Disclaimer, the following is no wise meant to assault the good conscience and Christian discipleship of non-Catholic Christians.
Nevertheless, this essay does divulge to painful ecumenical stages that are necessary for the Catholic Church to move on to once the things that Catholics hold in common with the non-Catholic churches or communities have been exhausted.
Here , we simply have to recognize the reality that if Catholicism is true, or at least Orthodoxy, then it cannot be that the Scriptures are ecclesiologically neutral; it's not possible.
This is because, for the Catholic Church, things aren't as simple as ?There are Christians and there are non-Christians , and if you're not a Christian you will burn, but if you are, you'll be okay.? Rather, there are gray areas, such as, schism, heresy , and infidelity in between complete purity (Catholicism) and total depravity (secular apostasy) .
Also, for Protestants today , they usually do not consider details about doctrines to be that essential to the point that bad errors can lead to hell. For Catholics, the situation is much more urgent, especially in modern times. Errors can end up leading a soul into perdition if they're bad enough or if they spread to create other errors that lead to perdition indirectly.
This was unfortunately one of the real reasons that the Catholic Church put to death heretics in times of the Middle Ages and somewhat later. It was in no wise to keep the faithful from finding the truth but rather that they may be protected from being harmed by false teachings.
Obviously, in the end , the Inquisitions were not morally acceptable; however , if we place in context the times of the Middle Ages and the very uneasy mix of politics and religion, these sorts of situations cannot really be fully understood in 21st century minds, since in our day , sparing mainly Islamic fanatics, religious warfare or religious-based execution, is largely not present , since Christians have moved on from killing one another over their differences and are able to agree to disagree, or, as it were, to scream and yell at one another at the Holiday table, and then go home after Thanksgiving hating the other party, haha.
The point Is really this, and it is not recognized as strongly by Protestants as it is by Catholic and Orthodox Christians: the religious doctrinal and moral errors really can in many cases have terribly serious consequences for the world?s ability to have peace and stability as well as for souls to attain salvation.
For this reason , God?s desire to bring the fullness of truth to humanity is a supreme resolve as expressed in Christ at the Eucharistic prayer , where he said , ?Behold do not be afraid, for I will send the helper, the Paraclete, and he shall guide you into all truth.?
For Protestantism , however , this is absurd, since there is not much truth that can be agreed upon amongst themselves.
But the reality is that, in modern times , questions of great complexity are arising from which a simple gospel message of ?Accept Jesus, repent , and join a Bible Church,? can no longer satisfy the normal human being who really asks the more serious and detailed questions of life and faith.
For this reason, only the Catholic and Orthodox religions believe that Christ wanted to form an infallible Church that would be guided by the Spirit to teach the world infallibly what his truths are, so that the faithful do not have to worry about developing the gospel themselves in a conundrum of confusion, never really reaching any significant consensus.
And both of these religions believe the attainment of such truth is effectively as follows, with a minor difference: apostolic succession. The issue that Protestants have is that they reject apostolic succession?s authority when it becomes morally corrupt in a great sense.
This is the real problem which Protestantism has.
And yet contrarily, the scriptures actually support the Catholic and Orthodox notion that legitimate authority can be sinful. We see this, firstly, where Christ said that Moses? seat was indeed occupied by wicked Pharisees but that we should still obey and listen to them anyway.
Similarly, he prayed for Peter and the apostles because he knew that later, many of the apostolic successors would become wicked and give bad witness, causing the rejection of their authority.
But the alternative is, again, chaos, and that cannot be true. Consequently, only the Catholic or Orthodox Churches can truly express what Christ desired.
The difference now is that the Orthodox Churches feel that Peter has a big ego because he thinks he can decide problems of disagreement as the ultimate leader of the college and also that he can define things of his own volition without them.
We are Catholic, and so if we were to divulge into seeing ecclesiological images in Apocalypse or other Scriptures, the ecumenical disposition will end up associating possibly intermediate gray areas, such as schism or heresy, with negative components within them.
Again , we are not intending to attack any good character but looking at the nature of the communities or Churches in terms of their objective errors or benefits, or, that is, objective status in terms of truth and grace.
