and God is silent.”
He cautioned that “western civilisation is in a profound state of decadence and ruin” due to people’s obsession with materialism and that the situation is similar to the predicament right before the collapse of the Roman Empire. “The elites care for nothing but increasing the luxury of their daily lives, and the people have been anaesthetised by ever more vulgar entertainments,” he said.
Pope Benedict XVI
This treatise takes its title "It Is The Time Of Antichrist" from an interview with Catholic statesman Vladimir Palko a member of the underground Czech Catholic Church and author of The Lions Are Coming: Why Europe And America Are Heading for a New Tyranny. In response to his book, Palko received a letter in 2015 from Pope Benedict XVI in which Benedict wrote; “As one sees the power of Antichrist spreading, one can only pray that the Lord will give us mighty shepherds to defend His Church against the power of evil in this hour of need.”
Peter Seewald recorded Pope Benedict XVI’s following comments in his biography Light of the World:
The true threat for the Church, and thus for the Petrine service … comes instead from the universal dictatorship of apparently humanistic ideologies. Anyone who contradicts this dictatorship is excluded from the basic consensus of society. One hundred years ago, anyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual matrimony. Today those who oppose it are socially excommunicated. The same holds true for abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory. Modern society intends to formulate an anti-Christian creed: Whoever contests it is punished with social excommunication. Being afraid of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is all too natural, and what is truly needed is that the prayers of entire dioceses and of the world Church come to the rescue to resist it.
It was almost forty years ago, in 1984, that Cardinal Ratzinger disclosed his views on the nature of the times and revealed that he had read the Third Secret of Fatima. As noted earlier, he said the Secret refers to the importance of the “Novissimi” (the Last Times), that “the things contained in this Third Secret correspond to what has been announced in Scripture and has been said again and again in many other Marian apparitions, first of all that of Fatima…”
In 1989, Cardinal Ratzinger opposed participation in the syncretic ‘Council for Peace.’ Explaining the refusal to join with the great world religions on the theme of peace, disarmament and the environment, he stated that “The proposed ‘Council for Peace’ which would bring together many different religions is, due to the very essence of the Church, impossible.” The Church should not “transform herself into a sort of political peace movement, in which the achievement of everlasting world peace would become her reason for existing,” he said, adding this grave warning:
“it needs to be said that the effort to establish a world-wide reign of peace by means of a world union of religions has a disturbing similarity to the third temptation of Jesus: All the kingdoms of the earth I will give unto you if you prostrating yourself, will worship me. (Matt 4:9). He continued;
It is evident that a peace established in this way would by its very nature be transformed into a totalitarianism of the sole authorised way of thinking or would threaten to be turned upside down into a civil war. In this sense the New Testament says of the Antichrist that he will present himself as a messenger of peace and security. The reference is to St Paul: “and when they say "peace and security", then suddenly ruin will strike them.” (1Thess 5:3).
He noted that:
one of the most profound interpreters of this passage was the Russian theologian Vladimir Soloviev (Orthodox convert to Catholicism), whose Legend of the Antichrist characterises the Antichrist precisely as the one who terms himself the establisher of world peace.
Cardinal Biffi
Cardinal Ratzinger continued his public ‘novissimi’ genre statements when elevated to the papacy. For example, papal watchers wondered why Benedict XVI selected the late Cardinal Biffi, a Soloviev scholar, to preach the 2007 Lenten retreat to the Pope and Curia.
In March 2000, Cardinal Biffi had quoted Soloviev (1853-1900) warning that the Antichrist would appear after the 20th century which would be marked by horrific wars and the demise of sovereign nations. Then, in the 21st century, the Antichrist would appear. He would call for a world religion via ecumenism replacing traditional Christianity with an amorphous ‘New Age’ type of spirituality.
His Eminence continued this theme in his above Lenten retreat, declaring that “if Christianity – on opening itself to the world and dialoguing with all – dilutes the salvific event, it closes itself to a personal relationship with Jesus and places itself on the side of the Antichrist.”
In thanking Cardinal Biffi, Benedict XVI commented: “I would also like to say ‘thank you’ because you have given us a very acute and precise diagnosis of our situation today.”
THE FALSE PROPHET
The Remote and Proximate Warnings, culminating in the Imminent Warnings should alert Catholics to the nature of our times; the latter times, the apostasy and advent of the Antichrist. However, there remains another indicator, essential to the Antichrist’s manifestation: the arrival of the False Prophet.
This important sign of the imminence of the Antichrist’s public appearance is the arrival of the counterfeit False Prophet; a diabolical type of John the Baptist. He prepares thy way before my face, (Mal 3: 1), a voice of one crying in the desert: prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight his paths, (Isa 40: 3, Mark 1: 3).
Fr. P Huchedé, Professor of Theology at the Grand Seminary of Laval, France, explained that before the Antichrist makes his public appearance at the height of the apostasy, he is preceded by the False Prophet. Additionally, “The false prophet…will not be a king, nor a general of an army, but a clever apostate, fallen from episcopal dignity. From being an apostle of the Gospel, he will become the first preacher of the false messiah.”
In his analysis of the Book of the Apocalypse, Fr. E Berry wrote:
There will be a complete organisation: 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 honoured as Saviour, and his prophet will usurp the role of Pope.
