(LifeSiteNews) — How close is the Antichrist? If you’re a Christian, you probably don’t think he’s very far off, as in hundreds of years away. Many think he is coming in our lifetime. But if you’re a Catholic familiar with the prophecy of Our Lady of La Salette, there’s a good chance you don’t think he’s imminent — because we haven’t yet had the 25 years of “peace” and “plentiful harvests.” Or have we?
The opinion that we haven’t lived through those 25 years was recently shared by exorcist Father Chad Ripperger, a gem of the Church and a wealth of spiritual knowledge. Admittedly, when I heard he said this, I was perplexed. He is among the best and brightest of the Church. But the Christian faith of the world is so abysmal right now (U.S. faith levels have dropped to the lowest on record), and the technology needed for the mark of the beast is so advanced that it seems to me more likely the Antichrist will exploit the tepidity and apostasy of the world before Catholics become fervent again and world leaders serve the Church.
If we have in fact already fulfilled most of the prophecy of Our Lady of La Salette, and the Antichrist is imminent, it is better that people aren’t lulled into a sense of complacency. So I prayed to God that He would help illuminate the meaning of the fulfilled part of the prophecy, as I used the world wide web for research.
And, astonishingly, He did.
I started with the understanding that, contrary to our natural assumptions that events predicted in genuine prophecy will be obvious for everyone to recognize, often that is not the case, including in Scriptural prophecy. So there is a good chance that, if much of what was predicted by Our Lady of La Salette has come to pass, it was overlooked by most Catholics.
During an apparition of Our Lady of La Salette in 1846, according to a transcript by one of the seers, Melanie, Our Lady revealed a good deal about what was to thereafter befall the world, beginning in the near future. She began by telling about the depravity of priests, and punishments that were to be sent by God, including in Italy.
She then identified a specific year, 1864, when “Lucifer and a large number of demons will be unloosed from hell,” and will “put an end to faith, little by little, even in those consecrated to God.” She said that the “dead will take on the form of righteous souls which had lived on earth, in order to lead men further astray; these so-called resurrected dead, who will be nothing but the devil in this form, will preach another Gospel contrary to that of the true Christ Jesus, denying the existence of Heaven; that is also to say, the souls of the damned. All these souls will appear as if fixed to their bodies).”
“Everywhere there will be extraordinary wonders, as true faith has faded and false light brightens the people,” she continued, appearing to refer to the “wonders” procured by spiritualism and occultism in the mid-1880s, which included practices like automatic writing in which demons communicate messages often thought to be sent by benign spirits. During this time, seances were popular to the point of being practiced by heads of state such as Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, and Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. Seance participants would often see “spirits” taking the form of their deceased loved ones, another “wonder.”
Our Lady continued to reveal that “In the year 1865, there will be desecration of holy places. In convents, the flowers of the Church will decompose and the devil will make himself like the King of all hearts.”
“France, Italy, Spain, and England will be at war. Blood will flow in the streets. Frenchman will fight Frenchman, Italian will fight Italian,” she went on.
Here Our Lady is likely referring to the Brigantiaggio of Italy (1961-1965), when southern Italian insurgents fought the new Italian national army in one of the biggest civil wars of the 19th century; as well as the battle between forces of the Paris Commune and the French national government in 1971, so intense at one point that it had a period dubbed “Bloody Week.”
Our Lady went on to give another specific prophecy in the context that “disorders and crimes of men have pierced the vault of the heavens,” and that is that “Paris will burn.”
The most famous and destructive burning of Paris in history occurred in 1971, fitting into the rough time frame she speaks of. At the time, major buildings in the city were set ablaze by Communards, including the Tuileries Palace, Palais de Justice, Ministry of Finance, and Rue de Rivoli.
“Several cities will be shaken down and swallowed up by earthquakes,” Our Lady then said, possibly referring to cities which were virtually destroyed in the early 1900s by earthquakes, including San Francisco and Valparaiso in 1906, and Messina in 1908.
“People will believe that all is lost. Nothing will be seen but murder, nothing will be heard but the clash of arms and blasphemy,” she continues. We may guess that this description of such despair and pervasive fighting refers to World War I. She noted that the earth will become “desert-like” — a potential reference to the devastation in Europe caused by World War I.
“And then peace will be made, and man will be reconciled with God. Jesus Christ will be served, worshipped and glorified. Charity will flourish everywhere. The new kings will be the right arm of the holy Church, which will be strong, humble, and pious in its poor but fervent imitation of the virtues of Jesus Christ.”
When I first read this, I thought, surely this hasn’t happened yet, since Catholics should be widely aware of a time when political leaders served the aims of the Church. But I then thought of Englebert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria from 1932-1934. He was not only a devout Catholic, but sought to govern Austria according to Catholic principles, including Catholic corporatist ideals, as Dietrich von Hildebrand testified in his memoirs, My Battle with Hitler. It was in service of this goal that Dollfuss commissioned Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi paper “The Christian Corporative State.”
