Sorry, though. No rapture today, folks, so we can all sleep easy...unless, that is, the Lord was just a-testin' and He's a-gonna be a-comin' back tonight to a-whisk believers up into the Heavens 'n leave the unbelievers down here on Earth until He comes again for the rather more sobering, er, Last Judgment of the Living and the Dead.
We're real Bible-believing Christians, Catholics. We believe Our Lord when He says nobody, not even the Angels, knows when the End of Time shall be. We also believe Our Lord when He says, "This is My Body...This is My Blood."
I don't know what this born again Christian obsession is with the rapture, because every time we go to Mass and receive the Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord, He unites His very Self, Body, Soul, Humanity and Divinity to us, making us one, totally absorbed with His very being. Stop me if I'm uttering a heresy, but I guess if you don't believe in the Real Presence, you have to have something really, absolutely, jaw-droppingly mind blowing to look forward to, like a mass air balloon expedition in the imminent future. Personally, when I think of the Last Judgment, I crap myself, but there we go.
The Lord Jesus is always present in His Church, in the Tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament. While Heaven is His Throne and Earth is His footstool (or something like that), He also dwells in the Tabernacle in every Church throughout the World even until the End of Time. If we can't see or can't believe that then that is our blindness. The Lord has made Him home on Earth in His Tabernacle in His Church. In Holy Communion, He does 'take us up' with Him to the Eternal Father. He Who for us became flesh and blood gives us His flesh and blood so that flesh and blood may one day go where He now is in Glory. Sorry, Baptists, but we are the real 'rapture people' every time Mass is offered!
I feel like I'm digressing a little, but, for some reason, a practical joker (quite practically, a joker) arranged clothes outside St Mary Magdalen's Church today in a quite humourous way to suggest that bodies had filled those clothes but that they had been taken up to Heaven in the Rapture. By the clothes, arranged as if the bodies of believers had been taken up following a good old lay down on the steps, was a sign saying 'Rapture 2011'. Very funny.
Of course, it would have been funny had St Mary Magdalen Church been a born-again fruitcake church for born again fruitcakes, but this gets back to my point yesterday about the Reformation. Nowadays, people hear something nutty about some nutty US sect and manage to associate that with the Catholic Church, which has always disassociated itself from millennial prophecies and crackpot end times theories. It's not fair! Atheists! If you're going to take the p*ss out of born again Christians, do it at the appropriate venues!
Like I say, quite a humourous arty Brighton stunt really, but I can't understand why, with a perfectly acceptable Baptist Church just down the road, they couldn't have pulled it off outside an 'ecclesial community' building which actually believed in the 'rapture'. Ignorance of the True Faith is rife! Yes, even in Brighton!
Anyway, while we haven't been taken up (or indeed left behind, because Catholics aren't real Christians, apparently), our beloved Holy Father has been ascending the very Heavens themselves, by telephone, to the astronauts on the International Space Station. God bless Pope Benedict XVI, now gloriously, and very humbly, compassionately and delightfully, reigning!
6 comments:
Sorry Laurence. We got it wrong a few times too, even a Pope.
400 Martin of Tours stated that the world would end before 400.
April 6, 793 Beatus of Liébana
The Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana prophesied the second coming of Christ and the end of the world that day to a crowd of people. The crowd thinking that the world would end, fasted through the night. The following morning, Hordonius, one of the fasters, said, "Let's eat and drink, so that if we die at least we'll be fed."
1284 Pope Innocent III.
Pope Innocent III predicted that the world would end following 666 years of the rise of Islam.
Anne - indeed, individual Catholics 'got it wrong' as you say. No doubt many popes in the first millennium also believed the earth was flat. But the two statements "Martin of Tours believes that....." and "The Catholic Church teaches that..." are poles apart.
Regards.
Laurence
Please can you make the Guild blog easier to find directly through Google Search.
If I type in The Guild of...etc. I just get other blogs mentioning it, not a direct contact..
Thanks
I can't find it either.
When is the Medley Minutes priest going to post on the Guild?
Is he away?
Do you have anything in the in-tray?
Not a Medley minute video, a written article please.
In today's paper (Sunday Times)- a GP (evangelical Anglican) in trouble with BMC for mentioning Jesus during a consultation. Difficult one this.
Any thoughts?
Fr Brown,should we say 'the church taught that', rather than 'she teaches that'? Well, she taught incorrectly, did she mislead those souls? And do we still believe in the rapture? Will the end ever come? Why are we still waiting for a prophecy that was supposed to come true 2 millenia ago?
I know you asked Fr, but the Church has never believed in the protestant account of 'the rapture'. As far as I know, the Church teaches only on the Second Coming of Our Lord in terms of the General Resurrection and Last, Final and General Judgment.
Post a Comment