If it seems as if our institutions are melting down, that’s because they are.
We’ve said this before — and quoted prophecies to that effect. Last month, we quoted a locution to Father Michael Scanlan, the late president of Franciscan University in Steubenville, to this same affect.
From Congress, to bureaucratic government agencies, to the executive branch, to the judiciary, to the media, and academia, to the IRS, to especially the health-care industry, to those who are supposed to protect us from consumer fraud, and environmental hazards, to law enforcement, and even at times in the Church: institutions are losing prestige, are losing respect, and that threatens chaos.
Already, in the United States, galamatias reigns: Institutions are under attack, prominent people are in disarray, once credible sources are no longer credible, and this breakdown will persist as part of what long has been foreseen in the way of purification or chastisement.
For the U.S., it is an unprecedented reckoning. But in history, one can cite a number of similar periods, including the Middle Ages and during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Everyone everywhere is attacking anyone with a contrary view in often vile terms. Partisanship has reached the point of totality; we are in a “post-truth” state, to quote one former official. Post-truth is pre-fascism.
It was back in 1975 at the Vatican during an historic charismatic conference in Rome that an American evangelist named Dr. Ralph Martin of Michigan — who has served as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization — was given a “word of knowledge.”
As his website explains, “Dr. Martin is an internationally known evangelist. He is the founder and president of Renewal Ministries, which he established in 1980 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to renew the faith of Catholics through retreats, publications, conferences, and through television and radio. He has published numerous books, articles, pamphlets and videos on living out the Christian faith in a more effective way. Dr. Martin’s television program, The Choices We Face, has been airing on the Eternal Word Television Network since 1985, and is the longest running Catholic television program in the world. He holds a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome.”
What Martin felt “told” by the Lord, back in 1975, was that “days of darkness are coming on the world, days of tribulation…
“Buildings that are now standing will not be standing. Supports that are there for My people will not be there. I want you to be prepared, My people, to know only Me and to cleave to me and to have Me in a way deeper than ever before.
“I will lead you into the desert… I will strip you of everything that you are depending on now, so you depend just on Me. A time of darkness is coming on the world, but a time of glory is coming for My Church, a time of glory is coming for My people. Because I love you I want to show you what I am doing in the world today. I want to prepare you for what is to come.”
That was nearly fifty years ago, and at the time, those who heard and believed it expected it to occur rather quickly. It seemed imminent (“soon,” in our rushed human time). It did not thusly transpire — at least not in obvious terms.
But Martin’s prognostication, like Father Scanlan’s, has unfolded in subsequent decades. Whether an intuition or locution is left up to our individual reckoning. Looking back, one can perceive that what it foretold began to take shape around 1975 in a subtle unfolding, as the evil from the Sixties became institutionalized and refined during that decade and then furthered during the Eighties (see the Wall Street scandals back then) and through to the present. This is all detailed in Where the Cross Stands.
In 2010, a writer for Time began an article on the fall of trust in the U.S. by saying (as if in affirmation of the prediction) that “in the past decade, nearly every institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, major league baseball, the Church, or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent, or both.”
Though it has been thoroughly rocked by the invasion of homosexual predators, and other issues, including current ones, Time went too far, perhaps, with the Church. It’s built on a Rock.
But the point was made. Add sports and all forms of entertainment to the list — especially these.
A meltdown: like snow on a mountain in spring.
First trickles, then streams… then torrents. We are in a time of whitewater; we are in a time where God is the only and a sure reserve; He alone we can completely depend upon.
–MHB
[resources: Michael Brown retreat, Washington DC area and Where the Cross Stands]