Why Now?

Now more than ever it is crucial that you be “watchers of the dawn”,
the lookouts who announce the light of dawn and the new springtime of the Gospel
of which the buds can already be seen.
—POPE JOHN PAUL II, 18th World Youth Day, April 13th, 2003; vatican.va

A letter from a reader:

When you read through all the messages from visionaries, all of them have an urgency in them. Many are also saying that that there will be floods, earthquakes, etc. even back to 2008 and longer. These things have been happening for years. What makes those times different to now in terms of the Warning, etc.? We are told in the Bible that we don’t know the hour but to be prepared. Apart from a sense of urgency in my being, it seems the messages are no different than say 10 or 20 years ago. I know Fr. Michel Rodrigue has made a comment that we “will see great things this Fall” but what if he is wrong? I realize we have to discern private revelation and hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I know people are getting “excited” about what is happening in the world in terms of eschatology. I am just querying it all as the messages have been saying similar things for many many years. Could we still be hearing these messages in 50 year’s time and still waiting? The disciples thought Christ was going to return not long after He ascended into heaven… We are still waiting.

These are great questions. Certainly, some of the messages we are hearing today go back several decades. But is this problematic? For me, I think of where I was at the turn of the millennium… and where I am today, and all I can say is thank God that He has given us more time! And hasn’t it flown by? Is a few decades, relative to salvation history, really that long? God is never late in speaking to His people nor in acting, but how hard of heart and slow we are to respond!

WHY DOES GOD DELAY?

The book of Amos says,

The Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets. (Amos 3:7)

But then, the Lord doesn’t tell His prophets what He is going to do—and then immediately do it; He tells them precisely so that they will tell others. There has to be time, then, for that word to be spread, heard, and heeded. How much time? As much as needed.

The sense of urgency in many messages has a twofold purpose. One is to impel the prophet to speak; the second is to impel the listener toward conversion. God is patient with both.

I can remember sitting around the table with my parents discussing the times we are now passing through. That was forty years ago. Those conversations formed and prepared me for my mission today. Likewise, I hear from people all over the world who say, “My grandmother told me about these times and I remember her saying that this was coming.” Those grandchildren are now pretty attentive as they see these things begin to unfold! In God’s mercy, He not only warns but gives us time to repent and prepare. We should consider this a grace, not a prophetic failure.

That… and many people do not understand that we are not going through just another little speed bump in salvation history. We are at the end of an era and a coming purification of the world. As Jesus allegedly said to Pedro Regis recently:

You are living in a time worse than the time of the Flood and the moment has come for your return. Do not leave for tomorrow what you can do today. God is making haste. —June 20th, 2020

It’s a big deal what’s coming and so if God is delaying, it’s because the world will never be the same again—and many people who are here today will not be when this Great Storm has finally passed over the earth.

WHY THIS GENERATION?

You rightly note that the disciples expected Christ’s return not long after His Ascension… yet here we are two thousand years later. But then, Jesus also left specific signs and visions in the Gospels as well as with St. Paul and St. John as to what would precede His coming—for example, a great falling away from the faith and the appearance of the “lawless one”, the rise of a global dictatorship, and then a period of peace after Antichrist’s

death denoted by a “thousand years,” etc. Hence, St. Peter began to quickly put it into perspective:

Know this first of all, that in the last days scoffers will come to scoff, living according to their own desires and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? From the time when our ancestors fell asleep, everything has remained as it was from the beginning of creation”… But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day. The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard “delay,” but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:3-90)

The Early Church Fathers took Peter’s teaching and expanded it further, according to what was passed on to them through oral Tradition. They taught how the preceding fourth thousand years after the fall of Adam and the following two thousand years after Christ’s birth would be analogous to the six days of creation. And so…

Scripture says: ‘And God rested upon the seventh day from all His works’… And in six days created things were completed; it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year… But when The Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from Heaven in the clouds… sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day… These are to take place in the times of the kingdom, that is, upon the seventh day… the true Sabbath of the righteous. —St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Church Father (140–202 A.D.); Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus of Lyons, V.33.3.4, The Fathers of the Church, CIMA Publishing Co.; (St. Irenaeus was a student of St. Polycarp, who knew and learned from the Apostle John and was later consecrated bishop of Smyrna by John.)

So then, there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God… (Heb 4:9)

Irenaeus adds:

Those who saw John, the Lord’s disciple, [tell us] that they heard from him how the Lord taught and spoke about these times… —Adversus Haereses, V.33.3.4, Ibid.

The end of the sixth thousandth year, then, is approximately the year 2000. Here we are. I think it is no coincidence that St. John Paul II celebrated the Great Jubilee in that year with great expectations. He stated that humanity…

…has now entered its final phase, making a qualitative leap, so to speak. The horizon of a new relationship with God is unfolding for humanity, marked by the great offer of salvation in Christ. —POPE JOHN PAUL II, General Audience, April 22nd, 1998; vatican.va

And we hear today the groaning as no one has ever heard it before… Pope [John Paul II] does indeed cherish a great expectation that the millennium of divisions will be followed by a millennium of unifications. —Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (BENEDICT XVI), Salt of the Earth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), translated by Adrian Walker

I explain this to give you a sense of how the Early Church viewed the Timeline of things and why that’s obviously very relevant to us.

