THERE has been a danger in the past to see the “thousand year” reign described by St. John in Revelation as a literal reign on earth—where Christ dwells physically in person in a world-wide political kingdom, or even that the saints take global power. On this matter, the Church has been unequivocal:

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. —Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC),n.676

We have seen forms of this “secular messianism” in the ideologies of Marxism and Communism, for example, where dictators have attempted to create a society where all are equal: equally wealthy, equally privileged, and sadly as it always turns out, equally enslaved to the government. Likewise, we see on the other side of the coin what Pope Francis calls a “new tyranny” whereby Capitalism is presenenting “a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” ^[1]cf. Evangelii Gaudium, n. 56, 55  (Once again, I wish to raise my voice in warning in the clearest possible terms: we are headed once again toward an “intrinsically perverse” geo-political-economic “beast”—this time, globally.)

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