End Times

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, and the End of Times

/ Robert Robbins / 4 Comments

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.

Ubi Ecclesia: Where the Church is During the End Times

/ Robert Robbins / 2 Comments 
"And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves; men withering away for fear, and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world."

We may not be in the End Times, but, boy, does it feel like it. Sure, this could be just another extended interregnum which will be neatly decided by a future council and non-heretic pope. It is possible, I suppose. But–on that hypothesis, I do wonder what signs there will be manifested in those days that will convince even the most skeptical that the end is nigh.

As I have written on this blog, the celestial lights are interpreted by Saint Augustine as the Church. The sign, then, is the disappearance of the Church. That is explosive commentary of Augustine, because it at once dispels the notion that there must be shepherds and teachers until the end of time in the sense that the Church faithful will be able to be instructed by them, receive their sacraments, and be governed by them as one flock. If they were, then the Church wouldn’t be hidden.

So, the question becomes, Where is the Church? If the Church is hidden, how can we find it? We know that the Church is not reducible to buildings, vestments, golden vessels, incense and candles. We know this, yet there are so many who think otherwise, who confuse the Church with a congregation of people who happens to be present in a building (formerly occupied by God-fearing Catholics) at the local parish church, most of whom believe contraception is okay, only a third believe in transubstantiation, and pretty much all freely and affectionately offer their “mass” in communion with a heresiarch.

Of course, the numbers are better at SSPX chapels and other traditionalists groups, including Sedevacantist mass centers. People here at least for the most part aren’t heretics, but they are schismatics. The Church cannot be where there is schism, just as light cannot coexist with darkness, nor that which is holy, evil.

Home Alone, Pray-at-Home, Recusant Catholics–if you know of a better term other than simply Catholic, email me; I respond to everyone–rightly do not go to either their parish church or their regional traditionalist chapel. We pray at home, keep the faith by candlelight in holy vigils, solemn fasts, joyful hymns, and many a rosary bead has slipped through our fingers in prayerful reflections, meditations, and contemplations of the infinitely unfathomable mysterious of God and His Mother.

The world is wise. The Vatican is wise. SSPX is wise. Sedevacantists are wise. We Home Aloners are fools. We don’t know anything about formal and material distinctions of the papacy, and colored titles and supplied jurisdiction elude our comprehension. We are fools–fools for Christ and His Mother, the rest of the world scoffs us to scorn. So be it. Let it be.

Wherever the Church is, the fool, and not the wiseman, will find it.

Ubi Ecclesia

by G.K. Chesterton

Our Castle is East of the Sun,
And our Castle is West of the Moon,
So wisely hidden from all the wise
In a twist of the air, in a fold of the skies,
They go East, they go West, of the land where it lies
And a Fool finds it soon.

Our Castle is East of the Sun
And abides not the law of the sunlight,
The last long shot of Apollo
Falls spent ere it strike the tower
Far East of the steep, of the strong,
Going up of the golden horses,
Strange suns have governed our going,
Strange dials the day and the hour.
With hearts not fed of Demeter,
With thoughts unappeased of Athene,
We have groped through the earth’s dead daylight
To a night that is more, not less:
We have seen his star in the East
That is dark as a cloud from the westward,
To the Roman a reek out of Asia,
To the Greeks, foolishness.

For the Sun is not lord but a servant
Of the secret sun we have seen:
The sun of the crypt and the cavern,
The crown of a secret queen:
Where things are not what they seem
But what they mean.

But our Castle is West of the Moon,
Nor the Moon hath lordship upon it,
The Horns and the horsemen crying
On their great ungraven God:
And West of the moons of magic
And the sleep of the moon-faced idols
And the great moon-coloured crystal
Where the Mages mutter and nod:
The black and the purple poppies
That grow in Gautama’s garden
Have waved not ever upon us
The smell of their sweet despair:
And the yellow masks of the Ancients
Looking west from their tinkling temples
See Hope on our hill Mountjoy,
And the dawn and the dancers there.

For the Moon is not lord but a servant
Of the smile more bright than the Sun:
And all they desire and despair of
And weary of winning is won
In our Castle of Joyous Garde
Desired and done.

So abides it dim in the midmost
The Bridge called Both-and-Neither,
To the East a wind from the westward,
To the West a light from the East:
But the map is not made of man
That can plot out its place under heaven,
That is counted and lost and left over
The largest thing and the least.

For our Castle is East of the Sun,
And our Castle is West of the Moon,
And the dark labyrinthine charts of the wise
Point East and point West of the land where it lies,
And a Fool walks blind on the highway
And finds it soon.