During the height of the Middle Ages, most every one you met on the cobblestone street was a Catholic. During the French Revolution, most every head that rolled down the medieval street was a Catholic’s. Today, most every pew-faring person is dogmatically a devout Protestant with sometimes Catholic sympathies.

You know you are in the End Times when not only is your neighbor not Catholic, as he might have been during the Middle Ages, but he doesn’t care two figs what you pretend to believe, nor would he ever be so illiberal as to cut your head off for believing it.

Among the Home Alone crowd, it is perhaps a truism now to say that we live during the End Times. But it is something we must wake up and repeat at every sunrise, because we may not see another. Personal death comes to us all, of course, but we who live today have the extraordinary privilege and burden of not having a neighbor that shares our religion and not having a state that persecutes us for it. Both factors make our faith today difficult, since it is generally easier to keep up with God’s Commandments when we have encouragement from our friends. And it is also easier to keep a law, when someone is threatening us with murder to break it.

What is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to do is keep God’s word in a time when we are alone and the world is indifferent to our beliefs. That is a lonesome and isolated place to be, but I am here today to encourage you to do God’s will, because there is one thing we have that no one else in the history of the world has ever had. The sense and the evidence that the Second Coming is nigh.

We have seen the Abomination of Desolation in the Holy Place. We have heard the putative Man of Sin speak from the See of Peter. We have witnessed the Great Apostasy. The things that we have seen have been global, not merely in France, for instance, when Catholics would have been tempted to think the End Times were upon them.

But time and prophecy are tricky. I am no prophet, so I cannot say that we are indeed in the End Times. But if we are not, I can only ask God why He did not give us this prophecy before hand, that our Catholic Church would be totally usurped by heretics, that a false worship service would be installed in the place of the Holy Mass, that millions upon millions of Catholics would fall away from Church, that whole nations would apostatize from the Faith, that there would only be shreds and remnants of the faithful scattered about the Earth, living out their mere existence in dens and lurking places, and having no Catholic society, culture, or friendships to keep them warm during this spiritual winter. In short, if not now, then when the End Times?

There have been many penpals I have had during the past several years this website has been up. I have kept with some through the years, but others I have lost touch with. I hope they are still keeping the faith at home in good cheer and hope for the Coming of Christ. For those who may be reading this, we live, not in the best of times, nor the worst, but in the end of times, the end of once was, once where the world made sense in the context and structure of Catholicity, once where you knew where you would be every Sunday morning and who would be there, Christ in the Tabernacle, your friends and extended family in the pews, and the glories and beauties of Catholic worship all about you, once but is no more, merely once upon a time.

May God give to us who suffer this desolation and darkness and deprivation such graces as to help us to merit that eternal crown of glory, for this our spiritual martyrdom.