John Paul II on the Most Decisive Confrontation —and History’s ‘Last Lap’

Karol Wojtyla (JPII) wrote,

“A non-Catholic philosopher once said to me: ‘You know, I just can’t stop myself reading and rereading  and thinking over the first  three chapters of Genesis.’

And indeed it seems to me that unless one does so reflect upon that fundamental Ensemble of facts and situations it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to understand man and the world.

These are the key to understanding the world of today, both its roots and it’s extremely radical and therefore dramatic affirmations and denials. 

The Covenant springs from the great heart. From God’s love for man. At theame time it is built on Truth rooted in what is real, that is to say true. God gave man this commandment, 

“You shall eat freely of every tree in the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil you must not eat, for in the day you eat of it you will surely die (Gen. 2:16,17).” 

Thus from the very dawn of History man is faced with a tree, the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree which is a symbol of his new human nature in that it is a sign of the limits implicit in his creaturely state, and, at the same time, in the frontier which development of the human person may not cross. The human person created in the image of God is not set beyond the confines of good and evil as Nietzsche and other propounders of the absolute autonomy of man would have it.”

The Anti-Word, the “Last Lap” and “Final Passover” of History

The Pope continues,

“Here, in  the third chapter of Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, it becomes clear that the history of mankind, and with it the history of the world, will botg be subject to rule by the Word and the anti-Word, the Gospel and the anti-Gospel…it all begins with the first lie…”

“We may now be wondering if this [our time] is the last lap along that way of denial which started out from around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To us, who know the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, no stretch of that route can come as a surprise. We accept with trepidation but also with trust the inspired words of the Apostle Paul,

“Let no one deceive you in any way; because first it is necessary for the rebellion to come, and for the man of sin, the son of perdition to reveal himself”. (2 Thess.2.3) — pp.29, 35 Sign of Contradiction, 1979 Seabury Press, NY.

Pope JPII knew: “A greater danger than Communism is coming. This is war! And it’s going to get worse.”

Mercedes Arzú Wilson

In a Women of Grace program on EWTN some years ago, Mercedes Arzú Wilson, president of Family of the Americas Foundation and World Organization for the Family, and a Vatican representative and observer to the United Nations during John Paul’s reign, was told by him as she went to confess the Faith there,:

“I want you to know there is a greater danger coming to the world than Communism”. “When he got serious,” she said, “he got serious”. He repeated it,  said again, “I want you to know that there is a greater danger coming to the world than communism. This is war! And it is going to get worse!”

She continued, “And I think we are seeing the fall of the Western world…Relativism, abortion, the failure (of families) to have children, sterilization, the schools,  pornographic sex education, Planned Parenthood, secularism.”

In a word, nihilism.

While the Progressive Pope Francis[1] almost at the beginning of his pontificate shocked the Catholic world by saying that the Church would stop, in effect, obsessing on “abortion and gays,” Pope John Paul II could not have viewed all of this in more starkly different terms. Who was obsessing? John Paul saw abortion as showing an aggressive world view set against Truth, against traditional families, against the Church and the world. He saw it as the manifestation of “the Antiword” of which the Church could not be silent.

Atheistic humanism, unlike Christian humanism, has long dreamed of a “New World Order”. But it is a world pseudo-order which decisively rejects the teachings and principles of Jesus Christ and his Church.

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI rejected that world order. They proposed and worked for an alternative to it. What they called for was a truly new world order based on Christian principles [2] and not the ideologies stemming from the French Revolution. Which is why the Progressivist and atheistic forces today are trying to bury even their memory.

For what is their “humanistic” “New World Order” today without the so-called “rights” to chemical birth control, abortion, euthanasia, population control, officially encouraged promiscuity, pornography, gender confusions and surgical gender “reassignment,” and all the other transvaluations of the traditional understanding of family, etc? These are the very tissue of their false humanism. And both John Paul II and Benedict XVI saw it all, utterly rejected it, and called it out by name: “the Culture of Death”. The Popes in this century have rather proposed a “world order” infused with the perennial spiritual values of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.– SH

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Church’s ultimate trial

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.

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Called to Watch

32 “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Take heed, watch;[a] for you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Watch therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning— 36 lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.”

__________

— July 13, 2023, The “Smell of Francis?” Grave concerns even more grave now. See this episode of The World Over.

America is racing toward Canada’s euthanasia free-for-all – as seven more states eye legalizing assisted suicide [and as media helps manufacture Satanic cultures of despair —SH].

The religious art in film of the late Franco Zeffirelli from the 1977 series Jesus of Nazareth.