5 of 70 the complete apocalypse the catholic apocalypse

THE CATHOLIC APOCALYPSE Michael Bolerjack

Copyright Š 2012 Michael Bolerjack

Table of Contents

Arts Rest All Saints Day Purity of Essence Our Evening Prayer Preface to Paradise Throne Paradise Throne PP TOMB An Icon from an Evening in Glas Salted With Fire Praemunire End of Prophecy

This book is a shorter version, lightly revised, of texts previously epublished in the spring of this year, accompanied by two concluding notes concerning sovereignty, the issues surrounding the butler and the nuns, and the endgame of Benedict, where his papacy is headed. The original writings were composed 2010-2012 after I had asked the Lord the rather naïve question, “Who is 666?” The answer was at first devastating to me, leading me through the apocalypse of the Catholic Church as perhaps one of the first, outside of a few men in it, to know the answer. It is said “crede experto,” trust one who has been there and lived it. Having been Catholic for over 20 years, educated at a Catholic university and a Catholic seminary, it is now with sorrow and anger that I behold what has become of the Church in recent decades. I have written these pages for Christ, I am doing it for the Church, believing in the power of truth. I am yet optimistic with the hope that God will bring good out of evil and that, even if it were impossible, God can and will reveal the truth about the Church and its apocalypse now unfolding. As a priest once said to me, God does the impossible, God will not lead us anywhere he will not provide for us, and God wants us to do one thing, and that we must do. I believe that I am doing the one thing that He now requires.

Michael Bolerjack Feasts of St. Agapitus and St. Helena August 18, 2012

ARTS REST

Wherefore art thou?

Art at rest? To pause, to remain, to support, art. Rhythmic silences. Steps at starets. Sartre’s stare. The rest is silence. But art at rest re-starts, again and again. The books I have written rest and re-start, not hesitating like Derrida, or like he says Freud does in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, not taking the step. I take the step, of faith, of hope, of love, of arrival, of action, positif, still possible, against the deconstruction of the ideal and the real, when nothing became possible, and the possible became impossible.

The books are St. Sartre’s re-start, reclaiming both the existentialist’s freedom and the dialectical critique for today. It may be that Jean-Paul will make it in before John Paul II. It is up to God, but Christ says the prostitutes and sinners make it in before his opponents in the official church of His day. The gospel does not pass away, because it always applies. Our situations (Sartre’s word) never change. The church needs change. The church needs Christ. But like the young man at the seminary told me, God’s hands are tied. How can the One with the whole world in His hands not be free? He hands us freedom without losing His. As long as He has hands, there will still be a world to hold.

He is free and we are free, radically free, free of Popes and popularity, of politicians, and of history, since that ended sometime during the last fifty years. With the end of history in the postmodern period, an abrupt thing faces us: we do not have to be tied to the time we are in, we are no longer historically conditioned. Therefore: Re-start the arts. St. Sartre would. Stress the Tessera, the era of fragmentation, in order for the mosaic to be made. I do not give a rat’s ass how you do it, but put the pieces together again.

Establish the stars. As the poet said, nothing will have taken but the place, except perhaps for a constellation. He conceded the power of imagination to still make patterns, despite the deconstruction latent in his poetry, which Derrida found and expounded. Poetry in arrears, as we all are, and myself especially, let us give the word.

Arrest, art rest, then re-start, begin again, like Finnegan, waking, say yes, say thee and thou and thine, not I and me and mine. Buddha said he was always at the beginning. To connect the end to the beginning, a very hard thing to do. To sign, without resignation, to name, not for fame, to put words in books, like they did in the nineteenth century, before, ere, erstwhile, previous to motion pictures, records, radio, television, computers.

Rasters, scatter patterns. Rather, Easters, homeward, by the book, for why not then be of another time? Time itself has ended as such. It is time to begin again, beginning with time. The world still turns at the same speed, though there is no world to turn.

Rare stars, rear yourselves, rise up sires, roses risen: The rest is not silence, but fire.

All Saints Day

It is very late in the game, as most of us know. Postmodernism has been a time of the seeming attempt to restore traditions, a conservative time politically and theologically, but also a corrupt time, morally and financially. I think we need to look back a few decades to solve the puzzle.

Heidegger said that Nazism was great because it was about the confrontation of man and technology. And I believe this was somewhat correct. Postmodernism is founded on the fascist.

It is both politically conservative, morally nihilistic, and technologically adept. The Third Reich did not cease, but was transformed post 1945, and lives on in the anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment forces that are stressing freedom and covertly preparing totalitarianism, at the same time. The Berlin-Rome axis did not die, and I mean this in the sense of the unfortunate Catholic Church, which is a means of the magical projection of fascism to our world today. It was a kind of alchemy. The more Catholic the country, it seems, the more corrupt. Mafia in Italy, drug cartels and death squads in Latin America. As I said, conservative, immoral, technological. It is a fascinating matrix. To this we add magic, from Harry Potter, to Borges and Garcia Marquez, to the atrocities done in Juarez, sacrifices to an evil god. A magical, technological, conservative and drastically corrupt world. Deconstructionists try in their texts to say, well, it was always this way. Perhaps. But I think the modern world that once was was in principle opposed to this fascist en-framing. The net seems inescapable. Even friends criticize me harshly for not setting-up my voice mail on my cell phone, for wanting to be incommunicado. There is tremendous pressure on all sides to conform to the paradigm of fascist fashion which is now technological. I do not think most people realize that technology is the implementation of the fascist. And I do not define fascist narrowly, to the tea party, for instance, but broadly to include the whole of culture and

politics, finance and technology. I believe all of this bears down on the church and the world as an overwhelming attempt to destroy not men and cities and nations with armies, but the souls of individuals, by the annihilation of faith, hope and love. The “they� by this I know not whom or where or what. True tragedy cannot be pinned on anyone in particular. That is what makes it a tragedy. Tragedies are different though from case to case, play to play. Hamlet succeeds where Macbeth fails. Lear perhaps succeeds despite appearances, being reunited with his daughter, in love, despite the pain. We, too, must love, despite the pains, the cares, the pleasures, all the temptations that would lead us not to believe, not to hope, not to love. Be ready. As Hamlet. Be ripe. Like Lear. The tragedy cannot be averted, but it can be overcome, transformed, and love still triumph. The modernist was nothing if not critical. That makes me modern. The postmodernist is theoretical, but not very critical. If these are indeed the last days, my work may be too little, too late. But what will be we do not know, but I hope that we all may be, when God is all in all. That God will not lead us any where he will not provide for us, that God does the impossible, but that God requires something from us, perhaps something different from each, or perhaps the same, has been my guiding thoughts in this year of completion. Whatever our vocation is, it is God-given, and we must do it. Each of us has a vocation, whether we know it or not. In a sense, it may simply to be alive today. Though we come at the end, we may still reap what others sowed, and receive the same just, generous reward. Do not doubt God’s mercy or His heaven. And do not doubt that if you hold out to the end you will win.

I want to speak at the last, really after time ended, about modernism and postmodernism in terms of the man who is perhaps the greatest modernist, Immanuel Kant, and the man who is perhaps the poster boy for the postmodern age, John Paul II. In that collection of homilies known as the

theology of the body, in the long introduction to that work, it is said that the Pope, sitting at sumptuous table with guests in the ornate and extravagant Vatican, would exclaim upon hearing the name of the philosopher Kant. I think with good reason, which I hope to elucidate. For the sake of argument, we could say that modernism was a most pure philosophy, and that postmodernism is a most impure philosophy. For reasons I refer to all that I have written hitherto. The opposition of Kant and John Paul II is essential. I have heard a religious who was teaching at a catholic university, without question and I think with deliberation, misrepresent Kant’s philosophy, twisting it all out of shape. When I attempted a correction, I was stopped by the fascist force the nuns use sometimes against anyone who questions them or opposes them.

The same is true of the Catholic hierarchy. They will not allow dialogue, criticism, or any difference of opinion. But, time brings correction, as Benedict once said, and thank God, we may still have a little. How are we to understand the Kantian project in terms of today? The philosopher made a critique of pure and practical reason, eliminating the transcendent as unknowable, but founding morals on the categorical imperative. The religious I spoke of denied the basic principle of Kant stated in his theory of the transcendental, that we all have certain forms we all think in, and therefore we are similar and able to communicate with each other. We are not similar to God, as the Catholics claim in the analogy of being, but similar to each other, in our existence in the categories and in space and time. To continue Kant today, by my renovation of Hegelian dialectic and Derrida’s deconstruction, I have presented a new kind of critique of reason, not one of the pure and the practical, but of the general and the particular, and this as early as my writings on Wordsworth in the 1990s, when the poet denied the destructive analysis in favor of what he called the grand and simple reason, what may be called the imagination. In my logic I have shown the particular reason as having become completely

fragmented and destructive, completely contradictory. I think John Paul II would say this is a direct result of Kantian modernism, and perhaps he would be right. But Wordsworth was more right, in arguing forward into the high ground of imagination, not back into dogmatic retreat, which was a cover for a subterfuge. The reconciliation of the great fragmentation in particular reason, seen prominently in the American politics of the last thirty years, and incorrectly blamed on the media, which is but a mirror, not the cause of the contradiction, comes through a theory that is grand and simple and imaginative in a general reason that forgives contradiction, that affirms all, not by perpetuating conflict, but like Kant, through a prayer for a reasonable religion and an eternal peace. The way up is the way down. All is one. God alone is. Be perfect, which means not to set no limits to love, but rather release judgment and the power to judge, giving to God what is God’s, and letting the world be as it is, and the church as it is, forgiving all particular sins and errors, the mistakes of an impure logic, by a general attitude of love and forgiveness. We see this in the imperative of Kant, which says, basically, perform your actions as if everyone would repeat the actions you make. Which is very different from Nietzsche’s repetition. It is an imaginative forward moral thought. In all, it is the rule of the symbolic life, which you and I both lead, though you may or may not recognize it as I do. Since these things have been: Would that all God’s people were prophets, as Moses said. And as Joel said, God will pour out his Spirit on all people, the old men shall dream, and the young men shall see visions.

And as Peter quoted the latter on Pentecost, the Biblical footnotes say it is accomplished, the thing Moses and Joel and Peter said. The Spiritual life is a prophetic and symbolic life, and what we do is, I think, truly repeated by others in a way we know not. Charles Baudelaire spoke of a mystical correspondence as does the Kabbalah. At any rate, what we do, what we say, and what we think, matters in ways we do not know, but which is commented on in theories in physics, the

so-called “chaos” theory, and in psychology’s so-called “synchronicity.” Everything belongs, as Richard Rohr said. Everything belongs in the theory of general reason, and everything then respires with meaning, as Wordsworth’s mystical and moral poetry stated in a sentiment some mistakenly thought was natural. The postmodern deconstruction of meaning, that took place through the proliferation of the text, is overcome by an acceptance of personal responsibility for our actions that will reverse the corrupt financialization of all aspects of life which is the value of technology. Meaning is not purchased, it is made, and we make meaning through our actions, which some wish to be meaningless, but which in the eyes of God, are all infinitely important, as the Kantian categorical imperative said in its own terms. He saw us in relation to everyone else, as our explication, while postmodernism implicates us in its tainted love, sin without sense. “Sin without sense” is the violence of the age, the fruit of fascism, in a time when the words “crazy” and “evil” are used with free substitution to describe what has happened from Hitler to Juarez, 1945 to 2010. Madness, which Plato said was sometimes a very good thing, is implicated with evil, which can never be good, through the taint of the postmodern logic, eliminating the possibility of great love and what may be called the great divine love that is the madness the saints showed, in order to destroy love itself, which, to be the real thing, must look to all the world just plain crazy. This confusion of “madness,” which my logic may be pejoratively termed, with an “evil” not crazy, violates the principle of principles of the general reason: The pure must be preserved, without a trace of the other. The Immaculate Conception, the IC, as Derrida uses it in Glas, is purely opposed to the taint of it, IT. With so many of us paying so much attention, how could the end of things happen and go unnoticed? It is an old saying, we could not see the forest for the trees. With the flood of information, somehow this, combined with the lack of prophetic insight, as opposed to historical or scholarly, or political and financial,

wisdoms, has led to the situation. The triumph of wealth, the triumph of technology, the return of triumphalism in theology, the triumph of life, as the poet would say, in all its glare and would-be glory, a great vehicle crushing all opposed to it, or even just caught in the path of the career of it, all this really Roman and essentially Empiric triumph, spectacle, done for show, for semblance, and not really fooling anyone, but gladly welcomed as the escape from reason and reality, has been the recipe for the disaster of the evacuation of faith, hope and love, for the eclipse of the light of the world, the opposite of the preparation for the gospel some thought it might be. My work is written in antithesis to this, attempting a synthesis from the debris. That I may be wrong in my elucidation of the time, I must admit. That the logic I have found may not work, I must admit. But that the world is in deep trouble, I think we all must admit. I hope you will concede that we all have the responsibility, given the opportunity, to suggest a solution to what has become a global problem, involving the fate of all. That my solution involves great contradictions, and yet is simple, is the strength of it. Against the complexity of the Gordian knot of postmodernism I use a gospel sword, the word of truth, and built my work, after its false, but fortunate, start in the abyss, by adhering to scripture and synthesizing it with what I found in the best and most useful aspects of the wisdoms I have read and known and lived. This dialectic may yet provide a way out by not the use of force against the knot, nor yet by yielding to the seductions of complexity, but by patient description and explanation, and even, I hope, a telling disclosure of truth. Having over the course of time, with patience, in my search for truth, reorienting both dialectic and deconstruction, and finally turned to Kant and the first two critiques, of pure and practical reason, I now wish to turn to the third critique, that of judgment.

Kant writes of the beautiful and the sublime, and of teleology, so it is appropriate to say the matter concerning judgment in the context of the end of things and our finality, that is, the Day

of Judgment, the great day, the awesome and terrible day of the Lord. Having transposed reason from the pure and practical to the general and particular, let us likewise transpose the critique of judgment into a clear and precise, up-to-date definition of what in Christian theology are known as the particular and the general judgments. It may be the former is what we all expect, that we will be judged according to our works, our words, what we did and did not do, what we did for the least among us and what we did not, what we did for Christ, and what we did not. Scripture says it is so. According to our torturous particular reasons it could not be otherwise, as human thinking shows. But the Lord has said plainly again and again that He does not think like we do.

The general reason that I have suggested is the closest we can come, at least that I can come, to understanding the absolute Mind of Christ, reconciling oppositions, forgiving enemies, justifying sinners. And so I believe the general judgment will be according to the general reason. It will be pardon, amnesty, forgiveness. Though we as individuals may have been sunk deep in the abyss of sin, the whole man, the human race, will stand united as one on the Day of Judgment, and we will all be forgiven, as one. It is the unification of the beauty of holy forgiveness with the terror and sublimity of the infinite power of God, together with a true understanding of the telos. With this prophetic hope the logic ends. Thus, the logic ends, pointing to something over the horizon, while within the world and within the church the task of love remains. What is this task? Paul said that faith, and hope, and love, these three remain, but that the greatest of these is love. I appeal to hope in the resolution of the logic and the working through of Kant’s critiques of reason and judgment, but what of the thing-in-itself, that is, criticism, as such? For what we know is the way we know. If we know dogmatically, and if we know critically, these are very different things. In the work now ending, I argued for a faithful criticism and a critical faith. I think both dogmatic catholic theology of the postmodern era and the dogmatic theory of

deconstruction are more like each other than has been supposed, because both are equally far from criticism, and deny it in practice, not tolerating it, nor dialogue, nor the inviolability of the conscience, but rather insisting on the necessity of the positions held by popes and professors.

