Catholic Authors and Christendom's Future

French historian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) in his work The Great Heresies, written in 1938, reveals the significance of September 11, warns about the violent rise of Islam, and predicts the disastrous effects of Modernism. Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich in her private revelations (early 1800's) also revealed a date which ties together with Belloc's description of the modern day fall of Christendom.

"The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to among the most famous in history--September 11, 1683."

"But I ask the question in the sense, 'Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake off the domination of Europeans--still nominally Christian--and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?' The future always comes as a surprise . . . And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

". . . very few men, even among those who are highly instructed in history, recall the truth that Mohammedanism was essentially in its origins not a new religion, but a heresy. Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the Catholic truths which it had retained. . . Whatever the cause be, Mohammedanism has survived, and vigorously survived. Missionary effort has had no appreciable effect upon it. It still converts pagan savages wholesale."

"These things being so, the recrudesscence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. . . I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic--but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past:--one might say that they are blinded by it. . . the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it--we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines--the very structure of our society is dissolving."

On Modernism Belloc observes and further predicts:

". . . a Church of the future within which there will be intensity of devotion, indeed, but that devotion practiced by one small body, isolated and forgotten in the midst of its fellowmen" [and left on one side in the general current of the new Paganism].

"Those nations which had retained the Catholic culture are now in the third generation of anti-Catholic social education. Their institutions may tolerate the Church, but are never in active alliance with it and often in acute hostility."

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich in her private revelations recorded in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (c. 1824), which provided the inspiration for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, records this chilling event:

"In the centre of Hell I saw a dark and horrible-looking abyss, and into this Lucifer was cast, after being first strongly secured with chains; . . . God himself had decreed this; and I was likewise told, if I remember rightly, that he will be unchained for a time fifty or sixty years before the year of Christ 2000."

So with these authors from our Catholic past, making predictions of which we have seen fulfilled, we can at least learn from their foresight and steer our souls, our children's souls, and as many other souls as we can Heavenward to stem the tide of evil and give God little victories.