Could there have been other political leaders around this time who also supported the Church and Catholic principles of governance? I marveled to find at least several more in Europe who governed around the same time as Dollfuss.
In Germany, Wilhelm Marx, who served as chancellor from 1926 to 1928, was a leading member of the Catholic Centre Party, which was expressly founded to represent Catholic interests in the predominantly Protestant country. In 1911, he had founded a Catholic school organization in Düsseldorf to fight against the secularization of the German school system, and he had also served as the chair of the People’s Association for Catholic Germany.
T. Cosgrave, the first president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932, was honored by Pope Pius XI with his highest honor for a layman, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Pope Pius IX, in recognition of his support for the Catholic Church in Ireland and Catholic social policies. Éamon de Valera, who led Ireland as Prime Minister from 1932 to 1948, also supported Catholic social teaching, adding clauses to the new Constitution of Ireland in 1937 to “guard with special care the institution of marriage” and ban divorce.
António de Oliveira Salazar, Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1945, was a strong supporter of the Catholic Church, and like Dollfuss, endorsed Catholic corporatism. He encouraged private Catholic schools, made religious instruction mandatory in public schools, supported laws in accordance with Catholic morality, and gave the Church a privileged status, exempting clergy from certain taxes and conscription and giving them state financial support.
And in Spain, the well-known Francisco Franco, who began to serve as Prime Minister in 1938, vigorously promoted Catholicism as the religion of the state, restoring the privileges of the Church after the Spanish Civil War and making religious education mandatory in schools.
It is noteworthy that following the First World War in Hungary, leaders like István Bethlen not only gave the Catholic Church weighty control over education but outright opposed the anti-Catholic principles of the French Revolution and communism. According to historian István Deák:
Between 1919 and 1944, Hungary was a rightist country. Forged out of a counter-revolutionary heritage, its governments advocated a “nationalist Christian” policy; they extolled heroism, faith, and unity; they despised the French Revolution; and they spurned the liberal and socialist ideologies of the 19th century. The governments saw Hungary as a bulwark against Bolshevism and Bolshevism’s instruments: socialism, cosmopolitanism, and freemasonry.
In addition, Belgium had several prime ministers who led as Catholic Party members during the period following the First World War until the end of the Second World War, including Henri Jaspar (1926 – 1931) and Charles de Broqueville (1932-1934).
These leaders did not need to be perfect to serve the Church in their political capacity, and they did so to a degree that they can be said to have acted as the “right arm of the holy Church.”
Our Lady went on in her prophecy, “The Gospel will be preached everywhere and mankind will make great progress in its faith…” This aligns with the fact that in the 1920’s and 1930’s, commercial airlines expanded and began regular travel to parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific that had previously been very difficult to reach, and allowed expanded missionary activity there. Further development of travel infrastructure and communications advances, such as transatlantic telephone service, further aided an expansion of missionary activity.
While so far Our Lady’s predictions seem to have clear correspondents in history, her next words are perplexing:
“This peace among men will be short-lived. Twenty-five years of plentiful harvests will make them forget that the sins of men are the cause of all the troubles on this earth.”
At first glance, it doesn’t seem to make sense that this post-World War I period — during which parish and devotional life was strong, missionary activity flourished, and the Church had a notable number of strong political allies — was a time of “plentiful harvest.” The approximately 25-year period from 1919 to 1944 encompasses both the Great Depression and World War II. This was a time of poverty and war, not peace and prosperity.
Wrestling with this, I thought, what if Our Lady means “plentiful harvest” in another sense? And then I realized: She was talking about this time period as flourishing in a spiritual sense, not a material sense. She meant a plentiful harvest of souls.
The very reasons she distinguishes this time period are spiritual and religious ones, not material ones. She says “charity will flourish everywhere,” not that “prosperity will abound.” By “Peace among men,” she means the peace of charity.
This interpretation comports with this time frame also because it was after the end of World War II — about 25 years after the end of World War I — that morality started to erode and the foundations of the sexual revolution were laid, as Catholic apologist Trent Horn recently explained. “The decade that broke American Catholicism” was not the 1960’s, but the 1940’s, according to Horn.
Historian Alan Petigny has pointed out that between 1942, after the U.S. entered World War II, and the first issue of Playboy in 1953, “the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled.” He believed this was a direct effect of the Depression and the War, which led Americans to desire to “live in the moment and enjoy life.” As Horn put it, war leaves “scars in the soul.”
Horn recounted another chain of events that contributed to a “silent sexual revolution” of the 1940s and its later flowering in the 1960s. In 1937, the FDA approved barrier contraceptives and the American Medical Association (AMA) recommended their use. Condoms were widely distributed during World War II because soldiers’ fornication was common, while posters from the time reveal soldiers were advised to use condoms, since “pick ups” spread venereal disease.