The conscience in its integrity preached by the Second Vatican Council must be critical, so as to be faithful to the message of the gospel, just as the philosopher must be critical in order to be faithful to the commitment to truth above all else. In an age when people deny that any truth still exists, or that the dogmatic position of one pope or professor or party, people or nation, economy or religion, is the one answer, the whole truth, it means that our time has dissipated thought in particular reasons, better known as rationalizations, rather than reach and take hold of truth itself, that is to allow oneself to live in it, abide in it, love it, instead of manipulating it, for politics, advertising, money, power, prestige and the appearance of the glamorous which is not glory, but is the death knell of beauty, good and truth. That we had a glamorous pope is a shame. That the destructiveness of the death written of by deconstruction became the definition of glamour is a shame. Faithful criticism stands outside the circularity of dogmatic positions, all particular, and stands in relation to the general reason, which is not to be seen in terms of the so-called general economy of postmodernism, opposed to restricted dialectic, but which is simply the standpoint that faith-criticism reaches by patience, love and hope. It is not a hopeless contamination and juxtaposition of any and all, but a discernment, beginning with the basic moral opposition of good and evil, which leads truly to the mystical love dogmatism promises but cannot deliver, because the dogmatic man is a tyrant, and loves no one in truth, but his own. They stand in particular against all the others, whom we know we are to love. Catholicism and Christianity to fulfill their mission must give up the special for the general, and love everyone. That political parties do not do this is perhaps understandable, but that the heirs of the gospel do not do this is a

sin, not to mention the many particular sins of which many now stand accused, even at the highest levels. That capital will not give itself away is perhaps understandable, but that the riches of the church, which are not found in the Vatican but in the Bible and on the altar of the heart, have not begun to be disclosed after two thousand years, what are we to make of this? You say, but the gospel is preached to all nations. Dogmatism is theory, but faith-criticism is practice. The church and the world criticize each other, but only from their particular points-of-view, that is generally not in good faith. They act like political parties, who agree to disagree, and profit off each other in a mutual economy of implication. In order to hold on to faith in the church and the world today one will need to learn to think, discern, be critical, and be faithful to the one thing necessary. Call that one thing what you will, it matters not, but when He calls, you must respond faithfully, even if it breaks you, breaks your church, breaks your world. As bread is broken, be broken, too. To not be too sentimental about this breaking, let us lay it all on the head of that one man Nietzsche, who was broken, as perhaps we all must be. There was Nietzsche, simply, on the square, and then dogmatically, we would have an anti-Nietzsche, which most good people since 1900, if they think about it, must suppose themselves to be, and then there is Nietzscheotherwise, the Heideggerean, Derridean, postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche. But you know my logic. What is Nietzsche in the fourth place? How does Nietzsche arrive? His basic doctrines, Heidegger cogently said, were the will to power and the eternal recurrence, which Heidegger made into “the will wills itself.” But this is not Nietzsche as fourth, rather Nietzsche returned.

What is the arrival of the will to power, of the will that wills itself? Not that willing of power, and nothing besides, but rather, and I might say merely, a willingness. Willingness. It is more “other” than the Other, than will to power itself, than an anti- or an otherwise-than-Nietzsche, and is his proper breaking, the breaking of the postmodern, through a simple, humble thing

summed by that word “willingness.” Not by assertion or negation. Not by reason, either dogmatic or skeptic, or even critical. Nor by indifference, the position of the amoral most congenial to Nietzsche, but by the willingness itself. Willingness to let go, to suffer, to be humiliated, to be broken. Christ did not will his crucifixion, but accepted it willingly. And there is all the difference between Christ’s practice and Nietzsche’s theory. Therefore, you may confidently hope that if you are willing, yes, you may yet be saved. Willingness is not the same as obedience, though it is often confused with it. It puts the glory of another ahead of itself, not as commanded, but out of love, out of confidence, in a courage that destroys even death, overcoming it not by willing nothingness, nor by not willing at all, but by willing as one is willing to love and be loved. It is our marriage. Blake spoke of the marriage of heaven and hell, while Derrida spoke of perfecting the resemblance of Dionysus and Christ. I choose neither option. I do not choose the one offered by the poet. I do not choose the one offered by the philosopher. To choose these seems not to reconcile oppositions, but to entangle all things in webs without end. It would be a violent yoking together of things that must be kept discrete.

Discretion recommends a better course. Let us say there is a marriage, to which we are all invited. It behooves us to attend the wedding of the Bride and the Lamb. We cannot feign important engagements elsewhere. On the day the world ends, if it has not already ended, there is only one place to be, and that is at the wedding. But recall, many were invited, but one did not have the proper attire, and so was cast out. I think we better bring an offering of some kind at least. I think it a spiritual truth that God has given gifts and talents to all, and that he expects us to not neglect these, but to increase them, as one might these days strive to enhance wealth.

However, I believe, the gifts of God are not always known to us, and we spend our whole lives searching for the thing we are to do. I was lucky. From an early age I was born to write, and that

was about the only thing I did. I loved and was loved, prayed, and made friends, held a few unsteady jobs, piled up great unpaid debts, all the while I wrote. It frightens me to think God in his absolute freedom may tell me that I got it all wrong, that I was really meant to do some other thing, ordinary or extraordinary, and that I missed the boat, missed my chance, do not get off the merry-go-round, but must go around at least one more time, if I am to be given an additional chance. God has mercy on whom He will. We work out our destinies in salvation history with fear and trembling, but also with joy and hope, as the council fathers said, and it is the union of these contraries that are the attitudes we bring to the wedding day, tomorrow, for which we may be shown mercy.

PURITY OF ESSENCE

The recuperation, the recoup, the dice thrown, the paradisiacal, the tree and the life’s He: Yes, that the logic of the impossible required that the thought of the impossible became the impossibility of thought, and he said the impossible was the only thing worth attempting, and nevertheless, in this therefore, this OR, this symbol or siglum, this turning point, this gold, was conversion, his and mine, in extremity, and that though I had seen did not yet believe, and inclined still toward the abyss, yet He saved me, and having said He would I did believe and came to be, conscience created, not by a smithy, not to be the conscience of my race, but to set out for a far country, that my race, a more meta- than marathon, to parry para- and carry on, toward Cecilia’s day and further, past deaths and rebirths and arrivals yet to come, looking back I found a fascist regime where none knew, and that the rapture has already happened, it is impossible, that the smoke of six million Jews in the Holocaust was the rapture, with their graves in the air, todesfugue, and Celan was not wrong, but crushed between mighty opposites, though he no baser nature, but he was it, the man, as each of us is, and it is the whole man who is the baser nature, as Hamlet knew, and we but caught between, and some knowing and some unknowing, and some knowing but uncaring, or inclining deliberately toward the abyss, on the horns of the dilemma, choose not the lesser of two evils, as the Church has always already done in practice, despite her theory, but break out of the vices, for God shows a way, and that is up, the dial pointing up, the indicator the direction the north of the future as Celan said, the Joycean gnomon, and the remainder, let that be, but you go on up, and only half make it, maybe, on

Kilimanjaro, but let us incline to the half that will, and despising the shame, look at the man at the altar, whomever he may be and realize that in Luke, after the words of the institution of the meal, Christ plainly says that the hand of the one who will betray Him is on the table, and therefore, every time a priest says the words of institution, his hand on the table betrays the words he speaks, but fulfills the prophetic word of Christ, whose word is eternal, since He is the eternal word, and His words will never pass away, and the standing now, the eternal truth always applies everywhere to everybody, as the Church says of her faith, and so the church then is the Church now, as Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, for ever, his opponents are ever the same, the type ever the same, only so much the worse for all we know of them, how many murders in His name which he let take place, yet nothing will have taken place but the place, when a pair of dice thrown, with a chance of turning, with a chance of forgiveness, but the Lord says at the end very succinctly, It Has Already Happened, and meant it then, and even more now, and six sides, the cubic anti-Christ, the indeterminacy of things and meaning belies the truth which is certain faith, and in the details is the devil, but in the premium mobile, at the outer limit, the first moved thing this PM, postmodern, the pontifex maximus is the title of a pagan priest who became the Pope, God help him, and in their titles, in their reach, in the tiara, kings ruled, kings slew, and in the time between noon and midnight, or the hour of great mercy at which Christ died and the hour or minute just before Igitur, in those closing dusks of days, popes ruled and popes slew, and were slain, but one was not, but said in his first lie, be not afraid!

When we should have been on guard, when we should have paid more attention, and cared that men were being silenced and persecuted for heresy by the anti-Christ, who could not allow dissent, disagreement, and this not a personal quirk of his, some trait, but strategic, to trap all the Catholics, who would love him so much and nearly worship a mere man, and who claimed it was

Mary who saved him, to cloak and hide the plot, and all of them going back to 1854 to cloak and hide the snare and wickedness, to pervert our love for Mary and use her against, what greater evil than this I know not, but that the sacraments made void, because the thing does not work itself, ex opere operato, but must be done with the intention of the Church, and where Peter is there is the Church, so if the man be not in communion with God, but in more unholy communion, what is to be done? So that therefore like deconstruction inwardly the Church was vacated Vatican dead at the top, de-capitalized already by the abyss of lie two sides Blanchot said, and that I had to leap, like Heidegger said, step back, and that I did, by the grace and mercy of God, and taking a long step back, did prepare the great leap forward, not of faith but by faith, to leap over the apocalypse, but how? To arrive and leap over the end of things, but how? And not like Macbeth standing on his bank and shoal of time, to see in to the life of things, and have a mind not mine own, oh Christ, re-mind me! Tell me of the things to come, when we will be there, ah, already there, the eschaton realized, as John and John and John my late friend said, fading on the dying horn, how we walked amid the ruins of shepherds and richmonds on a hot afternoon, though the battle was just as real as the battle of Britain, and death was near, I saw it in your face, but not yet in your eyes, you fading, John, John, John, oh the baptist! That I was too baptized by a priest in a Catholic Church just a mile away, and perhaps was written in the book of life, though works will tell, and so Hamlet had to perform, was that not it, after all, that the play was the thing, and the actor unable to act, has yet to perform, but though the rest be silence, and silence the work of fire, apotheosis, the funeral pyre, phoenix, rare bird, we did not fail like Falstaff, but fell with Hamlet, who said get ready, who said seas change, who said it is not near my conscience, and yet it were too curious to consider it so, I have traced the dust of Ash Wednesday back to Adam and forward to, fare forward, well, do not your alms or prayers in public but in secret, where your

father who sees in secret can give you the reward, for insincerity is the greatest sin, and that hypocrisy, that did un-man the papacy, where would be saints did prophesy the death of popes, may your days be as the years of Christ, she said to John Paul I, and I did not know, though some day we will all know just how and why he died, but that it might have been the cover-up, follow the money, and scandals appear and are hushed up just as quickly, and if we are to do it for the Church, and I think we are, if we have concern for the Church, and I think we should, it is for the souls of Catholics that we should fight, and the destruction of the hierarchy was like a neutron bomb of the faith, which destroyed not things but the thing-in-itself, despite the feigning and fawning and the abyss of power, the power of the abyss, which they had chosen, to hold sway, while claiming to be but mere servants, and the thousand years came and went, the First Reich of the Roman Empire, and a thousand years came and went like a watch in the night, the Second Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Third Reich was defeated by liberal democracy enlightened enough to fight for freedom, but that the pretension of the Fourth Reich coming is almost here, en-framed by Heidegger’s fourfold, and Derider’s semi-Pythagorean hypothesis of numbers, always squaring things, framing things, and we not knowing why, other than the bothand-neo-nor, which is the logic of the impossible, but writing, the text, became the net, and everything had to be done in the virtual space, so that time too would be but virtual, and oh, there hands were on the table, the whole wine, to sacrifice our daily bread, but the cup of her abominations, drink it not, that wine of astonishment, when a pair of dice, the shipwreck, the depths, may yet a constellation appear, all thought utters, all thought emits and admits risk, not chance, but a chance taken, to take the chance, to roll the dice, is not to either affirm or annul possibility, but to take action, so that the impossible became impossible, and the possible became possible once again, a limit on infinity, the eternal line, however zigzag which the dies falling

took, did not go to the tomb did not fall to death in the abyss where nothing is, but since he could not say it plumb straight out, the double session of our lives is almost over and if he would hasten you to death, yet I would haste to love, and all was not between, we were not in the middle as they claimed, to lull us to sleep with siren songs of literature, but in dialectical truth, which is the book, the name, the word and the sign, of glory, cannot not be, we were indeed very near the end, belated, related, in the struggle between death and love, and every time we took our places and rolled the dice one more time at the throne of our marriage, in the bed we read, we lay in love, and fought death to make love, though the house was burning, though the house was falling down, and even though we be buried in the debris, we would not cease from loving, oh, You and I! It was a Marinelability to learn my harmony, and justice that brought us love to symbolically defeat and therefore e-really, the time when all was veiled and unveiled simultaneously, all knowledge admits dice thrown, but the seat he sat on, knowledge better not to have had, and their bones under the altar, rather than their souls and relics bought and sold, and saints carved into pieces as if grace was wealth, as if the truth could still be rightly divided, as if, the poet said, as if, and the philosophy of as if we became and became what we beheld, so look away for union, gaze not on the spectacle, but listen, happy love, listen to the music of nature even pent-up in the city, as one would standing on a sea of mist mountainside see in the midst of the soul of the scene hear in the song of a gathering of birds more truth more beauty, still, be still, hear something real, as I have, morning and evening, in the days of my waking, but beautiful, the good God smiled on me, and praying did say me, as I said Him, so that the artist become an actor, you too could be said, despite, yes, and yet, for thee, for you, for you, I came for you, not in the night, not yet, not quite, but just at twilight, of idols, of ideals, and therefore of reality, in the nihilistic throng without a throne, and thrown into being, did implore and receive

Grace, that the ring might be complete, for what would be His wedding without such a ring? A gift to Him who gave me to me, I stood beside the groom holding the ring, and oh, saw the bride, not bare, but bedecked and new Jerusalem’s she did shine, Virgin bride, had left all for Him who stood beside me, she meta-, she mystic, she moral and more, and I having known para-, had become a friend of the groom, and a wedding guest, at the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world, which scholars do not know having voided all scripture of prophecy, but still His words ring true, and must be applied now, not then, and the Spirit will tell you things to come, and you cannot serve both God and money, and two did tell them, yet they would not believe, and just who is this Son of Man? Aye, that is the question he puts to one and all, that all may judge, discern, believe, hope and love, to really know the time, the day, the hour, He says he is like a thief, but a good thief, and he will take us away from the world, still separating out, wheat from tares, good from evil, as the world plummets into the abyss like in the wake of it, and we rise and shine with the resurrection, and today we shall be with Him in paradise, if you throw in with him, and not throw yourself away on the world, which is but a symbol, which, divided in two, the session double, mirrored, did like a lovely pool of broken water re-unite around Him, did gather at the throne, did placidly and with benedictions did more so unify and that than the universal church which was a broad and dangerous highway on which many walked, while he said the path was strict and hard to find, and that the children of the kingdom were thus always already to be thrown, to not sit with the elders at the throne, but having gambled for his vesture did proudly wear it, though he had never bestowed it, the pallium they claimed, the place vacated by the building of the palace, a tomb of faith, not the mountain of moral beauty, but the Book ever said it was Rome, and Rome it was ever to be, the eternal city, it had to be you, and it could not have been under auspices of Caesar, but under bridges of fathers,

the ire of sires, it is today you are that city, and yet a little while, you will be destroyed, one might say, not literally but literarily, if that be possible, in that you are void of meaning, except what the Word of God says of you, which you may have known, but did avoid, and pious, condemned reform, and forced our consciences rather than relinquish what you had stolen, and though you had the keys, the “keys� mark His word, did not un-lock, did not let in, oh my God, they have made your house a den of thieves and your Zeal does consume me, as all must say together, What Would Jesus Do? Indeed, do what he did, drive them out, re-form the old, tear it down to the ground, and prepare for the homeward journey, somewhere way over Jordan, over yonder, I’ve been told, not tolled, but storied in, not a fiction less, but in truth did write no novel, nothing new, He said It Has Already Happened, because the mark of the beast was confirmed so that the economy of simony could go on, buying and selling grace, as they said, His hands are tied, are they not? Yet He did cut that knot with the Word of Truth, that complex catholic contradiction He did hit with a rock, and then use its own sword against it, like how many times, Lord did they love the better places at the feast, and how many times Lord did they pay lip service to the humility of Christ yet claimed to be without even the possibility of error?

