With a pandemic still raging, where are all the doomsday prophets and Marian apparitions ? Is the media just not covering them or have Catholics just changed ?
Or maybe all the true believers beamed up to the spaceship idling between Jupiter and Saturn. It’s a shame they couldn’t convince the QAnon crowd to go with them.
Their prophet St. Donald hath proclaimed that there is no pandemic, therefore the matter has been settled.
lots of people are very fatalistic about climate change, so they still exist.
believers in a technological singularity are still hopeful.
So I’d say those are the new pessimistic and optimistic predictions about the future.
Why do you single out Catholics? In my perception, most recent (say the last 100 years) Christian doomsday predictions came from Protestant/Evangelical branches of Christianity. I was raised as a Catholic, and doomsday scenarios never were a thing in my upbringing. Marian apparitions (Lourdes, Fatima) though, yes, but they were not necessarily about the end of the world either.
As said already: Basically Millenarianism and doomsday prophesy over the last century has been a core teaching and identity marker of Evangelical Protestant Fundamentalism. .
Meanwhile the RCC as an institution, has stood on the Jesus quote “none knows the day or the time, but the Father” and that you just have to be ready and prepared to meet the Lord whenever he does show up, like the Wise Maidens.
As EinsteinsHund points out, if you notice the spate of recognized Marian apparitions from earlier in the 20th Century, those that even included any element of prophesy were not even about existential global “doomsday”, but about threats to the Church, telling people to keep the Faith.
(Notice I said recognized. People alleging that Mama Myriam has popped up to meet them on the way to get water or imprinted her face on their toast and given them a dire message to warn the Pope that their neighbor is a dangerous communist heretic have existed and bishops have been rolling their eyes shooing them out the door since, like, forever.)
Why would the pandemic affect Millenarianism? It’s the belief that Jesus will return and reign for a thousand years on Earth, after many disasters that will make Covid pale in comparison.
Covid has no relation to it.
Isn’t this about a diverse set of independent beliefs that sometimes used the round number of 1000 years with no agreed upon starting point to predict some climactic event described in varying levels of detail?
I don’t think these beliefs are dead, I think they tend to be based on current times being near the end of the 1000 year period and losing appeal as spaceships/volcanoes/raptures never occur. Give the failed predictions time to fade in peoples memory and we’ll find out the real millennium started almost 1000 years ago and is now approaching it’s end. The real millennium will of course have different starting points and eventual outcomes depending on who you ask just like now.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to confine my question to Catholics only. I was, however, thinking more along the lines of the Medjugorje apparitions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I was looking at the general media coverage of the day. I’m not sure how broad the media coverage was across denominational boundaries. It does seem to have caused quite a stir in the media.
I think twenty years would ordinarily be enough time for those inclined toward such beliefs to forget the disappointment of Y2K, but the flop of the Mayan 2012 prophecies in the interval has probably pushed a reawakening of popular millenarianism further into the future. Current cult leaders and crackpots need a new bag for the time being.
End Timers have certainly seized on the pandemic. From The Express (U.K.):
"According to Christian evangelist Michael Snyder, the coronavirus is one of 10 plagues currently haunting the Earth.
The plagues are: armies of locusts, extremely bizarre weather patterns, unprecedented flooding, major earthquakes, unusual volcanic eruptions, the coronavirus, the African Swine Fever, the H1N1 Swine Flu, the H5N1 Bird Flu and the H5N8 Bird Flu."
Some of those are rather pissant plagues in my view, but whatever.
The Revelation-type End Timers have been overshadowed by the political World-Is-Coming-To-An-End sorts. Their message is that the pandemic is a hoax engineered to put us all under the heel of the Techno-Elites, submissive and microchipped, while Bill Gates and his allies chuckle at the success of their depopulation program.
Traditional End Timers can’t compete with the Secular Crazy.
Right. It always cycles around. And there is always a new “sign” or a new “threat” that means this time, now for sure, is the time to gird our loins and get ready for The Big One.
Then nothing happens and within a few years people move on; sometimes it takes longer and some times not as long for the Millennial Fever to rise again.
And as just mentioned, now there is a whole variety of possible simultaneous doomsday threads running, so they sort of dilute one another.
Which BTW have not yet been given official Vatican recognition, rather it is still under investigation (apparently there’s argument over that some of the reports are more “credible” than others). And outside specifically Catholic media and community forums it has had very little traction.
He’s doing what numerous such ‘prophets’ try to do: shoehorning.
Covid doesn’t even come remotely close to fitting the description of the plagues of Revelation, nor the earthquakes, locusts, etc.
If even the Black Death which killed 200 million didn’t turn out to be one of the Revelation plagues, then a measly Covid sure isn’t.
I’ve heard there exist a few cults who expect everything to go pear-shaped 2000 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. The date for that is a bit fuzzy, though.
Just few days ago, December 16th, the San Gennaro miracle in Neaples (Italy) didn’t happen. It is the first time since I can remember (I am 37).
The majority of neapolitan people, and almost all Christian believers are scared. To them it is a very bad sign about our future!
The dissolution of blood of St. Gennaro happens three times in the year. The blood from solid condition becomes liquid as the priest shows the glass ampule who containe it to the happy crowd of devoted.
Television gave a lot of space to the miracle fail, debates were held. Priests, journalists and believers explained their opinion on the matter…
The following story provides graphic warning of End Times occurring in a galaxy far away.
[my bold]
Most definitely not. My whole family (me excluded) is Catholic, and I’m sure none of them have ever heard of the San Gennaro miracle, but wouldn’t give it a second thought anyway if they had. Those folkloric “miracles” are dime a dozen in some ultra-Catholic regions, but don’t impress many other Catholics.
I think, seriously, that QAnon is millenarian. It’s not, for the most part, explicitly literal Christian millenarianism. But it’s close. There are signs and portents. There is a coming event, that is always coming but never quite gets here. There is an increasingly elaborate eschatology, in which the righteous (“real Americans”) shall be exalted, and the sinful (Democrats, liberals, the coastal elite, and so forth) shall be brought low.
And when you combine that with some Christians referring to Trump as literally being “God’s chosen”, it starts to shade over into literal, explicit Christian millenarianism.
So far, at least, they seem to be waiting for Donald Trump to finally announce the open prosecution of the members of the Deep State pedophile conspiracy, and not trying to immanentize the eschaton themselves.
That’s a good thing, but I am a bit concerned with what they’ll do as January 20 approaches, and it becomes obvious that Trump isn’t going to bring the eschaton. If they decide that’s because the Deep State has stolen the election from Trump, I’m a bit concerned that we’ll see a number of violent incidents of “self-investigation” to immanentize the eschaton.
But maybe when the QAnon prophecies fail on January 21, the whole thing will fizzle out.
Fingers crossed…
I agree with the above, completely. Almost all of the end-times energy has been hoovered up by QAnon, the cult with no center but a thousand facets.
I am Catholic, I have heard of the San Gennaro miracle, and I’m not giving it a second thought.