From the Heart of the Shepherd

From the bulletin for The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2025 July 13)

The Eschatological Adventure, Part 9: Back to the Eschatological Future!

The soul of Reverend Louis had been burning away its impurities in Purgatory for nine hundred seventy-three years when the Antichrist finally appeared on earth. Eager himself was only dimly aware of the event. His soul felt a vibration passing through the Communion of the Saints, urging them (he sensed) to pray for the perseverance for the righteous on earth. This Eager did, though he could hardly have fathomed the occasion calling for it.  

Oblivious as he was to happenings of the world that forgotten about him for nearly as long as he had been out of it, Eager must be left to his solemn purgations (assured as we are of their happy conclusion) as another thread of this future-history is taken up. 

For better or worse, there are few to choose from. For we must follow the footsteps of one of those righteous persons for whom Eager, et al., prayed. And yet because the love of men did indeed wax cold, as Our Lord had foretold, and precious little faith could in fact be found on earth at the time of His last coming, the pickings are slim. 

So the slim spotlight falls on Jolianna. 

Had she known her name meant “lovely grace,” she would have thought it ironic. The angels saw it otherwise. This girl–for girl she was, nineteen and lean, and charmingly unpolished whenever she did anything but pray–could have been, in another century, a fill-in for Joan of Arc. She was forthright and selfless. Tender-hearted and quick-tempered, she was graced with a strong, simple faith that permeated her every thought. But unlike the Maid of Orleans, it was not Jolianna’s fate to speak with angels or to lead armies to victory. No, she was rather one of those blessed “last” who were to be first when all was said and done; a member of the mystical Body at the time it, as a catechism had prophesied, “entered the glory of the kingdom through a final Passover, when the Church will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.” 

It was not her lot, then, to taste temporal success in the Valley of Tears. But Jolianna’s life did resemble St. Joan’s in this: that she at last attained to glory by being swallowed alive by the gaping mouth of the beast. In the flames of this world’s hatred, her holocaust was perfected. 

But this maiden was not meant to be an echo of the saints who went before. Rather, she was the personification of the Church in her time, the Virgin Daughter Zion at the end of the age, the part in whom the whole was revealed. For by the time of our heroine’s baptism, the hour of consummation had finally arrived. The Groom was not just at the gates, but entering them. The pure and promised virgin was finally ready to be presented; her bejeweling was completed in Jolianna’s life, or rather death. 

Utterly opposite was that man whose advent was also foretold in Scripture. If she was the living image of the Bride, the perfect complement to Christ, he was His photo negative. The incarnation, as it were, of that spirit who found nothing resembling himself in Christ. 

The backstory of the lawless one could be summarized as the personal undoing of all that Jesus had accomplished for him in the desert. Christ had reminded the ancient serpent that “one does not live on bread alone,” but this man would be declared man’s savior by promising to end world hunger. While Christ had declared that the Lord God was not to be put to the test, this son of perdition would astonish the masses by his defiance of death, giving rise to rumors of divinity. And if Christ had categorically refused to bend the knee to Satan, even for all the world, this man would gladly accept that ancient offer, bringing history to an abrupt end.

Yea, all the kingdoms of the earth would be given into the hands of this “man of sin.” And the earth itself groaned the day that all nations declared him their lord, to great rejoicing. 

“Woe to them,” warned the prophet, “who call evil good!” And woe was on the way.

From the Heart of the Shepherd: The Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul