THE CATHOLIC RESPONSE
TO THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS
I was pulling out from the curb and noticed a ticket on my windshield.
Happily it was not a ticket but a pamphlet. It invited me to consider where I wanted to spend eternity. Inside the pamphlet
was a laboriously written note with many misspellings. It warned me about the imminent arrival of the Second Coming.
Such warnings are usually given by small bible-based fundamentalists
and evangelical chruches. They understand witnessing in this manner as a vital part of their fiath beliefs. Howerve, they
are not alone. There are also some Catholics who proclaim that legal abortion will result in the destruction of both
America and the world.
I have smiled
patronizingly at people who hand out such end-of-the world pamphlets and proclaim such messages. I fear my attitude matched
that of Mark Twain's. When told the world was coming to an end, he snapped, "Good. We can do without it!"
Howver, my patronizing
days are over. The late scripture scholar Raymond Brown advises that end-of-the world people perform a valuabel service for
us. They keep the Second Coming before our eyes.
People such as
these forcefully remind us of our own belief. In the Nicene Creed we recite, "He will come in glory to judge the living and
the dead." After the Consecraton we say, "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again." In the Pater Noster
we pray for the Seocnd Coming in the prayer Jesus himself taught us. We even beg, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven."
Rightly
so! Pierre Teilhard de Chardin understood this when he told us "we must renew in ourselves the desire for the
great coming."
We share faith
in the parousia with many of our fellow citizens. A US News and Word Report artilce cites a poll it conducted.
Almsot sixty percent of American beleive the world is slated to come to an abrupt end. About fifty percent are convinced
there will be an anti-Christ. Twenty percent believe the Second Coming and anti-Christ will appear in a few years.
Yet, we would
be unwise to get into the prediciton business. Many religious groups in our lifetime have grandly prophesied the day, hour,
and minute of our and the world's demise. Their efforts have resulted in scrambled eggs spread most ignobly across their respective
faces.
As Catholics
we need to take the advice of Jesus that we know not the day nor the hour of the Second Coming. We need to know
that human sin, even the moral evil of aboriton, will not be the reason for either the destruction of America or the
end of the world. We know this to be true becasue in the Covenant of the Rainbow God promised Noah he would not destroy either
humanity or the earth again.
The Fifth Lateran
Council of the early sixteenth century forbade looking into a crystal ball. It denies us the luxury of predicting either
the time of the Second Coming or the arrival of the anti-Christ. It was a sound prohibition then. It remains so
today no matter what the temptation may be to the contrary. Vincent McCorry put it this way, "What matters is not the timing
but the fact."
In the meantime
we Catholics have much to do. Like the people who St. Paul sternly admonishes in his second letter to the Thessalonians,
we cannot idle our time away. Nor can we afford the luxury, as Paul says, of minding everybody's buisness but our own.
We must become
more exciting Catholics. One way of doing that is by making the world about us a more attractive place to live in. Charles
Dickens said that no one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for someone else. Dickens would endorse the
statement that true love is an action; not just a feeling.
In a recent report
the United States Government Accounting Office stated that up to 100 million people, thta is one out of every three Americans,
live either below or just above the federal poverty line and that a large number of these are female heads of houshold and
their children. That so many of our fellow citizens, some of them infants and children, go to be hungry each night is a scandal
we Catholics cannot ignor.
We must demand
systemic changes in our naiton's economic structures. We must demand that everyone capable of working has a job
that pays a living, not a minimum, wage. We must demand that people with children have access to safe and affordable childcare.
We must demand that all children be given food, clothing and shelter above what is needed to simply exist. Most
importantly, we must work to ensure that our government at all levels - local, state, and national - does its job to make
this possible.
To be a Catholic today requires that we be a counter-cultural people. We make up an astounding 23% of
the United States population. What a force for good we could become if we stopped our
obsesson with abortion and homosexulaity and lived Jesus' mandate to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked,
and visit the sick!
The Prayer of St. Francis is a prayer for peace widely attributed
to the 13th cnetury saint Francis of Assisi. However, the prayer in its present form cannot be traced back further than 1912
when it was printed in France in a small spiritual magazine called La Clichette (The Little Bell) as an anonymous
prayer. The prayer was introduced to Americans in 1936 by Cardinal Francis Spellman who distributed millions of copies of
it during World War II.
There are more than 100 versions of the text in English. The most
popular version is the following one and I urge each of us to reflect upon it:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we recieve,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal LIfe.
Amen