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And this effectively, concludes our disclaimer.
Now, before commencing the analysis of any of the scriptures which we will examine, I would like to give a brief interlude as to why we would even expect these things to be reasonable.
Toward this end, let's begin to quote a primary Scripture that we will look at, a latter portion of Apocalypse 2, letter four:
And to the angel of the church of Thyatira write: These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like to a flame of fire, and his feet like to fine brass. 19 I know thy works, and thy faith, and thy charity, and thy ministry, and thy patience, and thy last works which are more than the former. 20 But I have against thee a few things: because thou sufferest the woman Jezabel, who calleth herself a prophetess, to teach, and to seduce my servants, to commit fornication, and to eat of things sacrificed to idols.
21 And I gave her a time that she might do penance, and she will not repent of her fornication. 22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed: and they that commit adultery with her shall be in very great tribulation, except they do penance from their deeds. 23 And I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am he that searcheth the reins and hearts, and I will give to every one of you according to your works. But to you I say, 24 And to the rest who are at Thyatira: Whosoever have not this doctrine, and who have not known the depths of Satan, as they say, I will not put upon you any other burthen. 25 Yet that, which you have, hold fast till I come.
Profound moments here , and clearly this is not literal but allegorical , for if it is the ages of the church , something supreme here as well.
Space is short, so we do not have the time to fully elaborate on how to argue what the letters are , but suffice it to say, here are a few backdrop ideas to set the tone .
The first larger idea is that the devil is primarily present in the apocalypse in two primary sections. The most common and well-known place is starting in Apocalypse 12, edging into 13, and then leaving for a space , then picking up effectively in 16, 19 and 20.
But the other place, that is less known, is our beloved and appropriate letters, which we are trying to argue are the ages of the church in some sense. Here, Satan is present in 4 of the letters.
Therefore, if we are to try to draw a common sense way to look at the letters which is not wildly strained to read into them with no basis of exegesis, we can argue that there is simply a basic correlation between the letters and the general larger dragon scenes of Apocalypse in the latter portion.
Incidentally, when we have first provided a common sense way to look at the dragon scenes, a summary of which we will present in a moment, we can try to correlate them to the letters; it will make a lot of sense.
Moreover, the ages that are derived are largely similar to how the Church and even secular historians would divide up the history of the church in a spiritual sense.
Space is very limited and so I will simply give , as it were , a very brief description of how I view what can be seen as the seven greater scenes of the dragon in Apocalypse:
1. The war in heaven: Pagan Rome, the devil's attempt to preserve his rule over the world by trying to destroy the gospel before it conquers it. The witness of the martyrs overcomes it, and the dragon no longer rules but comes down to an even playing field with the woman, the Church.
2. The dragon pursues the woman: the woman is journeying towards the kingdom, which is to say Catholic Christendom, just like the Israelites floundered in the desert 40 days before settling in the Holy Land. The journey, then, is like the progressive Christianization of surrounding Europe.
3. The woman is given the wings of a fowl and flies to a rest from the serpent: the Middle Ages; in Daniel 7, Greece, the leopard , had four heads and four wings. It was a leopard because Alexander's conquest was very swift. It had four heads because Alexander's Empire was divided into four parts after his premature death according to each of his four primary generals. Some scholars argue that the wings also render or represent speed, but that is redundant. I see the wings as four great elements of Greek culture which elevated it above a brute materialistic civilization. These four significant dimensions are rather straightforward: philosophy, art, drama, and athletics. So if you return to the notion that the woman acquires two wings of a fowl, we can argue that the church in the Middle Ages acquired two great dimensions of Greek culture that substantially elevated the Church?s influence during this same age. Obviously, these are philosophy and art. One of the greatest components of the Middle Ages for the Catholic Church, especially through our beloved St Thomas Aquinas, was Scholasticism ,an amazing integration of Catholic theology with Greek philosophy, enabling the church to explain, defend , and elaborate on the rich treasure of our faith with wonderful clarity and newer dimensions. And what can we say about Catholic art, which borrowed from the Greeks the columns , the great structures, the statues of Greek gods, and so forth, transforming these things into a Christianizing essence. Hence, in the place of the blasphemous Greek gods, there were wondrous images, statues, and icons of saints, angels, Mary and the Christ! The wondrous towering cathedrals, and basilicas and so forth. These two great elements of Greece wonderfully enhanced the great Catholic Middle Ages culture!