Napoleon did come thinking he without error, and Hitler did as well, along with popes that actually infallibly asserted the death of love and the love of wealth and power and now on the cusp of things we peer toward the next anti-Christ in this very late PM postmodern post-mortem, all the time they said one thing and did another, but which is abomination to God, and did not think like the Lord, and did not have the Mind of Christ, because they knew the truth and spoke oft of fine and living things, yet all the time behind the screen working to destroy our faith, but which if it be not in Christ will be destroyed, and holding not onto their Tradition-traitors, we Word in, we with meaning would be worded in, we scriptured, not historical but prophetic, not

without pun, they did forsake prophets for profits, and outlawed prophecy even, and said none can arise, for God has spoken, but the Word will always be spoken and the Spirit leads you where He will, away, at least, at last alone with Christ be loved, let Him be loved without any intermediary who usurps the place and vacates it, but that always His star does shine, past deconstruction of truth, and the dialectic of the day, past catholic love and catholic death, a faith abides amidst a crossing, paradise throne, for He chose it, as they unwittingly did, and hope and love as strong as death, which cannot hold Him or you or me, for we’re not bound, we’re free, the true city of the Bride, in Jerusalem we shall be, when we will be freed: Yes, His Word still cuts the complexities of the current complicity, for the crisis of the contemporaneity of the meaning of the mercy of Christ.

Our Evening Prayer will have been a book, filled with many signatures, at least three or four, or seven or twelve, but never simply two or one, for then there will be no signature and no end to the signatures, for the cuts and the wounds to heal, not in schizophrenic fashion, as the symptom that produces its own fore-healing, out of the play of forces that exert us within and without, making us both hyper sexual and hyper textual in the same instant of madness, overloaded with desire, overly attentive in our reading, trying to discern the indecipherable, circles of selves to fit the square hole of the abyss on the page and the stage, that framework of tech city, that un natural un shaped form less form beyond the simplicity of the curve of life that distorts our being into the one multi-task of living and dying in the same interrupted, as I met my age and did shoulder I knew not what, but God knew, when I knew Him not, and in the seeming interregnum of the vacant dethroned disfigured decapitated deconstructed I sought the absolute, and held that we should go from nothing to everything, and against the grain, and despite the triumph of the will and the eclipse of reason and the ebbing of faith and trust, I was a seeker, but I was found, and though it seemed I was struck by genius and by magic and by the muse, yet I did strike a blow, not against all that, but at the giant Goliath in the way, and what my rock was you should know, and what the sword, that too you shall know, for there was a behemoth, call it what you will, a thing I sum post-modern, that can in principle, of its own terms, never be summed, no summa yet possible, yet summation required, and that theological, and a synthesis, to appropriate and not to be appropriated, and to give and not to count

moment, like the supposed, like the word itself, which gives itself away in speech yet retains itself in the graphic shadow of a drawn and quartered neo-nor, the syn- despised, the thesis suspended, the trace of something that escapes both wisdom and foolishness, a kind of hilarity that is the death of serious work and building, dwelling and thinking, for a wandering polysemy, polylogia, a bare hymen of meaning between ourselves, our frail consciousness and the abyss of nonentity, that ISBN said is sacred yet tainted with vice, and in the taintedness, dreams of our yet un written pages flowing with no restriction to the falls of hymeneal aggravations and abusive abysses, the assault of the letter A on all we are, an aggregation of insubstantial structures, the cost, and to shoulder like Atlas, and not to merely shrug, and to stand under God when all around me the world was falling, not searching, but despising, and rushing, in economy, to spend all the capital of our inheritance, to waste the rich deposit of faith and reason so carefully built up by work and sweat of men and women over 4000 years, the great remainder of all dwindling to almost nothing, and then on bare credit to live, the future consumed as well, with nothing left for children, not even a generation to come, all it seems we have destroyed, even the possibility of action itself, the void invaded, the abyss and the gravity of it, the black star our hearts wed, the river she ran into no sea, and bells did ring always from morning till night, at dawn, at dusk, matins and vespers, weddings and funerals and a few more baptisms, but always in the church in the world, and in a tower that did not babble, though it did seem about to fall, and some supporting it, as

unlike 1, 2, 3, 4: but more like Nietzsche on the square, overcome overman, over a flogged and dying beast that was no thing but the wretched point at which his mind collapsed under the weight he could not support of a lifetime of the power of the open, but in order to arrive, in another way, without madness, yet still to find love, and this not in profits of extremity, but in the prophecy of catholic economy, when all will be not the glory globalizing but de-capitalizing, when the church of the new after the apocalypse, the time from 1945-2010, will emerge, a pure white nothing, a reconstructed theory and a reestablished practice, a Virgin, married to both God and Man, union of fecundity and yet with no actual relations with the world, a gift, a prayer that is apart, a part of the world that I and what we knew symbolically as 1000 points of light, as Francis did hold the church from falling, in his time, to make firm what was tottering and to do as has been said, we were all re-sponsible, though I was more responsible than the rest, as the priest told me that I was that man, as God called me, I lie not, and told me that I was doing it for the church because they were confused and did not understand His mercy, and that my vocation was true, and He does love me, and said so, and another priest said work on and risk and do not be discouraged, and as the King said, though 10,000 fall yet I will trust in you Lord, and there was no inter-regnum at the throne though the see may have been vacant, I do not know, but that the corruption of the time did reach even into the Church and did fell the world, and all, but at the same time in symbols, in signs, the real dialectic did prove that every action is every other action, as every other is holy other, despite the will to

transcends the world at the same time it absolutely transforms it, from both the inside and the outside, without force, yet traversing by a “work� the fantasy and the necessity of the lack of production for a reality promised but undelivered by the fasces, by the face of the veiled and the unveiled, by Jews and Moslems and the still Christian, by atheists and athletes of wealth, by a realm of morals that is being but transubstantiated to mysticisms without reserve, and finding in this the word of St. Sartre for the building up and tearing down by the anti sculptor Giacometti, who would with unceasing labor create and destroy the synthesis of art and religion and philosophy in the dialectic of the search for what another called the SA: as savoir absolute, in you, yes, therefore dissipation, and the will to deceive, and many there are who have been, we did still love and believe, and hope for the coming of the great day of our liberation from wealth and poverty, and all that goes with that economy, for an economy of grace and mercy that has always been and will always be, let it be done on earth as it is in heaven, dear Lord, I pray, that those who laugh will cease and those who mourn who will have a ceasing of their cause for mourning, and that in the age of analysis, we made something of our world, against it and for it at the same time, as was the Church, which despite the lack of holy attention still was mindful in missions and in charity and said so much right and did so much right and did so feed the millions with words and sacraments and breaking even in their daily bread, so done for that Church, a work stood, not torn down, though not one stone will be left atop another, as the Savior said, we may at last find the paradise throne, a temple interpreted as thee

PREFACE TO PARADISE THRONE

The world of the end is a strange place to live, but here we are, out of time.

The Book of Revelation was never understood because:

1) it did not apply to the Roman Empire, 2) it is written in signs and symbols, and is not literal, 3) it spoke of the future.

Now the problem is re-solved. Not Rome then, for Rome was not apocalyptically destroyed, but converted. It is the trouble with Rome now that should concern us. I believe the writing of John the Divine is the way that it is because the end of the world of which it speaks is not a literal end of the world but a symbolic one. That the Church took over from the Jews the symbol of Israel, calling itself the same, is a clue. What is said of Israel therefore applies to the Roman Church.

When Christ says that not one stone will be left atop another, He speaks then not only of the Temple in Jerusalem, literally overthrown, but of the Church today, that may be destroyed. This destruction, well under way, involves an attack on the virtues of faith and hope and love. Satan and the Anti-Christ do not mean to lay waste cities and all nations, but the faith of Christians, all believers. This can be done really though symbolically. Why would Satan wish to destroy a world he in a way already controls? It is faith in Christ, and love itself, that he hates. As deconstruction has shown, the best and perhaps only way to destroy a system is from within. And we see much done in the Church recently that troubles us, from the condemnations of so-called heretics to the problem of sex abuse. Besides this is the money, which the Vatican will not speak of, but which some believe came from Hitler to be stored in Rome, after the fall of Berlin. What we know is bad enough to cause much disquiet, but what we do not know will, I think, shake the faith of many, who, as Christ warned, put faith in men and their traditions, rather than in God. The attack by the recent Popes on the article of conscience decided by the Second Vatican Council is clear, so no one can disagree with Rome and its teaching. Infallibility is the

foundation of error, to hide, not reveal, truths that Rome wants kept secret, like the death of John Paul I, or why as John Paul II took over he insisted “be not afraid.” Should we be? The time we live in now has become a very meta-physically different type of time, the kind of time in which the symbols of the Book of Revelation make sense. How you read it is up to you. But read it.

Read it in the Spirit, not the letter, as Paul says. Read it as addressed to the Church of today.

Keep in mind that God does not think as we do, since He came to save sinners, not the righteous.

As Moses said: Would that all God’s people were prophets. The word of God is thoroughly prophetic, and the scholars who empty it of that dimension empty it of its primary meaning, which is neither moral nor mystical, but rather eschatological, and is concerned with the salvation of all, which depends on real and correct relationships with God, who must be known, in some way, to be loved, believed and relied on in every end.

Nietzsche, who is a type of Anti-Christ, said he wished for a “Caesar with the soul of Christ.”

Derrida ends his Glas, the death knell of The Book, with words in reference to the perfecting of the resemblance between Dionysus and Christ, and Dionysus was the end-point of the AntiChristian Nietzsche’s attempt to found a new religion. In other words, the two best known deconstructionists were at work on a synthesis of Christians and non-Christians. That would seem to be the path my book followed in the later stages, combining a dialectical method with deconstructive insights held together in a catholic framework, for the reformation of both the Church and the World, along the lines of a logic that accepts the contradictions it finds as inevitable and not to be rejected, but having been placed here by God, to be incorporated into a fuller, completed logic that accounts for the real and not just “paradoxical” things that conflict in The Bible and in our experience. The idea has been that God does not think like we do, therefore whatever the basic principle of our logic is, it must be ungodly. That would be the logic of Aristotle, long the backbone of the catholic way of thinking. The problem I face at this late date is how to distinguish the synthesis I have made in the name of the truth of Christ and the doctrine of his Word from the anti-Christian deconstructionist attack on Christ that would violently yoke Him with Caesar and Dionysus. If there is epicriticism, it is needed by me now the most. As for the Caesar angle, the Roman popes have that covered, and have already, before there was Nietzsche or any of his Lutheran fathers, combined a false Christ with a false Caesar, doubly wrong. It may be that from the angle of Dionysus, the new age religions that reject Rome make a

similar error, and this includes a broad range of Christian churches who emphasize the resurrection without the passion and the cross. On the other hand, I try to stand firm in the middle, as would, say, Aquinas, and hew to a course between the twin abysses I have named.

This is because I had the benefit in my catholic seminary of reading some Luther, as well as Barth, and others, and many other writers on religion, east and west, and have kept as my guide the word of God as it is revealed in The Bible, interpreted over the course of twenty years, within the limits of what my conscience, which was formed relatively late in life, but which has come fully to fruition, recommends. Now the conscience of the critic is the judgment that regulates the genius, and I have in this regard been informed by many philosophers and thinkers, to the extent that the system I hold in my work is, while not free from error, as the Roman, able to handle the problems of the postmodern age, of which misreading and contamination in theory and practice are fore-most. Nevertheless, it was only in the last year, as I turned my attention at last to the apocalypse and its interpretation, that these things came into their true meaning as concerning the end of the world, as it is called by most, that is, the final battle of good and evil.

Paradise Throne

The Coup Coda of the Cube

kryptos kybos That throne will never be thrown by a pair of dice to say chanced hazarded gambled risked EXCEPT by a cube foreknown, predestined, planned, so w/o a chance, dicey LAUNCHED in eternal circumstances as written in the BOOK: It has already taken place: It is done: Finis: Consummatum est Though we thought it abyssal it was merely Ulysses in an eighteenth

That number sums all antiAll anti-summation, is already summarized there in the

ultrastructure Of even a number, Of the number that is the enigma, The number of a person, And that to come, or as if to come,

Artless Ark, Breaking Bark, What would Peter and Paul do in the midst of such shipwreck?

Jesus slept and said O ye of little faith!

Should we do likewise?

The MASTER Has not lost his grip on the helm and the ship is not in danger…yet…what if the ship is lost Not foundered but unfounded, wrecked on the rock of the maker? Because thought to be Unshakeable, unjudgeable, w/o a One who would touch these my anointed prophets and WOULD THAT ALL GOD’S PEOPLE WERE PROPHETS Than profiteers,

All is not vanity, That yes, yet, there be an All: We must still pull down, pull down our vanity, and on the humble rock reside OR COME TO GRIEF in the folds of

666 Which is the cubic mass of the volume or the cubic volume of the mass, [the see and the sea coincide in the shipwreck]

AS IF TO BE A total count in the making of the anti-Christ, a totality w/o totalizer, the possibilities may be spelled in the alphanumeric that only became possible in the postmodernist era: THE SIX is a hex and a cube Hexagram: Solomon’s Seal Hexagram: Book of Changes CUBE: KAABA Which Islam turns around and faces, center of Mecca

Of course

Not to pass over the obvious,

THE BLACK BOX MAGIC TECHNO And around this square of Jews and Muslims and Chinese and all our TECHNOLOGY

The common denominator is the bias of the anti-

CHRIST Who will not allow the ultimate immemorial demon to de-throne PARADISE On a probability that it is a sin, so that it must be licit, for with God Only Certainty Will Do And in the eighteenth hour after dawn, after trial and crucifixion in the garden it is midnight and God walks and talks with His own: The PM was the wrath, postmodern, post-mortem, The AM is the mercy of the dawn and just before, FORGETTING RECONSTRUCTIONS For a leap of faith into a new world that was ordained prophetically

Is not madness become you Is not evil that madness you ABOLITIONS ABSOLUTIONS The search for the absolute Is the search for the knowledge of, And the now forgotten SA

SAVIOR ABSOLUTE un-knowing

neither SA nor DE

As If As If Nothing will have taken Deconstruction’s place was DERRIDAS ABSOLUTE But the deconstructed place

As If To Be Was silence while being is all meaningful speech and music W/O MERE NOISE/O WHITE NOISE/O THE PAGES W/O Except perhaps a constellation, a great cloud of witnesses: Virgins are not blanks, virgins indeed are signs not empty but full,

But if the Cube is the Coup in the Coda, the final throw of evil at Armageddon, What of Benedict’s Conscience?

On the One Hand: He completes the six sides with the six times six times six equals 216, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE Or, He completes the six sides with six plus six plus six equals 18, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE. On the Other Hand: What does John Paul 2 + Benedict 16 equal?

ALTAR AND SCRIPTURE The final sides of the cube, its top and bottom, They kiss it don’t they? and bury bones within …And placed a LIMIT ON INFINITY…it seemed as if… …It was the number in John’s Gospel when many walked away…

yet It will have been therefore a Throw of Dice Not done in secret but by symbols obscured, Perhaps even John Paul II did not know that he was the one who was wounded, And to overcome the Left, leaned to the Right, the Roman Fascist Bias

CAESAR AND CHRIST Thus stood opposed, but the emperor, the pope, the magister, the oracle, infallible, the Supreme Pontiff, pagan priest, pontifex maximus, pronounced:

yes Every Caesar is opposed to Christ As Chance is to the one Certainty

THAT All Scripture Emits Paradise Throne.

PP

PP: per procurationem, that is, by the agency of, or for the agency of, but of what and for whom do the popes sign their names? The procurator is one who manages another’s affairs, and was an officer of the Roman Empire entrusted with the management of the financial affairs of a province and often having administrative powers as agent of the emperor. So, the pope is the agent of what emperor and of what empire?

