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The End is Here “We are living in the end times!” It’s the sort of statement you might expect to hear from a televangelist or a streetcorner preacher. “The end is near! The last days are upon us!” Such apocalyptic ideas are for fundamentalists and doomsday watchers, aren’t they? Not necessarily; the author of the epistle to the Hebrews writes that God “in these last days has spoken to us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church in commenting on the Lord’s Prayer states, “The end-time in which we live is the age of the outpouring of the Spirit.” When did the outpouring of the Holy Spirit occur? At Pentecost, some two thousand years ago; so not only are we living in the end times, but so too were the Christians in the catacombs, in the medieval monasteries and in the seventeenth-century Vatican. The Church does teach that there will be a final time of trial and that Christians living then will endure great tribulation and persecution: for Catholics, contemplating the “end times” is not primarily about finding out when, or even how, the world will end, but anticipating the full and
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