4. The great river spewed by the dragon after the woman and the earth opening its mouth and swallowing the river to rescue her. Clearly by simply progressing through history, the Middle Ages were abruptly cut short by one of the most disturbing elements in the history of the Church and perhaps the greatest frustration of Christian unity, which was the Protestant rebellion. And subsequent to that, the natural reaction to the confusion , chaos, and bloodshed of these events, was a terrible rejection of all things supernatural ( which is the same as a rejection of all supernatural religion, organized! as in revelation or salvation or grace), and rejecting this entire sense of God coming down to meet men and to reveal things and help him, in the so-called enlightenment and other further worldly movements: religion is merely natural, man attempting to find God in futility ;hence why there is such unfathomable confusion and dispute. Consequently, as testified by the book of tan on church history, if it is true that there were as many forms of Protestantism as there were Protestants, so there seem to have been as many forms of supernaturally dead infidelity as there were supernaturally dead infidels! And in all these things, however, the magisterium of the church was the salvation of the faithful. For, if we remember that Saint Paul describes the church as the pillar and ground of truth, 1 Tim 3:15, he speaks of the magisterium, which acts as a strong foundation of all that is true, to hold the church together against the winds and sea , which would toss her into ruin. For, as the Christ has testified, you cannot build your house on the sand , much less in the sea of chaos; you need a firm rock, or at least the earth to do this. Here, then, the earth symbolizes the magisterium, which opened its mouth and swallows all the plethora of heresies in the heretical rebellion, especially through Trent, and the subsequent hurricane of worldly ideas and ideologies that emerged from the infidel thought of enlightenment, French revolution, masonry, and the countless ideologies and philosophies tossed to and fro, attempting to explain human reality even without religion. The magisterium again swallowed Protestant errors with Trent, and then swallowed all the subsequent errors of the world and age with the greater encyclicals and papal teaching and magisterial elaborations on all of these questions of confusion. Hence, the devil was not able to destroy the church right up until approximately before the 20th century, when the church closed it up these greater phases with Vatican I. Possibly here, we can see the wondrous locution of pope Leo the 13th, who saw that the dragon desired to try to ruin the church and asked God to give him a certain amount of time, which is we can see has more or less amounted to about 100 years or so beginning with Communism and Russia up to our own day. This could be at least one way to look at the beast which comes in the next phase. And some similar way in the vision: after being unable to destroy the church after all these vicious attempts of several hundred years, the dragon runs off angry and takes his position on the shore.
5. The beast, the dragon, and the false prophet , idealism of any Godless age of human history and in our case the minor apostasy of the 20th and 21st centuries. The dragon is the father of lies, the beast is the child of the dragon that incarnates the lies in human history, and the false prophet is the lies themselves spoken between them, making it a certain diabolical mockery of the true God as Trinity. The spiritual darkness of these ages can then be seen here by the imagery, which manifests the reign of sin in any of the great phases of human history: from Noah and Babel and Egypt up to the wickedness of the Jews before the exile, the Maccabees, Pagan Rome, and now our time .
6. The casting of the beast and false prophet into the fire in the chaining of the dragon for a thousand years. Subsequent to our modern godless age, it is not the end of the world , but according to most fully approved private revelations, a conditional chastisement will restore faith to the world, which can be symbolized by the casting of the beast and the false prophet into the fire. Subsequently the chaining of the dragon can symbolize the great renewal and age of our lady's peace, when spiritually the gospel will be in full force throughout much of the world, leaving diabolical activity on earth to a minimum. The reason that the dragon is not also cast Into the lake of fire is because it insinuates that the total vanquishing of evil does not come until after the age of peace, when the Great apostasy emerges, and that can be with the loosening of the dragon, which means that at the very end, he will deceive the nations again, and is then cast into the fire of her good. This is of course is where the scripture agrees with Augustine's common solution, and this last judgment is the true literal second coming.