The beast arising from the earth is a false prophet: the prophet of Antichrist. Our divine Saviour has a representative on earth in the person of the Pope upon whom He has conferred full powers to teach and govern. Likewise, Antichrist will have his representative in the false prophet who will be endowed with the plenitude of satanic powers to deceive the nations.
The earth whence comes the second beast is a symbol of the Gentile nations in revolt against the Church. The two horns denote a twofold authority – spiritual and temporal. As indicated by the resemblance to a lamb, the prophet will probably set himself up in Rome as a sort of antipope during the vacancy of the papal throne. But the elect will not allow themselves to be deceived; they will recall the words of Our Lord: “Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him.”
Bishop Fulton Sheen
Venerable Fulton Sheen wrote:
We are living in the days of the Apocalypse, the last days of our era. The two great forces – the Mystical Body of Christ and the Mystical Body of the anti-Christ – are beginning to draw battle lines for the catastrophic contest. … [Satan] will set up a counter church which will be the ape of the [Catholic] Church … It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. … It will be a mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ … There are Times of Troubles and it is not so much a Third World War that is to be feared, as the re-birth of Leviathan, the coming of the Day of the Beast, when there will be no buying or selling unless men have been signed with the sign of the Beast who would devour the child of the Mother of Mothers.
The False prophet will have a religion without a cross. A religion without a world to come. A religion to destroy religions. There will be a counterfeit Church. Christ’s Church the Catholic Church will be one; and the False Prophet will create the other. The Mystical Body on earth today will have its Judas Iscariot, and he will be the False Prophet. The false church will be worldly ecumenical, and global. It will be a loose federation of churches. And religions forming some type of global association. A world parliament of churches. It will be emptied of all divine content and will be the mystical body of the Antichrist. Satan will recruit him from our Bishops.
The Priestly Group Communio Veritatis, quoting from Ven. Fulton J Sheen’s book Communism and the Conscience of the West, examines the “apocalyptic convulsions which we are currently witnessing.” Ven. Sheen speaks of the “temptation to adopt a new religion without the cross, a liturgy without a supernatural world, a religion for the destruction of religion or a policy which is a religion — one that gives to Caesar that which is God's.”
Communio Veritatis explains that the coming of the Antichrist is being prepared by his False Prophet (Apoc 19:20):
“Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; It was (‘spoke’ in Douay-Rheims) like a dragon.” (Apoc 13:11). The beast which rises out of the earth looks like a servant of Christ, of the Lamb, but is a henchman of Satan, of the dragon. The false prophet is the pseudo-religious leader of the anti-church. He is promoting the Great Apostasy from the top with the help of grave heresies and despicable sacrileges. He deceives and cheats the inhabitants of the earth (Apoc 13:14) and wants to lead man to the veneration of the Antichrist. (Apoc 13:12).
The anti-church remains external in the Catholic Church, while on the inside, it rests in the new grave of the lower hemisphere of humanity. The anti-church is the bearer of the false Christianity and the Church from within. … The prophecy of St. Paul concerning the unlawful man in the Sanctuary of God, the Church of Christ, describes the greatest adversary of Christ in history wherein the enthronement of the Antichrist in the sanctuary of the Church is the climax of the Great Apostasy. An important and essential distinction is made. The Antichrist wants to be the head of the Antichurch, not the True Church which he wishes to destroy completely and definitively.
Note again that the False Prophet precedes the public appearance of the Antichrist. Archbishop Viganò also warns of the preparation for the establishment of the kingdom of Antichrist which will be preceded by the preaching of the False Prophet, the Precursor of the one who will carry out the final persecution against the Church before Our Lord’s definitive and crushing victory. His Grace himself denounced Jorge Bergoglio:
The tragic story of this failed pontificate advances with a pressing succession of twists and turns. Not a day passes: from the most exalted throne the Supreme Pontiff proceeds to dismantle the See of Peter, using and abusing its supreme authority, not to confess but to deny; not to confirm but to mislead; not to unite but to divide; not to build but to demolish.
Material heresies, formal heresies, idolatry, superficiality of every kind: the Supreme Pontiff Bergoglio never ceases stubbornly to humiliate the highest authority of the Church, ‘demythologising’ the papacy. His action seeks to violate the Sacred Deposit of Faith and to disfigure the Catholic Face of the Bride of Christ by word and action, through duplicity and lies, through those theatrical gestures of his that flaunt spontaneity but are meticulously conceived and planned, and through which he exalts himself in a continuous narcissistic self-celebration, while the figure of the Roman Pontiff is humiliated and the Sweet Christ on earth is obscured.
Conclusion
After his startling vision, the Exorcism against Satan and the Apostate Angels was issued by Pope Leo XIII on May 18th, 1890. It focuses on the papacy. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the Seat of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered.
A shortened version, omitting the papal reference was mandated as part of the Leonine Prayers and was recited after every Low Mass. The Consilium, established by Pope Paul VI, issued the Instruction Inter Oecumenici on Sept 26, 1964 which ordered:
‘The last gospel is omitted;
the Leonine Prayers are suppressed.’
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The someone or something whose removal is necessary before the Antichrist can be fully manifested, according to 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7.