As well, akin to the procurator is the procuring, often to make available for sex. Which is to say, not beyond the PP or pleasure principle of Freud. In that late work of psychoanalysis, the death instinct came to light, and the need for repetition compulsion, and I think these things can be discerned in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. As Plato writes in The Republic, those with training for philosophy can do great good, but if corruption enters in, there is an even greater ability to do harm. The PP is also the postal principle, the logic of the postmodern, as well as the post-mortem. In whose name were these things done, by what authority? At the seminary, as regards theology, they make Popes equal to The Bible itself, and say the magisterium is the one to interpret scripture, but should it not be the other way around? Should not The Bible be used to measure Rome? We return to the antichrist. You will recall that 6x6x6 equals 216, and I said 216 equals B + 16, that is 2 + 16.

And that this is Benedict. But looked at again it appears that the 2 is really John Paul II, and the 16 is Benedict XVI. They are the antichrist. One was struck down, but miraculously survived, and the other promotes his agenda. As well, you remember the other work in 666, that it is summed 6+6+6=18, and that is once again JP 2 and Benedict 16 = 18. There is much that could be said of the variant reading of the passage, the 616, which can be deduced from various multiplications and additions. These deductions point back to Pius XII, and the Nazi era. As well, they point back to 1962 and the illfated Vatican Council II. If John Paul II is the beast in some symbolic way, and Benedict the false prophet, what will happen next? It would have to be the en-shrining of the statue or image for worship, and that is the new order of mass to take effect for the liturgical year 2012. In the

catholic economy the entrance is through confirmation, a mark on the hand and the forehead. As well, despite the scripture always read that day, on Ash Wednesday, the Catholics throughout the world will receive a mark on their foreheads. For these reasons I have stopped attending mass. I have not read the new missal, but I have heard of changes in both what the priests say and in how the congregation responds. Concretely, I wonder what the new response to the priest’s “Peace be with you” really means. When the churchgoers say “And with your spirit” in what or to what spirit will they be praying? Men and women have bodies and souls, but spiritual entities like angels have spirits. It seems that there is one Spirit of God, and so Benedict should say that plainly, if that is what he means.

I have not in this work made a full-scale exegesis of the Book of Revelation. I think too often those attempts got lost in the trees, and could not grasp the main point in the forest of difficulties that is the symbolic end of the world. I have made a diagnosis about the Church herein, as well as lay out a catholicity in the logic by which the reform of the Church may be thought. What remains? We must not lose our faith, though we have been betrayed. I have written this for the Church, not against it, for the faith of the many, not the approval of the few. I think that in the future the present pope will die and the college of cardinals convene to choose his successor. I believe the cardinals should not select one, but appoint themselves temporary guardians of the Church until a council can be called comprised of all the bishops in the world to decide the future of the Church. The things I have said in this book are a small addition to the massive amount of news regarding the Church in crisis that is available. All I was shown was that the popes of my lifetime were the antichrist, and I was charged with communicating this to you for the good of all. Many outside the Church will not be surprised at the news, especially those fond of Martin Luther, while the readers I want to reach especially, the faithful of the Catholic Church will probably ignore the warning, if they ever hear it. However, if they be like the men of Nineveh, I will be happy, not sad, if the Church is saved and not destroyed. The point in the logic of the work, that God

does not think like we do, is seen in the career of the prophets, who if they were true, were not listened to, except perhaps for Jonah and Nathan and Samuel. The things we are told are too often too hard to bear, and the message of God too much of a challenge to the frail human nature which relies on the traditions of men rather than faith in God. You may think me but a self-styled prophet, so I will let the work speak for itself, and say that numbers do not lie, and that they translate easily to the present day.

Therese of Liseux, whom I often invoke, said everything is grace. So, the seeming death-throes of the Church need not be cause for sorrow, if it was the will of God for Rome to be what it has become, a thing hard to understand, but that it was foretold long ago is clear to me, and so we need neither rejoice nor fear but rather realize the signs of the times, as they are sometimes called, and become the light of the world which Christ says we are. The kingdom is within us. Where but two are gathered in His name, there He is in the midst. When the son of man returns will He find faith on earth? He says there will be a remnant who have not knelt to the Baal. It is up to each one of us in the integrity of our consciences, which are not deliberately set against Rome, but which Rome has deliberately set itself against, to decide in the crisis of the Church in the World where God really is and go there. If you can find Him nowhere else, at least He said He will be in you if you believe, and I believe God in His promises, every last one.

The antichrist was given a number in The Bible rather than a name not so much to hide him, but to reveal him, because the ultrastructure of numbers endures across all languages, and needs no translation, thus escaping deconstruction. When John Paul II said that the apocalypse of John was about the future history of the world, he told a lie, for it was about that man and his time that it speaks, while he seemed to be encouraging traditional readings of scripture. As Hans Kung said, John Paul II was the most contradictory Pope of modern times. And I have shown that the root of this contradiction is in the mystical evil that has tried since 1945 to gain control of not only the Church but of the ones

who are faithful to it. Without their assent the Roman hypocrisy must cease. Long has Rome been implicated in sin and crime, which can no longer be hidden. The hour of the final battle of good and evil draws near, and with the judgment beginning at the Church, as Peter says in his letter, where does the poor sinner stand? Indeed, with the ground cut out from under the feet of Catholics, and with the world already under the control of an antichristian matrix of forces including Islam, Israel, China and the technological capital of the magical projection of fascism where liberalism once stood, with a kind of Nietzscheanization, as has been said, of all politics, with a criminal intent to corruption on all sides, we are not, as seems, at the door of another dark age in which we must keep our love and knowledge alive in small isolated communities, but rather we stand at the brink of the end of the world. Now, scripture portrays the end in two ways, one a flaming inferno of fiery justice, and another in which the lion lays down with the lamb. This is just one of the many contradictions in The Bible. That the church has always been both sinful and holy, that we are sinners yet saved, that God died for us, that more than half of the popes were never made saints, and almost none since the Reformation, that the Second Vatican Council almost to a man unanimously passed the reform of the liturgy that fifty years later John Paul II and Benedict XVI will undo in the name of a “literal” translation and true “authenticity,” opening the door, I think, to some evil that means the invalidation of the mass, that these things were foreseen by the author of Scripture, and are part of God’s plan, who can comprehend? Yet, as Paul had the mind of Christ, so may we, to be not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewal of our minds.

Paul also said that God’s grace was sufficient for him, and so it may be for us. He said woe to me if I do not preach the gospel, so may we, and as John said, blessed are they who read this book and keep it, so may we, for I have added nothing to revelation, nor taken anything away, for I have seen Rome where it says Rome is, and have lived in Babylon, the market of the whore. That the new city of Jerusalem will be our all in all, that God will wipe away every tear, but that the way there is hard and narrow, and few there be that find it, is the awful and awesome truth of our apocalyptic age.

As Christ has said to one in our own time, “They are confused, they do not understand about My mercy.” Think of the mercy of God as His to possess and dispense, not in the hands of popes or priests and one will be more comforted by grace than by magical terms such as ex opere operato in which the Church teaches that the sacramental catholic economy works itself, without regard to God or man. As if by chanting they can bind the will of God. The power to loose and bind is important, but so are the words in which that power is described. What you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven and what you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven. What the Church has done does not then apply to her power to forgive, but rather, that instead of binding evil, they have bound God’s hands, and have set loose an unholy thing that will bring an eventual response. There is a correspondence of Heaven and earth, a kind of symbolic action takes place between them, and I think this is what Christ meant in the binding and loosing. His mercy was always to forgive the penitent, so if the priest does as He does, where else would the power lie but in the symbolic way I state, in which the Church binds God and looses what it should not, which any observer of the Church should now see. That God says I will have mercy on whom I will is the truth which we need not fear, for God is merciful, and we should seek Him rather than go to a man and an economy of sacraments that only has the appearance of the grace of God, but is in reality rather like technology, an aspect of ex opere operato, a thing under no one’s control, operating as if by magic. It was perhaps the divorce of grace and nature, whether by Platonism or Thomism, the positing of the ideal and the real, that led to an inevitable nihilism. But outside stands the grace of Christ knocking at the door. God will close the “ring” by His action, not ours. By His will, not ours. By a grace the Church calls prevenient, but which is truly grace as such in its totality, a free gift of God’s. We then are to be blessed.

As there is an inculpable atheism and a culpable atheism, as Karl Rahner showed in the 1960s, so there may be a culpable and an inculpable Catholicism, which is not to say catholicity. Any one who becomes

aware of the crimes of the Church, let alone the thing I have had to say in this book about the antichrist, must decide for themselves how to work out their salvation. The decapitation of the Church at Rome is needed, which is done in principle when each member of the Church acts on their own, thinks on their own, and becomes truly the kingdom of priests God says we should be. Would that all God’s people were prophets, but the application of the oil of anointing is not enough, if one receives their vocation but does not keep it, is not true to it, which is to be true to Christ in all situations and to speak out even if it be against those with the power, it seems, to judge you. For in truth there is but One judge, and judgment is reserved to Him alone, so that He may bind what has been loosed and loose what has hitherto been bound.

The PP could also be the pages following, or just the “papa,” of the Pope, and I believe. It has been said unless you believe you will not understand, but I think you must, I must, love and forgive, show no resistance to evil, be perfect, be merciful, be holy, take every thought captive for Christ, say scriptura sola, and so not leave out the text on the Apocatastasis, which was condemned by Justinian and the councils, but say yes to the insight that was proclaimed by Peter at Pentecost of the great promise of the universal restoration, or the all in all, which is a word and a vision of the complete fulfillment, the arrival, no more of war and division and no more condemnation and no more evil, but, PP as a perfect peace, or as Kant said, “to eternal peace,” for we have been at war, so long now, in the one battle of good and evil, we always the good ones and you always the evil, us and them and I and the Other. But reaching the point of what the east calls non-duality, I neither surrender to evil or resist it any longer, do not condemn it nor the one doing it, but love it, forgive it, claim my error which I reified as an IT or Other, and surrender it to Christ. In truth the Popes were the anti-Christ, I believe, but did not know they were. The CC was profoundly hypocritical, but did not see itself as such. By a method of triangulation the truth is not only reached but preserved. Thus the Trinity. Thus, the God-ChurchWorld, thus all hierarchies must be greater than the dual opposition which is the structure of disease and deconstruction, posited in morals as

good and evil. To reach this triangulation in politics, there must be a center, not simple left and right wings. In history and in religion and philosophy not simply faith and reason or Athens and Jerusalem, but the east, so long excluded, which from our standpoint of dualism seems to be the Other, but which is the thing that perfects and completes and will keep the structure not only from not collapsing into nihilism under the weight of the real and the ideal, but by grace bring the arrival long sought, and allow theory room for practice, the thing the Church didn’t.

In myself I forgive and love now the Other in me, do not condemn it, and do not illusorily declare a false peace but find true peace within. I must become Christ and Buddha and Socrates, by doing the works they did. You will say I am absurd and this is the impossible itself. Yet, they said it would be so, and told each and every one to do it, to be it, to make peace. Heaven has already begun, it is within us all, as Christ said, as Buddha said. The war was necessary. Peace is not impossible.

Shakespeare had his epilogue, spoken by Prospero, and Joyce too made a large epilogue for waking, as the other did to ask forgiveness. The Book does not end with the war, but with the peace in Jerusalem that follows. Good and evil are overcome as the structure of war by the truth that they be not opposed any longer, and that to condemn any-thing is error, and to forgive is divine. We all have been given the power to forgive and to make peace. I love my enemies, all of them, no matter who or what or why. Some knew it, so that now we may love.

To perpetual peace, the PP of Kant, and the proxy of the papacy, the pleasure principle, the postal principle, papa, or papaw, patriarchs and prophets, prostitutes and physicians, professors and preachers, the poles of north and south or of the opposition once we thought was irrefragable, to the struggle of good and evil, or of myself and the world, that war, was the illusion of me. In reality I am someone else known only to God. Post-Pontiff catholicism will be like the waking of the dead, the union of things irreconcilable, the arrival of the Messiah in fact not just in principle. For we all let usurpation and usury take sway in Rome and

everywhere else, worshipped a lie, and yet but judged our-selves. I must let go of the desire to be led, of the desire for leaders, of the desire that follows, in order to be free of the desire itself. Sophocles said that we suffer into truth. That is tragedy, but we learn. To know one must suffer, and we all suffer, but not all come to know the truth of suffering, have the experience but miss the meaning, or know it only in theory or by the book but not by direct knowledge, as it is, but lost in words and things, lose the way, which indeed is hard to find. The prize is not for invention, but for discovery. Reinvention, or rediscovery, one must choose their relation to the past, their own and the world’s. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates: did not write, did not work, did not take money for the teachings, did impart truth by word and deed, and did not lie, and did speak of suffering as to how it may be over-come, in different ways, but basically not by obedience but by independence, not by memory but by vision, not by mind but by heart, not in theory but in practice. I have made my work in the age of the triumph of theory which was the nadir of reality, and that formed the work in many ways, a problem to solve. As the alchemist Celan said, solve and coagula, which Robert Yankow too might have said of the forces of truth and tragedy, of magic and suffering, of the great transformation that must take place, whether we will or no, this life or the next, as God chooses.

Transcendence means that God is absolutely different, and that he chose for Jesus to be the one to suffer not just as part of an economic exchange in sin and guilt and atonement, but as a sign and symbol of the absolute difference of God and man, which is, and yet which we can not let hinder us from getting to God, by trust. The mercy of God is evident, because I am. Who am I? The one God chose to learn and to be written.

What have I learned? That I have written, and will have been written, but that the truth is not in writing, nor in the spaces nor in the differences. That I kept going. That I finished before I died, but in a way had to die and be willing to die in order to finish. That I prayed and was prayed. That I loved and was loved. That I hated and was hated, that I desired whether or not I was desired, that I made and stole, consumed, used, borrowed without repaying, that I was always angry, and thought I

knew what was going on, though I was always ignorant. That I gave this up, because I didn’t give up.

In the end, in a last desperate move, I told my wife that I was calling in an air strike on my own position. Indeed. It happened. As I explicated the end of the world, my world did end and begin again. She and I, in our vessel of mystery, our apartment on the Richmond Strip, made a great transformation of ourselves, of the work in us and on the pages of the books, and in a way yet known, in the world. It was alchemy in the true sense of the word. I became in a way I cannot show or say the very Christ and Buddha and Socrates, and had to be, not just seem to be, to save myself, my wife, my marriage, my work, and to save the world.

Tremendous forces had been unleashed and we were buffeted by a storm, yet made the higher ground, by grace. I became more than moral, more than mystical, more than I can conveniently say, but that I suffered, that she suffered, that I became awake and aware, that she too knew there was something more that she could see in me yet not understand, and that we both had to make peace between us, for us and for all, for God’s sake, and said it was the most important day of our life, but did not shrink back from the work, but gave our all, risked all, became more than we had been, made the passage together, crossed the river, loved and understood, each other, forgot what it meant to the book and to the world and to God even, but said, what do we mean to you and me, and the lives we saved were our own, and lived after we had died, and were born again, and did not violate but fulfill, and did arrive in fact, as we had promised and had hoped, and did not just want to be real but were real, the thing-in-itself, in learned unknowing, and wise simplicity, forgiving my folly, my waste, her concern for money, my obsession with God, our desire to escape each other and the work of destiny, the symbols of handshakes, kisses, a prayer, water, goodbye. And on awaking in our ordinary minds to go on thanking, grateful, now seeing signs that we would make it and had and get to God together. I have related the thing that happened as best I can, and hope whoever you are, wherever, and whenever, that you already know and know it even better than we.

Desperate diseases require drastic cures, and at last I had to love all or lose all, and so I loved. We all know the theory of love, I think, but oh how little we practice love itself and thereby understand and forgive and be the ones that we are meant to be, Jesus, Buddha, all the saints, all the genius of the spirit, the moral, the mystic, the poetic, the music of the seers, the vision of what exceeds words, and through that thing so little preached these days, self-control, the chief fruit of the Spirit that guarantees all love joy peace patience, surrender control to gain control, gain control but to surrender any right to any claim to any desire to, but actually being it, without right claim or desire, being the gift, in discernment, be the narrow path God will have forever been here.