Alfred Kinsey’s book Sexual Behavior and the Human Male, which was considered a leading expert work on human sexuality, was released in 1948. The report’s research shockingly involved pedophiles, and claimed that humans are sexual from birth. Using the skewed data of prison populations and pro-homosexual groups, it overinflated the rate of homosexuality and promiscuity in the population, and gave the impression that deviant sexual behavior was “normal.”
The sexual revolution had already begun — the spiritual “harvest” fell away.
Our Lady then mentioned a prefigurement of the Antichrist, which I believe most likely references either Hitler or Stalin: “A forerunner of the Antichrist, with his troops gathered from several nations, will fight against the true Christ, the only Saviour of the world. He will shed much blood and will want to annihilate the worship of God to make himself be looked upon as a God.”
She continued, “The earth will be struck by calamities of all kinds (in addition to plague and famine which will be wide-spread). There will be a series of wars until the last war, which will then be fought by the ten Kings of the Antichrist, all of whom will have one and the same plan and will be the only rulers of the world.”
“Before this comes to pass, there will be a kind of false peace in the world. People will think of nothing but amusement. The wicked will give themselves over to all kinds of sin. But the children of the holy Church, the children of my faith, my true followers, they will grow in their love for God and in all the virtues most precious to me.”
I believe it is clear that we have had at least several decades now of this “false peace” in which people are consumed by amusement, a phenomenon that has only intensified over the past couple of decades.
Our Lady goes on to prophesy, “Many convents are no longer houses of God, but the grazing-grounds of Asmodeas and his like. It will be during this time that the Antichrist will be born of a Hebrew nun, a false virgin who will communicate with the old serpent, the master of impurity, his father will be B (unidentified).”
Asmodeas is a demon associated with lust. We know that immediately following the Second Vatican Council, thousands of religious left their vocations and convents to be “free” and get married or even sexually experiment, but how many who stayed succumbed to sexual immorality? It’s difficult to say. Has the Antichrist already been born, then?
The following prophecies of Our Lady of La Salette may give some guidance:
“The seasons will be altered, the earth will produce nothing but bad fruit, the stars will lose their regular motion, and the moon will only reflect a faint reddish glow. Water and fire will give the earth’s globe convulsions and terrible earthquakes which will swallow up mountains, cities, etc. …
“Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.”
Regarding the changes of the earth, it seems that they have at least begun. Scientists and researchers have been reporting longer summers and warmer seasons throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (although the exact causes are debatable). The fruit of the earth is now largely bad not only because of genetically modified crops, but because of heavy metal contamination of the soil — and therefore food — in large part due to geoengineering chemtrails. The frequency of major tsunamis has been increasing since the 2000s, and already four of the 10 deadliest earthquakes ever recorded have occurred in the 21st century.
Most notably, Our Lady suggests that Rome’s loss of the Catholic faith will precede the arrival of the Antichrist. This should be the biggest red flag signaling he is close: Since Pope Francis was elected, we can say without exaggeration that the Vatican has lost the faith.
In fact, just one of his statements — that “All religions are a path to God” — meets the criteria of Pope Pius XI as set out in the 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos for loss of the Catholic faith. Pius XI stated:
Certainly such attempts can no way be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule. Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little, turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them falls away completely from the divinely revealed religion.
Francis has also heretically claimed that one can receive Holy Communion in mortal sin, and that same-sex civil unions are permissible; he has overseen the approval of the blessing of same-sex couples, and has also appointed a slew of prelates to the Synod on Synodality who brazenly defy Church teaching.
Pope Leo XIV has given no indication of correcting these heresies. Rather, he has met with homosexuals and transgenders, as well as a priest who supports homosexuality (Fr. James Martin) without correcting them in fraternal charity; he received the Dominican Sister Caram, a firm proponent of homosexual “marriage” and abortion, likewise without correction; and “when Cupich proposed to honor Senator Durbin, he remained silent…and then intervened in an exactly Bergoglian manner: we should put abortion in its context; there are other serious life issues,” as renowned Catholic professor John Rist put it. By all indications, he is continuing the program of Francis in its rotten essentials.
There are other material and spiritual signs that the Antichrist’s public entrance is very close, if not imminent, but that is beyond the scope of this article. The point is that we cannot bank on another 25 years before he arrives, but must be spiritually on alert and vigilant.
We should without delay make it a top priority to live in a state of grace, and grow as close to God as possible in prayer and in our moral life. We must fervently pray for those not living in a state of grace, and for priests at risk of succumbing to the religious deception of the Antichrist. We must frequent the sacraments often, and call upon the intercession of our good Mother, Mediatrix of all Grace.
And we can and should live in a state of total peace and trust in God’s care and supernatural help, joyfully embracing the way He can use us in these times. We are privileged to be living through them.