7. See above, the loosening of the dragon after the Millennium is the great apostasy that follows the age of Peace in stage 6.
In this mode , then, the seven ages of the Apocalypse letters become correlated directly one to one as follows for reference:
Letter 1: The age of the martyrs, or Pagan Rome
Letter 2: The age of the progressive conversion of Europe and the Trinitarian and Christological heresies (dark ages)
Letter 3: the Middle Ages
Letter 4: The Protestant Rebellion, and then the subsequent supernatural death of the world: the world of solo ratio, the world of the merely natural , eg, enlightenment deism rationalism French revolution masonry and the countless competing philosophical ideas and ideologies up to but not including the 20th century.
Letter 5: The Dark Night of the Soul for the Church , or today, the modern era of the minor apostasy, 20th and 21st centuries, communism and relativism.
Letter 6: The age of Our Lady?s Peace or the Unitive way of the Church and the Reunion of Christians.
Letter 7: The seduction of the great apostasy , or the martyrdom of the church
Note that letters 6 and 7 are yet future and assume that what remains for church history is based upon the best scenario that we can derive from the fully approved private Revelations of the church for the latter times, (for reference, there is an article in EWTN written by Susan Brinkman of Women and Grace to build on Colin Donovan's older article that harnesses scholarship that argues this scenario as the most likely) with the above Lady?s Age of Peace as the era of Peace of Fatima.
Now with the conjectured ages before us, we can examine the phases that have as it were ?fornication and meat to idols.?
These occur in ages three and four, which are, as we see above, first, the middle ages, and then the Protestantism followed by the supernatural death of enlightenment and so forth.
In short, what we are going to establish is that the fornication is figurative and refers to a spiritual cohabitation, ministers of heretical communities.
Sacrificing meat to idols will be a hyperbolic extension of Old Testament bad worship into New Testament bad worship , which is Protestant services, which do not represent what God truly wants, which is rather the mass and the Eucharist.
To establish the theology of fornication in a metaphorical sense , we now proceed to examine sexuality in supernatural and spiritual context.
Christ and the church theologically carries down into the imagery of the patriarchy and the priesthood. The Western patriarch, bishop , or priest marries his church or diocese in the same sense in which Christ marries the whole church.
Christ , in completely profound way, impregnates his church with truth and grace, from it she conceives, and then brings it to the world as a child.
In a similar vein a priest makes love to his parish .
From him proceeds the truth which he preaches , which his parish receives into its intellect to nourish them that they might know what to do to live out the words of God.
In the sacraments, the priest impregnates the faithful with the grace of God through the various rituals , what they mean , and what they give in terms of their graces and attributes.
After the Catholic priest , we now have schismatic ,or Orthodox ,priests.
Because the Orthodox churches retain true apostolic succession , they in fact possess holy orders and therefore all seven sacraments , and therefore priests. Hence their priests are also husbands to their parishes.
However, schism is a divorce and therefore the priests? presence is not fully pure but is like a divorced and remarried condition.
Finally, what can we make of heretical ministers?
In the Protestant rebellion, all of the ecclesial communities lost apostolic succession saving the Anglicans, who eventually lost it because they developed heresies later.
Unfortunately when you do not have apostolic succession, you do not have holy orders , and therefore you do not have priests.
Without holy orders, you have no true ordination of men, and therefore there are no true men of God in the Protestant communities. This, again, is because a man cannot be a true man of God unless he has been formally ordained by a bishop , who is a legitimate successor of the apostles. It is a formal reality and ritual, just like marriage, in the sense that one is not truly married until they go before a religious person, make public vows, and consummate.
There are a lot of modern Protestants who are trying to think Evangelical- baptism-ways of looking at sex, so that they are cohabiting before marriage because they think , well, if baptism does not truly save but is only a sign of your true salvation, why do we need to get married in a formal ritual, if in fact our love is already established informally.
And this, consequently, is a way to present the condition of a man who would like to think he is a man of God, even innocently, but who has not received the formal true succession of the rituals sanctioned by Christ and set up as a formal sacrament exclusively available to the churches who possess valid apostolic succession, which, again we see is exclusively the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Hence, although we are not here attacking the good character of any Protestant minister, many of whom will probably be saved because of their goodwill to lead others to Christ, we must nonetheless see that, objectively, they are not true men of God in a formal sense, just like a well-intentioned cohabiting couple is not truly married in a formal sense unless they have engaged the true ritual sacramental marriage.
As a result, Protestant ministers cannot be called truly a husband of their communities but only , as it were , a pseudo-husband since although they perform many of the ideas and elements of a true husband, even innocently, it is really in a certain sense only objectively a spiritual cohabitation, as harsh as it may seem to call it.
And now for the woman at the well.
Christ testifies , yes , you have had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband .
There are five great apostolic seats, or dare we say, supreme husbands!? The first and greatest is Peter the ultimate husband of the entire church.
There are four lesser patriarchs, the Eastern husbands.
And the Protestant ministers are not even husbands but , as it were, live-in partners.
So, in the beginning, the entire church was married to Peter, a valid marriage.
Then, in the great schism, a great portion of the woman divorced Peter and took upon herself the other four great husbands of the East !
In the final form of division, she was living in a cohabiting relationship, which is effectively Protestantism.
Let us now look at the instances in the apocalypse letters where fornication is delineated. Firstly, in letter 3, in the balak and Balaam, and then in letter 4, Jezebel , from a figurative standpoint.
Let's recall the quote for letter three:
But I have against thee a few things: because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat, and to commit fornication:
And now letter 4:
But I have against thee a few things: because thou sufferest the woman Jezabel, who calleth herself a prophetess, to teach, and to seduce my servants, to commit fornication, and to eat of things sacrificed to idols.
21 And I gave her a time that she might do penance, and she will not repent of her fornication. 22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed: and they that commit adultery with her shall be in very great tribulation, except they do penance from their deeds. 23 And I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am he that searcheth the reins and hearts, and I will give to every one of you according to your works.
For the time, since we see that stage four, or letter four, correlates to Protestantism and then the subsequent age of the worldly rejection of organized and supernatural religion, it will be better to treat this phase first, and then we can turn in the conclusion with the supplement if the first lesser scripture with balak and balam.
And so, with jezebel, we have that she considers herself a prophetess to seduce the servants of Jesus to fornicate and to sacrifice meat to idols.
The fornication can simply refer to the objective spiritual cohabitation In Protestant ministers which we have been examining and which is a counterfeit of the true husbands in holy orders.
Also, Jezebel is a prophetess, just as the Protestants considered themselves the true disseminators of the teachings of Christ.
They seduced the faithful to reject Rome and to put into place for themselves cohabiting men ,which is to say , men who are self-appointed and not ordained into true holy orders.
Worship of course, in God's eyes is supposed to be the mass, and what we are supposed to sacrifice to God is none other than the eternal son himself, his body and blood soul and Divinity.
Any other form of worship like this is wrong.
Obviously, it is not idol worship for Protestants , but, if we consider that, in the Old Testament, there were really only two forms of worship, one that was completely good and one completely bad, the bad one being , of course , idol worship, then if we see that Christianity really has only two forms of worship that exist, which are as it were, either the mass, which is in both the faithful and the schismatic churches, or then the form of worship that God does not prefer (but which is not totally bad of course), which is Protestant forms?most of which tend to be a one hour long dissertation on scripture combined with hymns at various points?then we could possibly draw a parallel between the two of the Old Testament and the two of the New Testament.
In this vein then, clearly, the legitimate New Testament worship is the mass, and the Old Testament severe idol worship can be hyperbolically symbolized by idol worship in the letters here. Consequently the meat that they eat sacrificed to idols is a bad substitute, as it were , for what is truly meant to be eaten at the mass, which is God himself.