On the following Sunday morning, early in the dark, after a night of study of Christian and Buddhist scriptures, and writers such as Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Eliot, Marx and Engels, I determined in prayer to Jesus that I wanted to keep my faith in Christ and yet still attain enlightenment like the Buddha. I lay on the bed in the cold December night the week before Christmas and meditated. I thought of the void, and I thought of the form. I recalled that in the Preface to this work I had said that in the beginning was an infinite nothingness which contracted creating limit, the eternal, God. I saw in this the relation of the void and form. It is also seen in the gestalt of figure and ground. But the truth is neither of these alone, nor these two together. Neither is it the perception of the distinction between the space and the form. Neither is it ignorance of the void and form. I thought for a moment what this ultimate truth could be and said, it is love. In Buddhism, the point is one of not clinging, non-attachment, and that is the character of human love, to cling, to grasp, to be attached. It is desire, it is greed, it is human love.

Christ on the cross showed what divine love is. It is letting go. It is selfemptying. It is not putting sovereignty in question, as Derrida did, nor renunciation of it, but surrender and abandonment, as I said in papers on the arrival in 2006. God’s love is so great that He lets go of everything, at the same in the cruelest of all situations, nailed, in pain, despised, but

praying for his enemies, granting salvation to the good thief, looking out for his mother, before the cry of dereliction at His abandonment by God. And then: It is finished. The veil is torn in two and God’s love is no longer to be doubted. The difference between God and man is shown. As Thomas Aquinas said, Christ suffered out of exceeding charity. The suffering was not for the sake of itself, a penance or austerity, but took place to convince us of the love of God, how completely a love divine lets go of even itself and its own being.

The unity of Christ and Buddha was thus seen in the meditation. What Buddha taught is true, and agrees completely with Christ. As well, the Socratic theory of forms is reconciled with the two, and the idea of the relation of the soul and body, which is perhaps one reason for the extremity of the passion. As Socrates said pain and pleasure nail the soul to the body, so the passion showed it is possible to overcome this through love. In the morning, seeing light on my wall, I saw in the light something like the love I had seen the night before, that it is neither space nor form nor cognition nor ignorance. And so too with life itself.

Love and light and life transcend the dual nature of thought that makes perception of form and void. In a way, the transubstantiation and the hypostatic union, as taught by the Church, accurately describe the Christ, but also tell the truth of all beings in which God subsists and whom He loves. I kept my faith in Christ, enlightened like Buddha, and Socrates, and so learned the truth, that it is one and all.

TOMB

The curtain of the unveiling of the apocalypse will be in but the blink of an eye, the simul ringing down of the curtain, as the desolation of the abomination is raised on high to disturb the canonical saints and then in the last act the monstrous logic of the sacrifice, once for all, yet always repeated, again and again, both singular and machine-like, once living once dying forever living forever dying, is suspended by the worst, the suicide, or more suicide of catholicism by the voiding of the rite by the rewriting of the order of the mass, let it be read by each, that we will not be we, but from union to mere series, from the son and father one in being to the Latinate consubstantial, which will confuse the essence of the transubstantiation, from and also with you, to and with your spirit, which even the bishops cannot explain where and when the priest acquired that spirit, to the changing of the words of institution, the all becoming many, which is misinterpreted by some as the narrowing of salvation, no I speak not of quantity but of the quality, going from the definite to the indefinite, the destabilizing of the core of the mass, and there are other words misplaced and misshapen in syntax, but especially when it changes from a sacrifice of praise to a sacrifice of ourselves for God’s praise, what is this? And so the Roman Church will sacrifice itself come this November, because the beast was wounded and almost died but did live, and the prophet promotes his agenda, his image, the decreed Missal, which indeed will speak or be spoken, and which one must adhere to without dissent to partake of the sacramental economy, a thing spoken for worship, to worship, and Catholics, signed on hands and foreheads with oil in confirmation and again every lent with ashes, as in Revelation, are in the circum-stances I describe, the only way in the world this year that the apocalypse can happen, because nowhere else is there such a conjunction of prophecy with practice. O, Catholicity! O, City of God! So in my interim, before the story that leads to where I now am, I give you the abbreviated word of the end of the world, a warning I could not postpone, but send ahead as fore-runner of the demise of roman insistence. Yet, this may be good news still, both for the church and for the world, especially for the world, because He came for the sinners, not for the salvation of those who are righteous. God does not

think like we do, which we cannot understand, with in-comprehensible love that reaches out not just to those of good will, but especially the unjust and unmerciful, so that the judgment that begins at the House of God, may be a warning to the rest of the world. What will happen to the church and the world I do not know, except that in reading both testaments of apocalyptic literature there are passages that are clear and others that are opaque. Scripture scholars and many priests tell you one thing, historical or textual, but I think we should look into matters for ourselves. The hope I hold now is that the end is not really the end, but a narrow strait to a better world, beginning even here on earth, with a thousand year reign, after the key of the abyss seals the error and evil of our apocalyptic time, to free us for the joy of Christ. The books I have written start in a far different place from the one I dwell in now, morally, intellectually and spiritually. What began as a young attempt at deconstruction before I fell for God in my conversion and began writing from a catholic point of view, goes through many stages, to arrive at the evacuation of the church, but not of faith, which I need even more now, and that in God, not in either the tradition or the revelation, but in the sole authority, which I see at work everywhere around me in what I term the ultrastructure, the articulation of the one life or force that is within and without us all the time, which contains the struggle of good and evil and all that depends upon that difference. One love we say. Yes, yet, we defer and differ, from each other and from ourselves, but you, and I, what are we to Him? Vaster than the star reaches, faster than a ray of light, this flux of which we sometimes become more or less aware, in the coincidence of things, or their adherence, rather than always falling, or if falling, falling faster, but into arms to catch. We need not plummet into the abyss, but He has mercy on whom He chooses, His hands are not tied by the words of men, as the seminarian told me years ago, though magic sometimes seems to work for some.

It may be that the present age that began in the period of the second world war, after the publication of Joyce’s last work, is the ricorso, the chaotic transition to the renewed state of humanity, and that this fourth age of understanding in which we live is but a brief interruption and that

the circle will recommence, like the journey through both black hole and worm hole to a better place in another world, or so it seems to me, that is, that scriptures and the writings of the postmodern, Joyce and Derrida, for example, need not cancel out each other, even if contradictory they seem or really are, for this is the era of the contradiction, and perhaps I speak against one thing and then against another and so interdict myself, but here in my world, there is still a we, a new we, not fragmented, but coming together, through technology, through spirituality, through community, through sharing our spaces and our thoughts, though still clinging to too much and not letting enough go, in order to arrive. They say either joy or pleasure or some such distinction, or Buddha and sentient beings, or Christ and whatever opposes Him, but He said love anyway, even those on the Other side. That is what we are going to be taught and shown, I think, as we suffer together the next few years, but only a short time in order to make our best effort, to learn how to make our best effort, to not fear but to love. Often in a disaster the good in people comes out, and I think some will understand but some will never do so. We, future oriented, feeling belated, hardly present, unable to preserve or persevere, deconstructed, disconnected, over aware and under aware, too informed and under informed, let us say these are the days, really despite appearances, to get it right one more time or one last time, to do the right thing, not just the next thing, and to not let up, not even blink until time expires, and when it is over, then to look up and see if we have won, for none can be sure, in a way, though in a sense we are all standing generally before God right now, and at the turning may all still stand together as the light arrives and be found not guilty for our sins and omissions both because some helped turn the wheel, and because the Lord had mercy we could not buy. The drama in these pages came from an un-dramatic life, mostly lived on the margins of poverty and sanity, though marriage and a late education in a catholic graduate school enabled me to push the work toward the points of reform and renewal it reached last year. I learned to love would sum up the thing that happened to me, and so I look back on the struggle between me and the world, and in my own mind between deconstruction and catholicism as being part of that, but how as one nephew asked do you really know if

you are in love? Or, how do you know you really love as one ought?

Perhaps we only love as we can, and not as we cannot, and as one man said, in our own peculiar ways, whether that match romantic fantasy or not, who is to say? For Derrida, the precursor, and the curse, love was not a question, not a problem, not something he ever once to my knowledge wrote of, which means by the logic of the un-said that it was the one thing he privileged, the one thing that is greater than even justice, or hospitality, or the other in-deconstructibles. Silence can be ambiguous, or it can be so accurate, as the painter Rothko said. Derrida’s silence about love, remarked in the film about him, and in the magazine the “American Scholar” at the time of his death, is un-like the silence of Heidegger about the Nazis and the Jews, and gives him a moral standing completely without hypocrisy compared to those who preach but do not practice charity in truth. He is said to be against purity, Anything but purity, he said late in life, though he liked pure French, and so much of what he did, all, was for contamination, written corruption in a way, tainted tains, one might say, and truly reflected the situation in the world, but all the time, like the religion he hid and finally revealed, as Caputo, a catholic said, there is, or perhaps we don’t know for sure, a real ideality, a true love so pure it had to be absolutely concealed, absolutely hidden and never put into play, without sign or signature, un-deconstructed, and neither the impossible nor anything else, but the act of love preserved by silence and the great lacuna is thus explained, and the greatness of deconstruction is not the struggle with technology but the absolute faith in love. My friend told me the lost cause is the only thing worth fighting for, and so it seems to me lately, with the church collapsing under the crush of corruption that is being only now by me seen for what it is, though others for centuries knew the truth. The betrayal is personal, and deeper, for it is by those most counted on, like the men abusing young children, or bishops abusing power. And so with the church lost or soon to be, what do I fight for? I think some form of catholicity is still possible, but without a hierarchy. That the council said the one holy catholic apostolic church only subsists in the Roman and is not identical to it, is important. That true church, like Luther’s invisible one will go on after Catholicism has passed away. Sans insistence, what then?

A decapitalization of the Roman, the head cut off, the bank turned inside out, the thing made transparent through and through, completely reformed by the laity and its taking responsibility. For each of us stands alone before God, and cannot be good Germans who only did what we were told. We know in any sense of justice that that defense is inadequate. Some current theologians speak of reconstructive theology, but pay them no mind, they forget that any re can be de again. Let us find the new basis, and jump clear of structure and construction itself, of the machine like mass and magisterium, duplication and duplicity, all folding in principle and in fact for the forgotten body of Christ as an organic singular event not to pass away or be passed over by the machinations of those in power. The body without a head? No. But Christ is the head generally and our own consciences in each of us particularly, and the men who would take them away from us are usurpers, treasonous against the true constitution of the body of Christ, of which all are members. Even severed or unrealized, to expound on Rahner and his implicit Christianity. The priest does not hold the keys, and there is no market for grace, what you have been given freely, pass on to others freely, and money is the enemy of faith and hope and love.

Love is free, so if you obtain it by trade or purchase, it is not real love you hold but a facsimile, and all you need to have that love of God is to realize you are already there, yes/yet/you, will have been, a future perfect.

Derrida wrote in his late essay on faith and knowledge about a confused series of things, including the projection of Roman power, globalatinazation, and the spread of auto-immune disorders. I could not make sense of this text a decade ago, but now I sense a prophetic voice at work in the deconstructionist. It seems to me that the Vatican has too much immunity, diplomatic immunity, doctrinal immunity, for the problem of the things to come to be resolved by the deconstruction of the hierarchy, the way the Soviet problem in Europe was overcome. The Pope’s immunity is killing the church of which he is the head.

The infallibility of the vicar of Christ is the most fallible part of this, along with a history of the money in Rome. The bank of the Pope was created in 1942 just in time to receive any loot from the Nazis. The impetus initially to create it came from the sordid deal struck with the Italian fascists in 1929, the Lateran treaty, in which the Pope conceded the papal lands lost in 1870 for a large amount of cash and government bonds, over one billion lira. The lawsuits of the last few years brought

by Holocaust survivors, trying to force open the books of the Pope’s bank, have foundered on the rock of sovereign diplomatic immunity. It seems that the Vatican is the supreme rogue state, a thing angering Italian officials and their banking system, while the Church operates outside it as an off-shore entity. The Pope answers to no one. But his very immunity is what will destroy the catholic church on its Roman basis. What is taking place is the transubstantiation of the Church herself, with the substance of Christ being displaced, so that only the accidents of a Church remain, that is, it looks like it and talks like it, but it ain’t it. What is replacing the substance of Christ in catholicism is not known, but must be evil. Its far-reaching effects will become apparent when the new order of mass takes place. And yet, be not desperate nor despairing, for the Bible has fore-witnessed these things, even before the birth of Christ. God has decreed it, and we cannot stop it. But scripture says that when Christ comes atop a white horse the sword which he wields will defeat the beast and the false prophet, and that this sword is one of truth. After the work of truth the abyss will be sealed with a key and peace shall reign. I believe this. I hope the work I have written depicts the things of which it speaks accurately and for the good of all, both in the church and in the world. The interpretation of the Bible on these things was always confused by applying them to events in the old Rome rather than today, and by attempting to interpret the number 666 as a name rather than what it is, the number of two men. It may be that what I have written will be neither published nor if so will go unnoticed by anyone, especially in the church. Some in the world may rejoice though at what becomes of Rome, but I hesitate to do so, except that as long as God’s will be done, there will be cause for rejoicing.

An Icon from an Evening in Glas In the days of Camus and Derrida, there was explication de texte. That will have been approached here, while escaping the suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric. For any two things can be connected from any distance under any rule. The text I propose for examination is the title implicated in the top left hand corner of the page. I need not go into the history of the production of the title of the work, for there are texts upon texts and their contexts, which I must effract. How the title was arrived at, from whence it was derived, in-volves the catastrophe of the end of the world which I am witnessing and recording from here, in this text. We all are, basically, from our own angles of view, sort of like the man at the end of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s solitude, who is deciphering the text of the secret as the apocalypse unfolds. Yet, let us keep our hands clean and not be negligent, for

the secret of the text is neither magical nor given to appropriation, neither pornographic nor pyrotechnical.

It waits on patience, and purity, perseverance and the peace that surpasses all under-standing. It is not done in a fever, or in a sweat, but in measured strains, by number and weight, neither a march nor a waltz, far rather like David’s prophetic dance before the Ark of the Lord, not frenzied, nor fraught, but rapturous, candid, faithful and confident. That the world does dance away its final hours on the edge of a volcano almost without quite knowing what it is doing, for none can be sure, our certainty forgotten, is the spectacle and the distraction that would, if it could, keep the knowledge locked away, but the truth will out, whether the world will or know. That the world is standing on its head and must be set right, and that Derrida did this in his own way, a way parallel to that of Camus, and not opposed, is simply the way I see it. That Derrida’s last texts concern, I think, sovereignty and the beast, will not go unnoticed, nor the myth of Sisyphus, the problem of the suicide of the church, and the crux of the matter contained in the juxtaposition of two words in almost any dictionary of the English language, that is to say, Deconsecration Deconstruction

Which hold the key to the recent history of the world and the fate of the church.

Seeing patterns is making connections. In the game of connect the dots, one finds the hidden design amid the random chaos, in order to reveal the hidden meaning. If the world has an author, if the text has an author, then we have always presumed that there is an inherent pattern or meaning amidst the apparent chaos of our lives and in the works of literature in which we see ourselves reflected. However, if there is no author, then one may connect the dots in whatever manner one chooses, not finding but inventing a design.