WHY INTERPRET THE SIGNS FOR OUR GENERATION?

But perhaps you object saying that the Lord said we will not know the day or hour. Yes, but the hour of what? In both the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus says:

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. (Matt 24:35-36)

In other words, we will not know the hour of Christ’s return for the Final Judgment and end of human history—the literal last day of the world.

The Last Judgment will come when Christ returns in glory. Only the Father knows the day and the hour; only he determines the moment of its coming. —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1040

Since Jesus explicitly explains the events that precede the advent of the Antichrist and what precedes the Era of Peace (cf. Matt 24), we would be fools not to “watch and pray” regarding these events and to use them as a gauge to know the nearness of these things.

When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? (Luke 12:54-56)

Still, you ask, could we be saying all this 50 years from now? Yes, we certainly could. But is that likely? In the video series Daniel O’Connor and I did on the Seven Seals of Revelation, everything we said about the “labor pains” was backed up by news headlines as well as prophetic messages from around the world indicating these events are already or about to unfold. Ah, but hasn’t this happened in every generation? The answer, plainly, is no—not even close.

Yes, we’ve always had wars, but never weapons of mass destruction. We’ve always had murderous regimes, but not a daily holocaust. We’ve always had impurity and lust, but never worldwide pornography and sex-trafficking of minors. We’ve always had natural disasters, but never so much devastation. We’ve always had unfaithfulness in the Church, but never the kind of apostasy we are witnessing. We’ve always had dictators and conquering powers, but never a rising global dictatorship. We’ve always had brands and markings, numbering and armbands, but not the possibility of a global system that will force men to “buy and sell” through a biometric ID. We’ve always had Our Lady’s presence with us, but not the explosion of apparitions around the world. We’ve always had private revelation, but none approved that say those messages are preparing us for the final coming of Christ.

You will prepare the world for My final coming. —Jesus to St. Faustina, Divine Mercy in My Soul, Diary, n. 429

Finally, when have we had five popes in the same century say that the times of the Antichrist may be upon us?

Who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction? You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is—apostasy from God… When all this is considered there is good reason to fear lest this great perversity may be as it were a foretaste, and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days; and that there may be already in the world the “Son of Perdition” of whom the Apostle speaks. —POPE ST. PIUS X, E Supremi, Encyclical On the Restoration of All Things in Christ, n. 3, 5; October 4th, 1903

…we see that all rights both human and Divine are confounded. Churches are thrown down and overturned, religious men and sacred virgins are torn from their homes and are afflicted with abuse, with barbarities, with hunger and imprisonment; bands of boys and girls are snatched from the bosom of their mother the Church, and are induced to renounce Christ, to blaspheme and to attempt the worst crimes of lust; the whole Christian people, sadly disheartened and disrupted, are continually in danger of falling away from the faith, or of suffering the most cruel death. These things in truth are so sad that you might say that such events foreshadow and portend the “beginning of sorrows,” that is to say of those that shall be brought by the man of sin, “who is lifted up above all that is called God or is worshipped” (2 Thessalonians ii, 4). —POPE PIUS XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor, Encyclical Letter on Reparation to the Sacred Heart, May 8th, 1928; www.vatican.va

We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the Gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the antichrist. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence; it is a trial which the whole Church, and the Polish Church in particular, must take up. It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church, but in a sense a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization, with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations. —Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (JOHN PAUL II ), at the Eucharistic Congress, Philadelphia, PA for the bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; some citations of this passage include the words “Christ and the antichrist” as above. Deacon Keith Fournier, an attendee, reports it as above; cf. Catholic Online; August 13, 1976

Modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-Christian creed, and if one opposes it, one is being punished by society with excommunication… The fear of this spiritual power of the Anti-Christ is then only more than natural, and it really needs the help of prayers on the part of an entire diocese and of the Universal Church in order to resist it. —EMERITUS POPE BENEDICT XVI, Benedict XVI The Biography: Volume One, by Peter Seewald

Still today, the spirit of worldliness leads us to progressivism, to this uniformity of thought … Negotiating one’s fidelity to God is like negotiating one’s identity… Pope Francis then made reference to the 20th-century novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson, in which the author speaks of the spirit of the world that leads to apostasy “almost as though it were a prophecy, as though he envisioned what would happen.” —Homily, November 18, 2013; catholicculture.org

So no, our generation is not like every other generation.

