Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

prefigurement of Christ’s last triumph, for by it the old order in fact as well as
in prin ciple was removed from the scene, leaving the Church free and
independent in the world. Christ’s tri umph of the Cross is the beginning of
His final conquest of death.
Common Misunderstandings
To teach these things, we repeat, was the purpose of the Apocalypse. It
was not written to satisfy idle curiosity about the future. It was not written to
contradict our Lord’s own words about the last times, “of that day and hour no
one knows, not even the angel of heaven, but the Father only” (Matthew
24:36). And “you do not know at what hour your Lord is to come” (v. 42). It
was not written to provide a blueprint by which a person of in genuity could
plot the future course and destiny of peoples and nations down into our
present time. (People have, it is true, dreadfully misused the Apocalypse in
this way for countless generations, and in variably they have found its
“revelations” playing out just as it reaches their lifetime – it is easier, it seems,
to fit the prophecy into the convenient mould of the past which is known than
to be equally sure of the future.) Above all, it was not written to frighten us,
to cause us to despair, but to console and reassure faith.
We are not so optimistic as to think that any amount of common sense
words on the Apocalypse will keep it from being misused by those who have
made it (or rather, their misunderstanding of it) the essence of their religion
and life. It has too long afforded curious souls that thrill of “sacred
fortunetelling” by juggling the numbers and symbols which they do not in
the least understand, making them mean what they want them to mean, and
then confidently serving the result up as “God’s word.” It has been too long a
gold mine for the lunatic fringe, the idle, the curious, those who are more
interested in their neighbors’ sins than their own, and those who have a
singular pleasure in thinking themselves irremediably “saved” while a
countless number of their fellow men are irremediably “lost,” for all this to be
given up without a struggle. The Apocalypse will continue, probably until the
end of time, to be a writing “which the ignorant and unstable twist to their
own destruction, as they do the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16).
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