I think we have reached that point. Not that there is no author, but that things such as characters or people or plots or history are not the paradigm of our research, but language itself. And perhaps still the book as such and authority remain a subject of question and concern, for we know that as we write we may well be written. This is true in genetics, mathematics, physics, which involve writing or codes, that is to say symbolization, something at once both real and symbolic, literal and more than literal, the ideality of design. We do not know where the design came from but we see it. These words are letters that are arranged in patterns that convey meaning, under ideal conditions, the framing context of the mode of the reader and other factors. All of this I say is not the

explication de texte, but rather the interpretation, the other part of studies in the French schools in the time of Camus and Derrida. Coupled as they were in the curriculum, explication and interpretation were analogical to the roles of faith and reason in theological thought, in that they seemed to presuppose one another. That they are still viable, and are distinct disciplines, may be in doubt. Perhaps there is nothing but a generalized economy of writing at this time. Still, we seem to accept in fact some restrictions as necessary, bending the rules where we desire, but still within a kind of framework. I cannot speak for all. There may be types of discourse unknown to me that operate in far different ways. I do not know. One limit case or promontory in that regard is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which in turn inspired the Glas of Jacques Derrida. These texts rewrote the codes or rules regarding literature and philosophy, working out of the command and control authorial paradigm, which is itself based on competition, into a collaborative creativity which does not dictate meaning but suggest it, dream-like and hypnotically, with an almost fascist connotation to the collaborators. On the other hand, I have found that the work I have been engaged in is not limited to these modes, but requires a combination of the contemplative and the critical, on the part of both the author and the reader, for the advent of an economy of meaning that is catholic to

take place, that is to say, a universality, as opposed to the authority of any Roman Empire.

The kind of writing that Joyce and Derrida excelled in is characterized by the cognizance and exploitation of what I call the Ultra-structure, a term I have borrowed from science and use to describe what I will sometimes refer to as the Glossolalia of the text, a reading and writing in tongues, as in the Wake, an activity that is summed in the word Icon in the seven word title that I placed at the head of this text. As in the Bible, there is speaking in tongues, an expression of meaning given by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the nascent Church, and which subsists today even in catholicism in some out of the way places. But just as one may say that the whole economy as such, all economies in principle, have transformed from restricted to general ones, and I here refer to Derrida’s early writings on the subject, the gift of tongues has, in my opinion, also shifted from a strictly oral or verbal expression to the modes of reading and writing, and that in fact textuality itself is this in some way. If language is the house of being, as has been said, which is another way to speak of the languages descended from the catastrophe that took place at Babel, at which time God “deconstructed himself,� according to Derrida, then God is in language, as the Word, logos, as truth and meaning, but

in other ways as well. From Holderlin we derive the scene of reading as a quiet, holy act. I project a general-ization then of scripture as such, perhaps as Derrida did the Messiah. Blake said everything that lives is holy, and the word, language, is a living thing, and though often put to profane and secular use, which is an understatement of the greed and pornography that engulf us, yet our texts are basically sacred in a way, even though impure and contaminated, or perhaps even not despite this but because of it. I have advanced a logic over the course of my work that hinges on the understanding of the necessity of contradiction and it applies in this case. The Ultrastructure in language cannot be without being inclusive, both blessing and cursing, creating and defiling, and so on.

It is the principle of connection, the condition of possibility for it. It is potency in relation to act, to speak in quasi-Thomistic terms. When I first discovered the word Ultra-structure, I used it exclusively to describe the numerical, not the alphabetical, and saw that numbers need no translation, and so are privileged carriers of meaning. This insight was crucial in the advancing of the theory concerning the Apocalypse which turns on the meaning of a number in the Book of Revelation. I need not rehearse that for you now, having already covered that ground in previous texts, but promise you the subject will have impacted the work you are now reading. However, I will come at

it by way of the Exegesis and Eisegesis of the iconic seven words of my text, An Icon from an Evening in Glas. But before turning to the explication itself, I would like to preface it with a statement concerning the terms Exegesis and Eisegesis. They mean in their etymological back-grounds in Greek to lead out of and to lead into and are used especially in the context of describing Biblical inter-pretation. When one reads ones own ideas into scripture, one is said to be reading eisegetically, while when one reads what is “really there” one is reading with proper exegesis. On the other hand, Joyce and Derrida and the writers following them eschew such an opposition, deconstructing this polarity, rendering it meaningless.

In the explication of the seven word text that is to be accomplished, the traditional idea of Exegesis and Eisegesis, while not being ignored, will be redefined by my practice. I will say in advance that all of this bears on the conversion of “leading” into a kind of “following,” and that interpretation and explication is always more of the following of the seams in the semes, rather than a seeming to lead the text toward its inherent meaning, which is always univocal or equivocal. The text itself is, if not infinite at least indefinite, and cannot be pinned down to a set of controlled meanings or readings. There is no exhaustive Exegesis. One can say this is for a mystical reason, when reading the Bible or other scriptures, and in my

theory of the book in general, all texts become the scripture that they are, and as such may be read as having always more than one meaning, the old model including moral and mystical levels in the hierarchy of interpretation, which my own work several years ago drew on. The network of language exists at both the hierarchical level, while at the same time, and contradictorily, subsisting in the text as a leveling, an evening out, I might say. This is the direction of Ultrastructure or Metasignification, which is neither less than nor more than nor equal to another, while at the same time, and contradictorily, being the parallel or prime of that other traditional, re-stricted, hierarchical method of inter-pretation that characterizes theology and its regimes. By being parallel to the tradition, which has become lost in the labyrinth of its own desire, not only is place given, and magnitude recognized, but direction is now discerned, without which we will not arrive. Our arrival is not derived from the tradition, but survives it. One need not be disconsolate over the loss of meaning, for something is received in its stead, the way to a let us say kingdom let us say of ends that the tradition indicated while at the same time preventing.

To put it in theological terms, the Romans do not practice what they preach, and so cannot reach the goal set by the savior, which is neither a leading in nor out of the text, but a following. Deny yourselves, take

up your crosses and follow me. Jesus asks not leaders but followers of the good gospel.

Now, at this point in the text, if it were a retro meta-fiction, a second narrator would interrupt and comment on what has come before, and the text would explicate and interpret itself. It seems to me that something of this sort is called for, because of an apparent faux pas on my part in the preceding, that is, my assertion of the relationship between Glossolalia and the word Icon. As I was re-reading what I had written, I noticed right away the dissonance in the assertion, and thought without doubt that the word Glas makes much more sense as the symbol for Glossolalia than the word Icon does. There is, in my apparent slip, a crux, and so I inadvertently

really went straight to

the heart of the matter, and upon reflection, decided that the relationship between the word Glas and the word Icon would be the appropriate site for launching the engagement with the text to be explicated.

Glas, the title of Derrida’s monumental 1974 work, is the word in French for the “death knell,” the tolling of the church bells at a funeral. One may ask, who’s death? Indeed, it seemed in a way to me at the time I read the English translation in 1986 to be simply the tradition, or even Western culture, everything before postmodernism. Now, it sounds to me different, the

tolling of the bell, and involves a complete reevaluation on my part of the meaning of Derrida’s work, and the history, meaning and fate of the Church, by which I mean the Roman Catholic. To say the tolling of the death knell is the Church itself mourning the death of the Church itself is what I now discern, and in this I reinterpret Derrida’s overall strategy to have been always directed at the Supreme Pontiff in Rome.

Derrida took part in the deconstruction of the time, if not leading it then at least presciently seeing the way things could go and the way he wanted them to go, not for the mere sake of enjoying the de-struction of the world, but to indicate the crisis he, I think, saw coming for and from the Catholic Church. The target of Derrida’s attack was at first expressly logocentrism, presence and propriety, valorizing writing over speech, absence over presence, the other over the subject or the self, scattering over gathering, the text over the book; then, later, he took up the problem of religion in his writings on the Messiah, justice, hospitality, and the openness of the “to come.” Toward the end, he wrote of what he termed globalatina-zation, and warned against a projection of power on the Roman basis, and posthumously mentions together in a title “sovereignty” and “the beast.” It seems to me that Derrida was approaching obliquely but steadily to an interpretation of the death of the Church and to the apocalypse now.

The icon is a sometimes “wordless word� that also sometimes contains within itself a text, a book opened, revealing an ancient script in a foreign languages. The icon itself is an image in need of study, and whether or not it has letters or words in it, is open to interpretation and explication. I believe that, again to eschew the relation of Exegesis and Eisegesis, the icon reads us more than we read it. This can be re-applied to texts generally, rather than being restricted to only iconic images, and then it can be said that the text reads us, explains us, and not the other way around. In my discovery or positing of the Ultrastructure I have found that this phenomenon has occurred especially in what has become known as the postmodern period, from roughly the second world war, or the publication of the Wake in 1939, because of a breakdown in the traditional orders. In the chaos that may be but random chance, the thing, which I call also Metasignification, takes place, whether in the mind or out of the mind, I don’t know, as the connecting of bits and pieces to form patterns. We half-perceive and halfcreate this new reality, as Wordsworth said. We are cocreators of it. It sometimes seems magical or schizophrenic, evil or crazy, or sublimely imaginative, and weird or supernatural. There is something there in the details of general textuality that can be seen if

we look hard enough. Joyce had a genius for this perceiving and creating, and by producing the chaos of the Wake, gave a space for the Ultrastructure to be projected into or discovered, as in an alchemical experiment. The icon of Glas by Derrida fuses the ultrastructure with the traditional, forcing the order itself to bear the weight of the creation of new things within it, which is one aspect of what is called deconstruction. The text is in a place somewhere between rigid order and complete nonsense, a place of lability, change and openness, of possibility that deconstructs the closure of a set arrangement, allowing constant re-invention, and bringing to light an indefinite number of potential connections that cannot be limited or closed off in principle, though in fact for a written work to be, there must be some limits found or applied, as the human subject itself needs an identity, in order to not become lost or submerged in the ever greater of the sea surrounding. But as mystics tell us, our destiny is just that losing of oneself in the infinite sea of God. Textuality is not the divinity, nor is the internet, which are rather simulacrum of eternity, which at least in a parallel manner are breaking into the closed paradigm of human society and are translating us into another space that is preparatory to the advent of the thing that is on the other side of the apocalypse, a kingdom of peace, the new age to come.

At the outset of my text, in addition to the promise of an explication of the seven word title, I promised some interpretation of Derrida’s sovereign and beast, of Camus and the myth of Sisyphus, and of what I call the suicide of the Church, as well as something on the importance of the relation between the words Deconsecration Deconstruction which I think sum-up the problem of the church in the modern world. Taking these in order, it is not, I think, a coincidence that Derrida employs terms that apply to the Antichrist, though the word coincidence has become altogether meaningless in my world. Things just simply are, in their weird ways, and I cannot understand or explain how or why they happen. As I have said elsewhere, I believe John Paul II is the “beast” of the Book of Revelation, based on the interpretation of the text, including an elucidation of the famous number. That, if this is the case, as he was raised to the status of the order of the blessed, then the abomination of deso-lation has already occurred, and the order of mass that takes place in November 2011 is his “image” that speaks in order to be worshipped. It is not clear to me, however, if John Paul II and Benedict XVI were conscious they were doing what Revelation

prophesied. It seems to me that the world and the church were destined to be destroyed, or changed, by God himself, but that this takes place in two ways, which may compete with each other as a disjunctive either or, or may collaborate as a synthetic both and.

The world and the church began the final deconstruction of themselves about the same time, in the 1960s, the time of Derrida’s early work, of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, and which is the date some, for instance the critic Northrop Frye, point at as the start of the postmodern period. The world stayed on its course of de-construction, including even that of the Soviet Union, but Rome did not, and under John Paul II, beginning in 1978, began instead a worse thing than deconstruction, that is to say, it began to deconsecrate itself, which Derrida, I think, obliquely points to in one of his last ideas, that of “the worst.�

This is taking place, in principle and in fact, by the repudiation covertly of the highpoints of the theology won at Vatican II, such as the inviolability of the conscience, in the unending sex abuse scandals, and in other more obscure, but perhaps more unholy things, reaching back throughout Catholic history, concerning lies and forgeries, money and murder. Again, I do not know the intentions, only the results. In the Book of Numbers, God tells Moses and Aaron that he himself breaks his promise, after the people of God refuse to enter the promised land, as Caleb and Joshua urged them

to do. Instead, they would stone the men who had scouted Canaan and found it indeed a land of milk and honey, ripe for the taking. God wills that the people fall in the wilderness over the next forty years, for not listening to the men who told them that the promised land had arrived, they needed only go in and claim the victory that God would surely give. Something like that has happened in our own day, with the visionary men of Vatican II and their attempt at a free, transformed catholicity, being rejected for the thing the Roman Church has become, a disgrace. That those of us who know this stand like Joshua and Caleb in relation to the people of God is to me incontrovertible, so we must urge now, go in, trust God, the kingdom is yours, while realizing our plea will probably be rejected, every people of God, new and old, Jew and Catholic, always refusing. In this may be seen the myth of Sisyphus, as well, that we roll the rock up, only to see it roll back down, yet must do our duty, as perhaps even the bishops and theologians of Vatican II knew their leadership could be eventually despised and ignored. I do not think the Church is going to immediately cease to exist as a visible bricks and mortar institution, and it will still have its money and some power, but as a spiritual entity it is ceasing to be. God, I believe, as in the case of the rebellion in the wilderness, is not bound to fulfill the covenant with this Church, and in fact, new Israel

and old Israel are in the same position, typologically in every way, just as the religious authorities, in the days of Jesus, are the same type as now. In the time of Jesus, whose name is really the same as Joshua, the promised land or the kingdom of God was again proclaimed, the thing was at hand, but through some refusal or lack on the part of the people of God, it was deferred, not because God chose to, but rather because the Church herself did not claim the victory.

The situation became clear under Constantine, and more so later, as the institution became involved in money and politics. That God knew this beforehand, that the people would betray him, not only among the Jews but at a later time, is foretold in Daniel 12:7, when it is said God will “scatter the power of the holy people.�

Indeed, the thing is at hand, a little earlier even than Isaac Newton foresaw based on a calculation he made of 1260 years after the coronation in 800 of Charlemagne. No, it is 1260 years since the forgery of the donation of Constantine, the fiction on which Rome bases her authority, which was accomplished by 754. In other words, the Deconsecration that began then will be fulfilled now, and the death knell will toll, albeit perhaps in silence, for the iconic Church that once was.

To go on from this point to an explication of the little seven word text of the title seems a bit anti-

climactic, but I will summarily mention a few things.

In the center of the square appears the words “veni roman,” and in a cross-like formation there is the indication f-ing roman, pointing to the bind of a contradiction that concerns the final Pope to come, called Peter the Roman in the prophecy of St. Malachy.

Whether he will fulfill the evil plan or expose it, I do not know, but after him, the Church will be no more.

There are many other connections among the letters in the design, including some chatter about “anal” icons, or the essential anal aspect that is the condition of possibility inherent to a thing for it to be analyzed.

The anal is a thing Derrida writes of in his Glas, and in connection to religion. In his work, the IC and the GL are opposed, the immaculate conception and the siglum GL, and it is indicated in my design that IC and GL had a son, something of an Onan, as is the type written of in de-construction, such as Rousseau. As well, several women appear covertly in the text, including Eve, Mary and the Greek earth mother Gaia or Gaea. That in the center of the square an “omen” is written concerning at least an “I,” and also other things that can be construed into some sort of narrative, if one desires, is given, considering there are at least several characters involved in a kind of conflict. But, that time has stopped and that everything is connected, would have to be the principle of any possible inter-pretation of the text-design. You

may look and may find more in the seven word text, but I have shown you at least this much.

I cannot say things are even at this point, what the leveling means, or if there has been some kind of revenge, or getting even. I do think we are in the “evening,� as one said, not dark yet, but getting there.

The world will deconstruct and the church deconsecrate, and what will happen after that? We do not know, but the Bible promises great things, the thousand year kingdom of peace on earth in Revelation, and as also Isaiah promises, a finale in which the lion lies down with the lamb, not a violent catastrophe, but a restoration of lost innocence. I think, in fact, the part of the apocalypse that is catastrophic is almost over, and the violence, for instance the absurd amount in Mexico as I write, is an indication of the way the matrix of technology, money, and fascism, all tied to a grand corruption that may be seen in the useful paradigm of collaboration, where all give their assent, none dissent, and the thing itself, Rome or the authority of an invisible hand, is seemingly infallible. But if it can’t be wrong, it must be wrong, and if I must be mistaken, then I must be telling the truth. Truth, if it is true, must always be inconvenient, as we say, unsettling, disturbing, opposed to the illusion, the madness, the evil. That truth and lies stand side by side, good and evil, being

and mere semblance, cannot be helped, but if justice ever happens, as we hope, then the re-conciliation of them will have taken place. Impossible, as Derrida said, yet God alone does the impossible.

