No. 1732

So Catholics can play the Evangelical/Pentecostal "It's the End of the World As We Know It And I Feel Fine" game, too?

All I know is that I can't think of any of those "Left Behind" books without thinking of that Spinal Tap song.

I'm just saying.

Irenaeus, I hear where you're coming from, but I wouldn't call it a "mindless fundamentalist game." Isaac Newton spent the last years of his life trying to figure out the book of Daniel. Maybe it was a waste of his time, but he obviously thought it was important and worthwhile. I'm not sure I'd call Newton "mindless" for engaging in that kind of endeavor.

Of course, I know you're not referring to Newton, but to the Hal Lindsey types who say that "such and such is proof that the Lord is coming back soon," until something goes wrong and then it becomes "the fact that such and such is no longer true is proof that the Lord is coming back soon." The most obvious example is that in most "end times scenarios" the Soviet Union was expected to exist until the end. When Soviet Communism collapsed, all of a sudden end-timers were in a quandry. Now that Islamism has reared its ugly head, we can all prepare for more end of the world scenarios. (I don't mean to belittle the actual threat from Islamic fundamentalism, I'm just saying that lots of Christians are going to shoe-horn that into some sort of Second Coming scenario.)

As someone who spent many years in a dispensationalist group strongly influenced by J.N. Darby who virtually invented the genre, I learned to take all of it with many grains of salt.

But I do think that the Biblical admonitions to watch for His coming (i.e. "like a thief in the night") are obviously meant to be heeded. In particular we are to "watch" by keeping ourselves in a healthy spiritual condition, so that we are a treasure He can return for. 2 Peter 3:12 even speaks of "looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God." We can hasten His return, not by studying end-times scenarios, but by communing with Him and loving Him more than this sick and corrupted world.

Big question: Was it a book you decided to keep or get rid of? I would be curious to know your opinion of the book now that you've joined the Eastern church.

I kept it. To be honest, I've only ever read around in it. As a Catholic, I didn't know quite what to make of it, not even after she was declared a saint. I think her revelations could be true, but I reserve judgment.

"And what is also interesting, some fathers suppose that God can 'abolish' any prophesies. That seems hard to understand, if something was really promised and was going to happen but then depending on people's wrong behaviour promises were abolished?"

Yeah, that's it, if a prophocy doesn't come true, it must have been abolished by God. I think this happens all the time to Sylvia Browne.

"And what is also interesting, some fathers suppose that God can 'abolish' any prophesies. That seems hard to understand, if something was really promised and was going to happen but then depending on people's wrong behaviour promises were abolished?"

1. Which Fathers are these, and what sort of "prophecies" are they talking about?

2. For the record, even with regard to canonized saints, the Catholic Church does not regard so-called "private revelations" as part of the Faith. An individual is free to believe in them to the extent they are found "worthy of belief" (i.e., not contradictory to Divine Revelation), but Divine Revelation itself ended with the Apostles and New Testament.

Aerty, thanks for the post. You know whereof you speak. I think your last paragraph is spot-on, and I would only make explicit what seems implicit therein: that our watching entails a perpetual state of readiness (24/7/365 as my students put it), not a fascination with dates and times. At the end of Mark 13, Jesus says (paraphrasing from memory), "About that day or time no one knows, not the angels, nor the Son, but only the Father...therefore what I say to you I say to all: keep watch." If Jesus on earth didn't know the time of the end, who are we to try and figure it out? And even if we could, would that really affect our behavior? Would we spend a season in sin and then clean up our act right before the End? I hope not. That's cynical. So, in my mind, we can't know, it shouldn't make a difference if we did, and so we keep ready at all times.

Hmm, I doubt Nostradamus and St Faustina are to be understood in the same ways.

In 1937 deeply committed Catholic Poles were very much concerned with Russian and German designs for dominion, both countries being run by totalitarians most easily described as atheists. But Catholic Poland didn't, to put it lightly, enjoy its various historical crushings by Protestant Prussians and Orthodox Czarist forces either. Maybe that is why Faustina concerns herself with Poland as a national entity, which is something of a curiosity for a saint/mystic.