In other words, a hyperbole as it were, we can see these things as an exaggeration of taking what was wrong in the Old Testament and projecting to the bad worship that is not desired in the New , or Protestantism.
Hence, again, the meat to idols can refer to their false form of worship which is not the mass and not the Eucharist
?And I gave her space to repent. ?
The true Reformation is what Catholics call the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Reformation.
The church responded with a space quote unquote , meaning a time to address the Protestants to give them a reconsideration to come back. Again, the true Reformation or what secular historians call the Counter Reformation is meant here, in which the church answered a plethora of heretical questions that the Protestants had, the great council of Trent, and reformed much of the church morally by having indulgences attained through spiritual activities and not by money, radically changing the education of priests so that they are suited to teach properly etc , moral cleanup.
Nevertheless , with this great ?space? spiritually, Protestantism did not repent but only continued into its horrific and terrifically confounded chaos and hurricane for a few centuries.
Now, the so-called enlightenment was a spearhead of what I call the terrible but somewhat good age between the Protestant rebellion and the secular apostasy of the 20 and 21st centuries.
Clearly, the Protestant rebellion gave us unfathomable chaos with sola scriptura.
It led to a secondary great age which was a radical rejection of all organized religion which claims supernatural essence, whether in revelation or salvation. In other words, it descended to reason alone, whether in religion or in science, philosophy etc.
Hence, the child of solo scriptura was the supernatural death of solo ratio. This supernatural death then being a child of sola scriptura and Protestantism can be the meaning of when Jesus says and I will kill Jezebel's children with death, that is , the death is not literal but is a spiritual death of the supernatural essence of faith , a retention of only natural goodness or reason.
And after reason was confounded ad infinitum ,with the philosophies and all the other ideologies and such , trying to solve the meaning of life without religion and only a perverted reason, it led to the secular apostasy of the 20th century with atheistic materialism in the east and then hedonistic, relativism hedonism in the West
Finally, then , to return to letter 3, the meat and the fornication, with balam and balac , once again should symbolize some essence that is like Protestantism, but that is clearly occurring within the Middle Ages before the big explosion in stage 4.
Suitably, in the middle ages, we can see what was effectively proto Protestantism, beginning, with heretical situations such as Hus, Wycliffe, and the Waldenses.
For the time being, there were two other elements in the Middle Ages letter that would be speculative here, but we can mention them briefly.
In the beginning of the letter, it is mentioned that a mysterious person named Antipas was slain earlier in the phase, as it were. He is effectively called a faithful witness.
Well , if it is seen sort of earlier in the past, we could conjecture that it occured somewhere around the commencement of the Middle Ages. In short, I will say this.
The greatest witness to the gospel is the Petrine office! And in fact, if one rejects this doctrine of Peter, they are wounding the heart of God and of Peter in a spiritual sense , which in the very same way is like a spiritual martyrdom.
Hence the slaying of Antipas can mean the great schism, which indeed occurred in the beginning days of the Middle Ages.
As for the Nicolations, who appear here and in letter one, the Wikipedia encyclopedia suggest that the nicolations were part of a sect named after Nicolae, who practiced sort of a hedonistic sense of the Gospel, akin to what the Corinthians had mistakenly done.
What I say here is that the Nicolations mystically mentioned may also call up it's absolute counterpart, or contrary position, which are the dualistic heresies that are the antithesis to hedonism, the hyper-aceticism of say, the gnostics and the miletians, and other dualists who saw the flesh as evil but the mere intellectual spirit as good, pitting them against one another , and extrapolating this false relationship on to the divine.
This fits well because these dualistic heresies first arose during the pagan roman period, such as, but not limited to, gnosticism, marcianism, manichean.
After Pagan Rome was vanquished through Augustine, Manichaism and a few other dualistic heresies persisted a little while but faded out until much later in the middle ages, in which case they reemerged in the catharsis and the albigensians. These heresies were strikingly similar to the dualism present in some earlier heresies.
So it makes sense that they appear only in letter one and letter three which again is the Middle Ages ,where , unfortunately, these poor heretics were put to death in the Inquisition in great numbers.
Well that about wraps it up thank you.