To conclude, I should speak of the seven word textdesign, “An Icon from an Evening in Glas,” in relation to my work as a whole, which could bear that inscription. The Icon Glas pair describe the struggle by me with catholicism and de-construction, while the word Evening invokes Hegel’s word in his Philosophy of Right that Minerva’s owl of wisdom flies at dusk, an indication of his awareness of the closure taking place through the accomplishment in the dialectic of all possible positions in the spectrum of thought. My work finds itself shuttling back and forth between the Roman, the Derridean and the Hegelian, all plied together as the three strand cord of which the Bible in Ecclesiastes speaks. If this knot or circle was at any point effracted, to use once more Derrida’s term I learned from his late work Given Time, then it is not in taking sides in the positions of the catholic, deconstructionist or dialectician, but rather by the autobiographical element of the writing. For those who have read, or read about, Derrida’s Glas, autobiography is a part of his de-construction. Perhaps my work is an oblique commentary on my own deconstructed self. But as Derrida said, GL protects against the schiz that GL

produces, and so, having becoming other to myself, at times uncanny, quite beside myself, I eventually healed, and this perhaps by the very thing that GL symbolized in its invention or intervention in my life.

I do not know, and the authorial fallacy is asserted. I am not the best judge of what I have written, or of the life I have lived. That the work is the history of a journey out of deconstruction and completely through the catholic church, only to emerge on the other side, understanding both in themselves and in relation to each other, may be true.

If I were to add anything to these final words, it would be concerning what Derrida already called in 1991 “the state of the debt.” It seems every nation and most individuals are in a financial bind that is insolvable except by means of a key piece of what I would have once called the “Catholic Economy,” ideas that I and others have been working on the last few years in light of the Church’s teachings on social and economic justice. It seems to me that we are in need of forgiveness, of a “jubilee year” as in old Israel, forgiveness of debts and debtors. As well as giving and asking for forgiveness, as individuals, nations must adopt a total for-bearance of the debt, at least until things get better, if not an outright charging off of the entire debt of the U.S. and all other countries.

Then we can start over with a clean slate. Our debt now

threatens to enslave and impoverish the whole world. I do not say it was an intended thing, as I do not know the intention of any, but I know all need a chance to begin again. The promised land “to come,� will have been, therefore, so that the Messiah may arrive.

You might say, as I said that I might, as God Himself in His might may say, that as has been said, we had then but a circling occupation, and did walk into eternity without ever knowing, but for this: a young professor stood at the chalk board and drew a new diagram of our salvation according to the Council, in an elaborate encircled sphere, almost justly Ptolemaic in design, ever in a paradigm of Catholics, with Roman centrality the primacy, and those of the other nominations spreading out in a sea of the to be blessed, amid the murmur of a discussion

I so as

hazarded to interpose: there are not degrees of this salvation, one is either saved or one is not; so that for a logic disjunctive I put them to it, and did so make them love, in that now as I see it, our circles interchanged,

what was at the center is in the end but

only peripheral at best, and God calls sinners, not the righteous, and the twins of Israel, new and old, Jew and Catholic, miss the Messiah, or as if to, so God turns human salvation inside out, stands our thinking against itself, for mercy if and only if, is His alone and is most free, and judgment has begun at the House

of God, so that we will have been shown His ways were never ours, nor to be comprehended.

But let this be, as it dismayed, for those who say there can be no Christian thing proper tragic, so all is a divine comedy, but yet we do not know the time, whether it be free, and whether we are ready, nor if we be ripe or rotten, or if things stand out of joint, for it seems to me that even when we do our best, our actions recoil against us, as Oedipus or an hero from a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and we wonder at ourselves as men betrayed, so let it be with Caesar, if we had but time, what great things could have been said and done, as men of a Roman rule did think they had saved the Church even as they destroyed the same, deconsecrating the blessing with the curse of infallibility, with the assumption of the right to heir, while propagating a faith, which, neither mystic nor moral, did hinder the eternal from ever breaking into time, as if, and imposed upon the becoming of the kingdom of God a rigid, hard, static, death, the Being of the thing appropriated, and stamped the necessity of hierarchy and all that comes with it on life itself, as if, only to find the miracle in the end of true substantiation,in that the body and blood of Christ was given but once for all, His action saving only those whom He chose, only those so chosen. We are all but parallel lines that meet in infinity. Because of the

space that took place in the modern theory, the square as such became impossible for the geometry of Einstein, as he reconciled the discordances in thought, and he said there were only lines and their primes. It seems if we be beside ourselves, we have a chance. The world itself has created its own parallel world, and it is more in that virtual world that we live and move and have our being than in the space we once lived in. Now, that other space, the primordial one of the Bible, has become distant, in a way un-thinkable, and perhaps impossible to reach, even more impossible to traverse, even if it could be. But it is still possible for God to square things, because though we are billions of parallel lines lost in a waste land, God’s meridian crosses all our parallels, and he closes us, squares the accounts, gives shape and form to what, though it was still direction, had no meaning, for the end was unknown and un-knowable. God has drawn a line, not to cross us through or out, and not in an erasure of our characters, but to complete the story, so that we may be saved. His line is not an underlining, to reemphasize us, nor a line across the bottom of our last page, a line that says so far and no further, but a kind of margin, a place for His gloss and for Him to write, a line running from the top to the bottom, clean through everyone and everything, like the prime meridian spoken of by the poet, which connects us all, our distant sites not so much gathered in the

appropriation, that is in the circle of the text and the world it created, but a line to cross all our lives with the knowledge and love of that one who is alone able to demarcate us, to take a globe, and circle it against the time, as he also said, there, north of the future, for we have been given all our latitude, and given enough, see what we have done, but as the line approaches from the other side of this evening, how long was his patience, how long was his forbearance, how long he suffered us in the wilderness. But now that waiting, that wandering, is over, and he draws over the face of our depths, to shake us, to arouse us, to awaken us to his arrival. Our life will not have seemed so long, once He comes, nor will the dreams we once beheld still hold, for the cord of life will not have been cut, in fate it will not be so, but our life’s lines then will have to have been, as even the Glas foretold.

In the Book of Joshua it is told that a schism almost occurred in Israel, in the beginning, as the tribes were settling the promised land. The tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh had taken their places east of the Jordan, as in the agreement they had reached with Moses, just before all the warriors crossed into Canaan. However, after the two tribes and the halftribe were to the east, they thought to construct an altar for themselves, and when the people of Israel

heard of this they sent an armed troop to make war on what they considered a blasphemy, the setting up of a rival altar. Gad and Reuben, their descendents and those of Manasseh, explained that the reason they built their own altar was that they feared someday the children of Israel in the west, in the I think proper of the Promised land, would tell the children of Reuben and Gad and Manasseh that they were not true Israelites, and disown them, and cause them to be disheartened and to lose their faith in the one true God of the patriarchs. They built their own altar they said to show all that they too worship the same God, and to point up the difference between themselves and the one altar before the tabernacle, that they were not a rival in worship, but the same, which might become lost from view to the people of God and their descendents because of their physical separation from those in Israel. Phineas, representing the people of God, was pleased with this response, as was Joshua and the elders when he made his report upon his return.

What moral may we draw? It is this: That the altar I have erected in the work now concluding, though it often preaches the arrival, is not a rival to the Catholic way, but one with it, with provision made however that the altar of the Lord, we feel, has become de-consecrated by the actions of the hierarchy and the clergy of the people of God. We do not claim to be the only true people of God, anymore than we feel those who

follow Rome should claim that exclusive title. At Vatican II, in the declaration on religious liberty, it is said that there is a true religion still, and that this only subsists in the Catholic and Christian churches and is not identical with them. The true religion may be found in many places, but I feel strongly that true religion is evidenced herein by this altar so set up to show that we too worship God, so that no one can claim us to be outside the one fold of Christ, shepherd of our souls. That Christ, king of endless glory, is the one true sovereign, and does not need a visible representative on earth that merely usurps the throne that is in fact set up in heaven, not in Rome, or in any city of this world. It also exists in the heart of each believer as the one aboriginal vicar, the

conscience, which is irreplaceable and our

last refuge. One must follow ones own conscience, as the sole sovereignty that is within oneself.

The starting point for my critique of the papacy last year was the coat of arms of Benedict XVI, a fact I have concealed and withheld until now. There are various interpretations, all benign, of what that crest and shield contain, but I would like to add my own reading of that heraldic device, the at once iconic and Glas-like emblem of the man I consider the false prophet of Revelation, who promotes worship of the Beast, by means of an image set up for worship, at

every altar of the Roman Church. In the coat of arms of Benedict, there are several features. With-in it are three items, a seashell, the head of an Ethiopian, wearing a crown, and a four-footed beast, a bear.

Despite the benign, obscure and I think far-fetched inter-pretations of these things by commentators, I offer the opinion that they mean some-thing sinister.

It is in fact in what is called the “bend sinister� that the Beast appears. In Revelation, the Beast is said to have four feet like a bear. Thus it fits. The seashell I think represents the verse of Revelation that says the Beast will rise from the sea, not as in some obtuse reading about heroic Augustine, and a boy emptying the sea. The Ethiopian crowned is I think a reference more complex, bearing on the Acts of the Apostles, the only place in the New Testament that such a person is mentioned. He is the one converted by Phillip. What comes just before this is the warning about Simon Magus and the perennial Roman ur-problem of simony, as for instance the practice, still,

in Mexico of the selling

of indulgences. It is important what the Ethiopian is reading when he is found by Phillip, something from Isaiah about the suffering servant. The passage as Acts quotes it is a little different from the Old Testament.

It speaks of him who in his humiliation had judgment taken from him. To me this indicates the view of the young seminarian I once heard that God’s hands are tied, there is nothing he can do to end the abuses by Rome.

Surrounding the inside of the coat of arms are some curious innovations by Benedict, the replacing of the triple crown by the bishop’s miter, contra a ruling by Paul VI in 1969, and the addition of the pallium, along with the traditional “keys” of Peter. It seems this addition of the bishop’s hat fits the reading by exegetes of Revelation that the false prophet will have two horns like a lamb, which has been taken to indicate the form of the miter. The pallium itself is a pall that now hangs over all. Altogether, it seems that Benedict’s coat of arms is a symbol that fits his role, as I see it, as the one who follows the Beast, wields the same power as the former, and will promote the worship of him, especially by the image I take to be the new order of mass.

In this iconic representation of who and what Benedict is, we have the telling Glas of the Roman Church, if it is read prophetically, which is the dimension of Biblical studies neglected by many, but which is the highest level of scripture interpretation, being the end in view for which the Word of God was given. The emblem of Benedict, an anti-icon, inscribes the Glas of the Church, as a Mise en abime, as a crypt to be unsealed. It is perhaps this that Aquinas was shown, and which caused him to lay down his pen.

Near the start of his career, in the “opuscula” on the eternity of the world, Thomas had said that it had not yet been demonstrated that God cannot do an infinite number of things simultaneously. Indeed.

Thomas in the beginning knew more than he knew. In the end he knew what is called the vision of God, at least that’s what they say. They say that he saw God in a beatitude, the glory of God, was astonished by the beauty of love and simply ceased to write in order more quickly to pass on to the heavenly abode that awaits.

But perhaps the vision of God was for him something else, far stranger than the pious fraud the church used to gloss over the silence of Thomas and his statement that all he had written was of no account. I think, it seems to me, God did not show him Himself but the catholic fate. All the work of Thomas would be for naught, and even used for evil ends. God has mercy on whom He will, and I believe that Thomas Aquinas found that before he died God had already decreed the condemnation of the Church before it was ever created.

Thomas was not wicked and understood, though he was astonished. The wicked will never understand. God’s way is not the way of the church, nor does it know Him. In this, blindness and blessing.

SALTED WITH FIRE I would say that one can perhaps best view my apocalypse or apocalyptic writings through an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic, where at the end of history, at the top of the logical spiral of the Absolute Spirit or SA [Savoir Absolu of Glas by Derrida] is the trinity of art, religion and philosophy. You can read this book and perhaps someday my other, unpublished writings, going back to 1985, and find little if any critical writing on any other subject. However, there is a fourth mode in which I write, a literary style, somewhat poetic and autobiographical, which effracts the circularity of that Hegelian triad and opens the system to its other. The effraction, a term I borrowed from Derrida, is a thing I posit as the “I” that breaks the matrix of GodChurch-World, and destroys that ring, consigning it to the flames, in what I call an arrival ending both the dialectical confiscation and the deconstructive impasse, also a theme of the later writings of Derrida after his real religious turn in 1989, the year I also converted. He both deferred arrival, famously, yet called on it to come, in a Messianic and increasingly Apocalyptic sense. His steady but as always oblique approach to a prophecy concerning a time that is now occurring has only through the writing of my work in the last two years come to be understood by me as a revelation concerning the Roman rule. The work I have written effracts systems on different levels, not only that of SA and the other totalities of closure that now are attempting the absolute anti-spirit, and of critical, philosophical and theological writing by the personal and poetic “I”, but in these pages you have finished reading by the synthesis of the literary with the critical due to the form and

pressure of the time. In economic terms, and differently from the deconstructionist tenet that it can only be done from within the thing to be deconstructed, I am performing a further break from a radical place in the exteriority where I found God in 1989.

It may be that the young man studying at the seminary with me a few years ago in order to become a Roman priest was right, that “God’s hands are tied.” Often, in the almost eight years since, I have defended the thesis of idealism that God is the absolutely free, but at last wondered to myself a few days ago “what if?” What if the young man was right? What if somehow God is not free? What if Rome somehow has practiced the closure on God first of all, by placing certain words of Christ against others, and through the constant call for mercy, cry for mercy, invocation and preaching of mercy, and the doling out of it en masse in the confessional, has in effect made it impossible for God to come again in justice. If He does so He will deny Himself as the merciful, and no longer be God, who cannot deny Himself. It is in the Roman interest, of course, to see the second coming deferred, forever if possible. Perhaps as was thought after the resurrection, Christ was supposed to return at once, but something happened to prevent Him. This may be the meaning of the scenes in Acts where the people in awe of the apostles lay all their money before them, to get near the power of the Spirit of Pentecost, and then those who do not are incredibly struck dead at Peter’s feet for not giving every bit of money to him.

Peter took the money, when he should have said “give it to the poor.”

This is the true simony, not the Magus attempting to buy power, but Simon Peter selling it. The Church went wrong in the very beginning and has been wrong ever since. Power and money. Mammon. So they have tied God’s hands to keep on with their corruption extending now even to the ritual abuse of children on the one hand and of the mass on the other. If this is the case, I asked myself what is to be done? If the power of the keys given to Peter in Matthew to bind and loosen has bound God in Heaven, bound his justice on earth and in heaven, while loosing

only a seeming mercy, words of mercy, at least, it seemed to me there could be a way to overcome the power of the keys and, if it is thinkable, to untie God’s hands so that He could act. It is absurd, therefore, so think like Tertullian and believe. If the set of all of the Words of Christ are a closed set, a canon circumscribed, both without by decree, and within by the incessant gloss of fathers and theologians, so that everything is determined, it could be possible to make this closed set overall indeterminate, if a statement could be found that fulfilled the mathematician Gödel’s theorem that for such a set there will always be a proposition that is either both true and false or the validity of which cannot be determined from the other propositions in the set. There are things said by Christ that seem to be false, that some hearing Him would not die until they saw Him return in His kingdom, for instance, for the Church is obviously not the Kingdom Come. So, I searched for an inexplicable statement and found it in Mark, where Christ says “everyone” will be “salted with fire.” The fathers say this is both hell, on the one hand, and the Holy Spirit, on the other, which is a flat contradiction, and Gregory the Great says of the passage that no one should disturb the peace and unity of the Church, by which I think he sensed some trouble to come based on these words. In fact, the context of “salted with fire” indicates the fire of hell, but which I think cannot be, for it applies to “everyone.” One could say that the term “fire” is equivocal, some to hell and some to the Spirit. If this is the case, it may be the Lord said it in this manner, as he said other things hard to understand in the parables, not to be understood, but this in an absolute sense, in order that the phrase “salted with fire” is both/and, not either/or, and therefore, according to the logic of contradiction I laid out earlier in the work, the words are true in a sense which the logic of the Church based on Aristotle and Aquinas cannot accept. All of the truth is that truth is both true and false at once, this is the whole, which thus cannot be closed, so the words “salted with fire” fit the logic of set theory, in that they are both self-contradictory, thank God, and cannot be glossed from other propositions in the Words of Christ.

