The US Church has spent decades fearing that an antichrist would arise from some bogeyman scapegoat group outside the Church, when all along we were training ourselves to be his greatest disciples and anoint him ourselves. All the Left Behind books for the Evangelical paranoids. All the Late Great Planet Earth crap. All the whackjob stuff about beeswax candles and Three Days of Darkness and quack Fatima conspiracy theories and Malachi Martin junk and Mel Gibson anti-semitism for Catholics. And it was all bringing this to birth.
And even at this hour they remain blind as bats in their stygian satanic pride, certain that God died and appointed them saviors of the Church from the pope and John the Baptists hailing the coming of the Orange Messiah. MAGA “prolife” antichrist religion, like its Nazi predecessor, would be hilarious had it not gained access to the powers of the mightiest military-industrial complex in the history of the world. Now, God alone knows how many it will murder. And, as ever, the heresy will persecute and murder its victims in the Name of Jesus–including His disciples. And for their reward, abortions will soar.
As Uncle Screwtape says, “To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that is what truly gladdens the heart of our Father Below.”
To be clear, I don’t think Trump is the Antichrist. But he is obviously an antichrist. They are a dime a dozen and always have been since the Ascension of Christ.
Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us. (1 John 2:18-19)
And since the devil has no creativity, the pattern repeats throughout history. So the Catechism says:
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
There remains hope. Other antichrists have been defeated. But the way to win is by the weapons of the Spirit and we tend to ignore them until every other weapon we would rather use has been tried and failed. As for me, I am going to Mass as often as I can. The Eucharist remains the Source and Center of any true Resistance to the evil we have, in our folly, unleashed on ourselves.
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It’s amazing how an obnoxious con man has captivated a large swath of the American people. His wandering gibberish is treated like Gospel. His blaming of immigrants for all our problems is accepted as fact. His promotion of bizarre conspiracy theories is regarded as brilliant insight.
I think it goes back to flattery. Trump flattered the MAGA crowd. He told a bunch of ignorant nobodies that they are smart and are the “real Americans.” It was Kool Aid and they gulped it down.
Economically, Trump has done little for the MAGA fools. Indeed, he is taking away their Medicaid in many cases, and only cutting taxes for the rich, but they still love him because he throws them culture war bones. He beats up immigrants, gays and others that the ignorant nobodies do not like.
Trump has created a religion with MAGA. A religion that is based on resentment and ignorance. Ignorance has become a virtue. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and other clowns. They wallow in ignorance and are proud of it. Even Ivy League Republicans like Ron DeSantis pretend to be Yokels to fit in. It’s the movie “Dumb and Dumber” come true.
When will the fever break? Who knows, but you have to believe enough people will eventually come to their senses.
A while back, I read a Patheos Catholic article about the Antichrist by Dwight Longenecker. The gist of it was that the Antichrist was a figure who would appear to be reasonable and offer to solve the world’s most pressing problems, but in the process of doing so would lead people away from the Church. So basically, a President Bernie Sanders or any figure on the progressive political spectrum taking on that role would qualify.
The overall impression I got, was that is was not fundamentally about doing good, but about who was getting credit; and failing to be properly deferential to God (and the Church by proxy), was the gravest sin of all. You see, the problem is not that the Antichrist would do evil; otherwise, how would it deceive people so thoroughly? No, the surest and most prescient sign that this figure is the antithesis of everything the Church stands for, is that it would do good, and people would be lured by its promise of helping people, and fixing the environment, and doing all kinds of good things.
You know, Lucifer appearing as an angel of light and all that.
He does have a point though. There is one thing that a religious institution fears and abhors more than any other: a competing ideology. Which reveals his entire screed about the Antichrist to be nothing more than a self-incriminating indictment of Catholicism as a whole.
Or maybe just his own personal faith.
Solovyov’s antichrist was a humanitarian uberman. I think Fr. Dwight and Vladimir were giving more credit than is due to the masses.