Big chunks of Poland were at the time well known to be on Hitler’s list for annexation by force or threat of force; Germany lost substantial areas (relatively speaking, small by US standards) to Poland in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. In 1920 there was actually a short but unknown Russian-Polish war that with some luck and heroism the Poles won against Lenin’s inept invading armies, but it's not as if Lenin's heirs were in any hurry to forgive or forget the defeat. (See the Battle of Warsaw.)

John Paul II was not exactly thrilled, in the last years of his life, that Poland rejected his hopes that it become the wellspring of a re-Catholization of Europe. In the late Nineties a lot of young Poles stopped regular churchgoing and the picture there apparently now resembles that of the rest of central and eastern Europe. Churchgoing peaked in Western Europe after WW2, the redecline began during the early 1950s.

As for how how holy and exalted Lech Walesa, Solidarinosç, and the Polish Church really were/are...Wojtyla escaped taint for faults and sins of the Church in Poland under German occupation and the pogroms that followed the war, and then under Soviet and Communist rule, but many others in positions of responsibility did not.

To add to Simon's comments, thankfully Jillian is wrong, Mass attendence in Poland is quite high and demographically even, it is not just old people, in fact, in the Univ. City of Krakow man churches are packed up and down the aisles and out the front steps with 20-something students. Of course statistics are not perfect but I had heard that weekly Mass attendence in Poland was something like 75% of Catholics (Catholics being 95% of the population) the 62% number might refer to people who go to Mass every week without fail, thus while on any given sunday 75% of Catholics are in Church, on every given Sunday 62% of the same people are in Church. Also, daily Mass, Rosary, confession, and all traditional devotions are well practiced in Poland. Also it should be pointed out that it is Polish immigrants that are driving up the Mass attendence numbers in the UK.

DJ - It is funny that you would say this. I was attending a college event for my son & ran into a woman from Poland whose daughter was attending school with him. She has been in our country for approx. 5 years for her job. The biggest thing she liked about our country was the fact that no one knew if you went to church on Sunday or not. Apparently, one of the biggest reasons these people are in church is because they have to do so. I would have loved to ask her who cared - the government, your neighbors, etc. Interesting at any rate, but this may why so many people are in those pews.

mom4vr61, having lived in Poland I can try to speak to this a little more.

First off though, augmenting Simon's point, if you meet a Pole who has anti-clerical leanings the chances are the parents were active and privleged in the PZPR (Polish United Workers' Party).

As for social pressures to attend Mass. A German friend of mine (who is rather critical of religion) said that in Poland, "All people have is their farm and their Church." I suppose for people in small rural villages where everyone knows everyone, not making it to Mass on Sunday is noticed.

Culture in the small villages is sort of on a plane with "Quiet Man" era Ireland.

In the cities however, Krakow for example has 72 Churches within the old-city (a very compact core area). Most of these churches are huge, most of them have several Masses on Sunday, and are always packed. Frankly I had no clue where the people were comming from to keep filling them!

In the USA we are are used to finding the Catholic Church in an area, figuring out the Mass time, and if we screw up on either of those accounts we aren't gonna make it to Mass.

In Poland, I never even bothered to learn the Mass times of various Churches, Sunday morning I just walked arround and it was always inevitable that I'd find one, it seemed that from 6:00 AM until 1:00 PM there was a Mass starting every-half hour somewhere.

Now with all these options of churches and Mass times, the individual church go-er is anonomous, this is not the tiny village Parish model, so whether one goes to Church or not goes complelty un-noticed, there is no community pressure, and the effect of family/cultural pressure is not the driving force for 20-somethings, bottom line, people in Poland are in Church because they want to be there, they like going to Mass and it is important to them.

As for the gov't in PL, the Law and Justice Party claimed deep loyalty to the Catholic Church, but for almost all of Polish history, going to Church was an act of defiance against Communist, Nazi, or Czarist overlords.