Therefore, all the set’s propositions are indeterminate, due to the rules of the closure of the ring set, which provide for the multiplication of the indeterminate term over all the others, making them all indeterminate, the very multiplication the Church has depended on for the internal closure of the set, all being absolutely true backward and forward. If all of the Words of Christ are indeterminate, then those authorizing the power of the keys are, too. They cannot be proved true or false, their truth or falsity is in principle absolutely unknowable, and the Pope cannot use the passage to enforce his power. Therefore, God is free. His hands are no longer tied. We are free to believe His Words or not, as faith permits, may God increase our faith, and He is no longer bound by the power of the keys once held in error by the Roman Pontiff, but now returned to their rightful owner. O, Christ, come quickly!

Theology and the Church, though not Scripture in which all truth is hidden [that “dangerous” book as a one-time friend called it in most unfriendly terms as he stressed the necessity of “earthly existence”], are the “The God Enclosure” that men and women use, if possible, to trap God, because they fear God’s freedom [and their own], a God who made a world where lions rend the flesh of living antelopes, for instance, not to mention human society’s evils. It may be that God is completely incomprehensible, despite human reason, so He is not even “true.” God is not nice, but neither are we, really, though in hypocrisy we would pretend to be. Yet, although this is, willingness to love is the secret by which we live. The willingness to love by which we live implies a willingness to love not only each other but God, foremost, and to believe Him in His promises. The Jews in the wilderness did not believe that the Promised Land was ripe for the taking. They balked and refused. So many times have the people of God refused to enter in. It may be that here at the end of things God gives us once more and one last time the chance to do the right thing. Let us not be those children of the kingdom that the Lord says will not sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, instead cast out into the darkness wailing, while many from the

east and the west gather in with the patriarchs and the prophets. It may be that the Church need not be destroyed even if prophesied by as diverse sources as Malachy, who envisions only one Pope after Benedict XVI, and the Book of Revelation and Daniel, which I think I have shown, however briefly, must apply to the state of affairs in the Church today. It may be that those currently performing their roles in this passion of the Church do not understand what they are doing or why and do what they do in their own minds and those of others with the best motives. It may be that God, as shown in Numbers, and at other places in scripture, can change his mind. If the Church repents, it can still be saved. I will not lay out a program for how the Church may still save itself from a judgment that I fear it will incur if it holds to its present course. There are men in the Church who need to think on these things and at the time that is most acceptable, take action. That the fate of perhaps one billion souls rests in the hands of so few is cause not necessarily for terror but for hope. If good men be willing to stop evil, evil cannot win. There are better angels of our natures, and they appeal to us, even now. There is no such thing as fate. All are free, God, man, the Church and history. That Revelation promises the thousand year reign of Christ on earth is a prophecy we should look to. How many alive today in the Catholic Church will walk with the Lord in His Kingdom Come is not known. I believe the time is short until it commences. Let none of us, I pray, be the man to whom God says depart from me, I never knew you. To know the good, to see that it needs to be done, and not to do it, is a sin. To know the truth and not to acknowledge it is to be an accomplice to falsehood. To never walk in the splendid beauties of the New Jerusalem would be the worst tragedy any man could suffer, especially one who was responsible in a special way to be aware. We all work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and even the apostle Paul did not count himself as one who had attained.

PRAEMUNIRE In a preparation of a defense of the actions of the butler and the nuns, it is not so much necessary to justify what they have done or are doing, but to call into question the right of their accuser, the Pope. I believe the Pope bases the ultimate authority he has over them on long-standing notions of sovereignty to which the medieval theory of the divine right of kings is not foreign. But in what sense is Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, a “king”? If he claims sovereignty, it is probably in some sense as a kind of king, a monarch, an absolute, unquestioned ruler, reigning by divine right. Let us look at this. The liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church designates the last Sunday of the Church year, just before the Advent season, as the Solemnity of Christ the King. At any one time there can be but one King.

That is Christ. It is Christ who is sovereign of the Church, not the Pope.

Does Christ need a man to represent Him with say, power of attorney, as His agent, in the see of Peter? The presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, conferred on each member at confirmation, indicates, if one believes, that God is already represented and present and can directly affect persons and events. In the case, also, of each individual in the Church there is the all-important conscience, which as Cardinal Newman said is the “vicar of Christ” in each person. I believe it is this spiritual vicar whom the nuns and the butler are obeying instead of the man on the throne in Rome who is, in contradiction to one of the most important achievements of the Second Vatican Council, the treatise on conscience, produced after centuries of ambiguity and inquisition, forcing their consciences, and this precisely in religious matters, which the Council Fathers said was the area in which the rights of the conscience of the individual are most to be defended. Of course, the Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated under John Paul II and signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, allows the teaching of Newman on conscience in one place, while later saying that Catholics cannot deliberately set their consciences against the Magisterium. I believe one can deliberately violate one’s conscience, but I do not see how one can deliberately “set” it, as one would set a watch.

Rather, it is the conscience that sets us. Since conscience is the vicar of Christ, it is Christ who sets the conscience. The butler said he did what he did in leaking Vatican documents under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. It was God’s will. The Spirit blows where He will. God is free. The

butler has told investigators he saw evil all around him in the Church. This from a man who has been at the Pope’s side day after day for years. A Vatican psychologist said the butler suffers from a “grave psychological disorder.” From the symptoms described, such as “uneasiness,” it seems to be a matter of an uneasy conscience, a moral dilemma, not a psychological problem. Other matters, such as the planting of a check in his apartment, to make him look like a thief rather than a whistle-blower, make me incredulous. If he asked no money from the press or publishers for the leaked documents, why would he appropriate a check? As an employee or resident of Vatican City State, he may be able to be held accountable in the Pope’s courts for his “crime,” but in terms of the higher law of the theological issues involved, the butler is not guilty. It was not a sin. It was an act of faith in God and an act of love for the Church. The Pope, sometime spiritual leader of a billion people, is now but a temporal ruler, like the popes of old, concerned with money, power, law, politics, keeping secrets, hiding things the Church and the world should know. He seeks to enforce justice on truth-tellers like the butler and the nuns, while at the same time begging for mercy for the sex-abusing priests and the bishops responsible for the cover-up. Only in a totalitarian regime could he get away with this, not in a democracy. There is some sort of dissonance here between Benedict’s roles as temporal ruler and spiritual leader. On the other hand, does the Church then have two Kings, Jesus Christ it’s spiritual sovereign and Benedict it’s temporal? We know the history of the popes and emperors in the middle ages. The pontiff always held the spiritual ruler to be supreme. And so He is. Let us never say we have no king but Caesar.

Christ is King. May He come quickly.

The sovereignty of Benedict being in dispute and the sovereignty of Christ recognized, let us appeal to English law. The rule of Praemunire applied to those who upheld papal supremacy in legal matters involving the English King. Convicted, those supporting the Pope had to forfeit. A fortiori if Praemunire is applied by analogy to the current question. Christ is King in the Church and in each individual in the Church. One cannot serve two masters, as the Lord said. Benedict must forfeit. Certainly, Christ the King may have a council or counselors, as other kings may have, but he needs no other sovereign. I believe, as in the parable of the vineyard, the King is returning to take it back from the usurpers who beat and killed the men the King sent to them to speak for Him. Benedict, on his accession, claimed to merely be a laborer in the vineyard, but this means one who does not give to God what is God’s. Christ the King has chosen the American nuns and the Pope’s own butler to speak and act on his behalf, to rebuke Peter to his

face, which seems to be a time immemorial job for those in the Church. I call on Cardinals and Bishops to also speak and act, in defense of the butler and the nuns, and in common cause with them and their lay supporters. I thank God that these events are unfolding on the fiftieth anniversary of the convening of the Second Vatican Council, which is still in living memory. Blessed John XXIII said God spoke to him directly and told him to call the council. Across the board, the current Pope and his predecessor have besieged it and attempted to roll-back point by point the high-water mark of the Catholic Church. In matters of “practical theology” such as church administration and the liturgy they have pretty much succeeded, but in terms of what may be called “mystical theology,” that is, the individual, unique relationship of each Catholic with the Holy Trinity, they will not succeed. For the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within us and cannot be overturned. This relationship is forever, and will outlast even St. Peter’s and the so-called eternal city of Rome.

END OF PROPHECY In my work on the catholic apocalypse I arrived at my premises, formed my arguments, forged the literary styles, and derived my conclusions using only faith and reason, though I cannot say I did it alone, but by the grace and mercy of God. All of the information I deduced the work from is a matter of public record, more or less, and there were things I heard from unnamed sources concerning the finances at the Vatican that I chose not to print, being unable to substantiate them. Nothing has been based on private or special or direct revelation of the Lord to me. However, I prayed often, and thought things over for myself. In this I received the light and strength to write what I have written. At the end, I made a special prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary and over the next few minutes I arrived at what I think Benedict’s endgame will be. It is not a prophecy in the sense of one of the Biblical prophets, but writing based on thinking in reflection based on prayer.

There have been seventeen encyclicals of the antichrist. Because of the exigency of the number 18 (6+6+6=18, 6x6x6=216 and 2+16=18, and John Paul 2 + Benedict 16 = 18) there must be 18 such letters before the pontificate of Benedict ends. He said previously he was delaying his next one until after he had published the second volume of his best-selling work on Jesus. Now that that has been issued, as well as his book on the “signs of the time,” I think he will soon publish his fourth encyclical, to go with John Paul II’s fourteen, to reach the fateful number. What could this potentially culminating statement be? I think it will be the ex cathedra assertion of the proposed Marian dogma discussed for years of the Blessed Virgin Mary as mediatrix and adjutrix. That is, that she shares equally with Christ the role of both mediator and judge. The infallible declaration of this dogma, long championed by some in the Church, will do several things at once. First, it will permanently destroy the hope of ecumenism that in part gave rise to the Second Vatican Council, the hope of the reconciliation of the Catholic Church with the other Christian churches. The Vatican in 2011 floated the idea that the real antichrist is the pope to come after Benedict, and that he will be an ecumenist.

Immediately on certain Catholic websites the book by the Russian 19th century theologian Vladimir Solovyov, “Tales of the Antichrist,� appeared, which the Vatican suggested supports their contention. As you may suspect, I believe Benedict was merely trying to direct attention away from himself. The prophecies of Malachy are wellknown. There is to be only one pope after the current one. And he well may be ecumenical, which Benedict definitely is not. The foreclosure of the ecumenical movement will isolate the Catholic Church, reinforcing the mystique of exclusivity, which one priest told me is the ideology of the Church today. The faithful will be told that they are the good ones, sure of salvation, on the inside, unlike those without, the heretics, apostates, sinners, and so on. Many people go along with this, unquestioningly, fearing the consequences if they are outside the circle. Perhaps the ecumenical movement was a dream as regards the Catholic Church, because no thinking Christian outside the Church can in any way accept the authority of the Pope, and those in the Church cannot, for the most part, imagine a Church without a Pope, and are really not allowed to imagine it, as papal infallibility forbids it. The ecumenical impetus at Vatican II nearly gave rise in

Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, to the redefining of the role of the bishops vis-Ă -vis the Pope, but Paul VI in 1964 had two notes appended to the Council document instructing how it was to be read, over-ruling the Council, and taking the wind out of the sails of reform in the Church. The proposed permanent council in Rome composed of a group of bishops went on, but was diffused and made ineffective by the Pope and the Curia. The forces of reaction, which had tried to hinder the bishops even before they met first in 1962, by devising a plethora of drafts that had to be completely rejected one and all by the Council so that the real work could begin, turned the corner on the progressives with the “interpretationâ€? Paul gave of the most important document of the Council. It was only a matter of time, after what I think was the coup in 1978, for Wojtyla to step in with an iron hand and begin eliminating voices of opposition, dissent and even dialogue within the Church. The current struggle by the American nuns is a last attempt to stop the complete closure in the Church of the hope for a freer Catholicism witnessed in part in Rome during the Second Vatican Council.

What else will the possible encyclical on Mary do? It will do something I think unprecedented. The dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary, promulgated in 1854 and 1950, respectively, did not contradict scripture. The Bible does not comment on these matters, so the Popes had a free hand, and they had been widely discussed in the Church for years. However, the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary being both mediator and judge with Christ is different. The apostle Paul said that we have “one sole mediator” with God, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ himself said “scripture cannot be broken.” An infallible papal dogmatic assertion on Mary as it has been discussed since the time of the Marian resurgence in the Church led by John Paul II, would be a flat contradiction of scripture as well as a long-held teaching of the Church, denying both St. Paul’s word as well as Christ’s. But the antichrist could well do such a thing, and I think he will. I believe he has already beatified and ratified the actual worship of the beast in the Book of Revelation, and set in place the eventual suspension of the sacrifice, which will be made vacant spiritually, not literally. The

odd thing about the notorious failed prophecy of May 2011 in “The End of the Church Age” was that it is not literally but spiritually true, and being invisible, may already have happened, almost unnoticed.

That prophecy, which frightened many people about the end of the world, said a series of earthquakes would take place, ringing the globe, time zone by time zone, beginning in the Western Pacific Ocean. In fact, such an earthquake took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, devastating the city, but I believe that the prophecy may point to an event that has or will take place in the Catholic Church, connected with the recent changes in the Order of Mass, many of which may not have gone into effect because of the unheard-of innovation in the second half of it of the so-called masses of “reconciliation” which I do not think have as of yet been widely used, if at all. The paragraph of instruction on these all new masses stipulates different occasions for their celebration, such as times of emergency, and other more benign reasons. I believe that on a day now known to the Pope, before his reign ends in 2014, all of the Catholic dioceses in the world will have one of these masses read and celebrated, and that this will be in conjunction with the assertion of

the new Marian dogma, possibly with the insertion of the new titles for the Blessed Virgin into the mass. This may cause the deconsecration of the Roman Catholic Church on that day, time zone by time zone, around the world, from the start of the new day, west of the International Dateline. As it says in Revelation, Babylon falls in the space of one hour, the length of a Sunday mass. The Church will deconsecrate, if it does, because of lese majesty, an offense against the sovereignty of Christ the King, by the Pope, and against the Blessed Virgin Mary, who though seemingly exalted by this act of the Pope, is actually being impugned in her humility as the handmaid of the Lord. For too long the Church has distorted the image of Mary, and now I believe this was done with insidious intent, both to trap Catholics who love her into the coming deconsecration, and to make war on the Woman as the Dragon does in the Book of Revelation.

It may be that nothing at this point can be done to stop this from happening. Perhaps all we can do is await the final spiritual vacancy of the Catholic Church, though what external temporal affect this will have on the World cannot be known, though there are many

frightening indications in the Book of Revelation of events prophesied to take place, which I think will be triggered by the voiding of Catholicism. We may look forward to the thousand year reign of Christ when the battles are over, but the road there will be hard for anyone to traverse.

On the other hand, there are still one billion Catholics, and they individually, or nationally, by groups, or orders, or en masse, are still free to follow their consciences, to take action against the abuses of the Church already known, and the darker sub-text which has given rise to them. The democratic forces in the world have long been engaged in a struggle with anti-democratic forces, and this is true in the Catholic Church, too. These forces of democracy, nascent at the Second Vatican Council, may still be asserted and the Church taken back, saved, transformed, and the world with it brought to a peaceful and loving end, in which judgment is not necessary. The choice confronting Catholics is simple: a free, democratic Christian Church, or a totalitarian antichristian empire modeled on Caesar. May God forgive all who hold and teach the Catholic faith.