I know that all times are perilous, and that in every time serious and anxious minds, alive to the honor of God and the needs of man, are apt to consider no times so perilous as their own. At all times the enemy of souls assaults with fury the Church which is their true Mother, and at least threatens and frightens when he fails in doing mischief. And all times have their special trials which others have not… Doubtless, but still admitting this, still I think… ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. The special peril of the time before us is the spread of that plague of infidelity, that the Apostles and our Lord Himself have predicted as the worst calamity of the last times of the Church. And at least a shadow, a typical image of the last times is coming over the world. —St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890 A.D.), sermon at opening of St. Bernard’s Seminary, October 2, 1873, The Infidelity of the Future

WHY THIS AUTUMN?

In all the years of watching and praying, I have never seen such a convergence of specificity in private revelation as we are now. Seers from around the world who do not know each other, who speak different languages, who have different callings and backgrounds… are now saying virtually the same thing all at once: time is over (by this is meant the “time of grace” Our Lady has referred to in her apparitions, not the end of time as we know it). The world is going to change and will never be the same again.

Moreover, all of the recent messages from Heaven seem to be converging upon this Fall. So, either these prophets from around the world are deceived en masse—or we are about to see serious events unfold shortly over the next few months.

Brothers, sisters and children, this time must be one of great reflection: many continue not to listen to the messages that come from heaven through Me and my Most Holy Mother. From autumn onwards, other viruses will appear. Look at what is happening in my Church; the behavior of my priests is under the indifferent gaze of those who say that they have faith… —Jesus to Gisella Cardia, June 30th, 2020

Tell everyone that God is making haste, that this is the right time for your great return. Do not leave for tomorrow what you have to do. You are heading towards a future of great trials. —Pedro Regis, September 22nd, 2020

Life will never be the same again! Humanity has obeyed the directives of the global elite and the latter will continue constantly scourging humanity, only giving you brief moments of respite… The moment of purification is coming; the disease will change course and will reappear on the skin. Humanity will fall over and over again, being scourged by misused science together with the new world order, which is determined to render inert whatever spirituality may exist within humanity. —St. Michael the Archangel to Luz de Maria, Sept. 1st, 2020

Pray that the suffering would be lessened, as the light in their hearts has now gone out. My dearly beloved children, gloom and darkness are about to descend on the world; I ask you to help me even if everything must be fulfilled—God’s justice is about to strike…. You have presented good as evil and evil as good… Everything is over, yet you still do not understand. Why do you not listen to my Mother, who still gives you the grace of being near to you? —Jesus to Gisella Cardia, Sept. 22nd, Sept. 26th, 2020

My dear people of God, we are now passing a test. The great events of purification will begin this Fall. Be ready with the Rosary to disarm Satan and to protect our people. Make sure that you are in the state of grace by having made your general confession to a Catholic priest. The spiritual battle will begin. —Fr. Michel Rodrigue in a letter to supporters, March 26th, 2020; Note: contrary to false rumours, Fr. Michel did not say the “Warning” is this October; he is on record saying he does not know when it is.

My child, I can no longer hold back the hand of justice for a world that is seeking a correction because mankind has lost his consciencousness of sin. —Jesus to Jennifer, August 24th, 2020

Jennifer added in personal comments to me on September 28th, 2020:

We have entered into the time that we have been warned about for some time: “The Church versus the anti-church, the Gospel versus the anti-gospel.”

And while I was preparing this writing, a reader from Ontario, Canada wrote saying:

A seer in our area, who has received locutions all her life from the Blessed Mother (a dear family friend as well… not an ounce of inauthenticity!) came up to me after Mass this morning and told me that for the first time in her locutions, and for the first time, she was visited by the Heavenly Father Himself who told her that time was extremely short and what is to come will be worse than anyone is anticipating.

IT COMES DOWN TO IT, NOW…

So, in answer to your question, what if [these seers] are wrong? Then we have three options to consider:

1. God has continued to delay for the sake of sinners;

2. The seers each heard and deciphered the locutions/visions/apparitions incorrectly; or

3. The seers are deceived.

And so, we continue to watch and pray. That said, as lockdowns begin to ripple across the world for the so-called “second wave”, it is arguable that the

warnings from Heaven are already unfolding: lockdowns started just days after the first day of Fall. For my part, as a watchmen of these times trying to be a servant to the “now word,” I sensed the Lord say the other day as churches began closing again: “This is the descent into darkness” with the clear sense that this darkness we have entered will not reach its completion until Our Lord purifies the earth. Indeed, after the first church closures last winter, I clearly sensed the Lord saying that the world is now past The Point of No Return.

What does your heart tell you about the hour we are in? I suspect it is the same as the reader above: “a sense of urgency in my being.” Pay attention to that. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you have to do today. Remain in a state of grace. Reject fear. Hold fast to Our Lady’s hand and stay near the loving Heart of Jesus. He will never, ever leave us. That was His promise. So do not be afraid.

But do not fall asleep. Not now.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1	cf. The Day of Justice
↑2	2 Thess 2:3
↑3	Rev 13:1
↑4	Rev 20:1-6
↑5	cf. 1 Cor 15:52; 1 Thess 4:16-17
↑6	Over 115,000 abortions occur every day globally
↑7	see The Descent Into Darkness
↑8	cf. Matt 28:20