Here’s the thing about being a Prophet. The trick is you don’t peer into the future, you peer into the present. You simply take a look at what’s going on around you, at the stuff everybody else sees but no one wants to notice. And you extrapolate.

For instance, you gather the hints being thrown out in the Father Pavone situation and you make the obvious connection, as I do here, that things are going to go from bad to worse – and the cause is the heresy of Americanism and our devotion to consequentialism, which will doom the pro-life movement from within, despite our best efforts to rationalize our sin.

Likewise, Fr. James V. Schall, S. J. writes a prophetic piece about the coming persecution of the Catholic Church, which is really only the present persecution extrapolated out in time. Fr. Schall points out, as an alarming example, the legal mandate that private insurance must now cover contraception, about which a commenter notes

I work for a Catholic-sponsored health insurance company. We are preparing to comply with the HHS mandate. There is NO sign that the company is fighting back. I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and I’m terribly distressed by my company’s apparently ho-hum attitude toward this assault on religious liberty. It affects all orthodox Christians (small-o and capital O). I don’t know if there is a plan to fight back or not, but I’ve seen no evidence of it yet. I’ve already decided to resign if the company does comply with the HHS mandate. I don’t think that I could in conscience work for an organization that goes against its own moral and ethical teaching.

… a very telling example of the reality of the coming persecution – it’s already here and it’s forcing people to lose their jobs at the very least.

Fr. Schall also predicts that soon in the United States, as in China, there will be two “churches”, one an underground catacomb true Church and the other the government sanctioned “official church”. The true Church will be persecuted and shuttered because of “hate speech” – which means pointing out the sins of sodomy, fornication, contraception, abortion, the abuse of children, the abuse of the poor, de facto slavery to the state and to corporations, and all the things we’re not only tolerating but celebrating in our culture today. The “official church”, the false church, will join in celebrating all these horrors and will make it all go down smoothly by offering services with gay guitar music and self-esteem workshops over coffee and donuts.

I will be bold enough to add another prophecy, based simply upon observing what we see today and what we’ve seen in the past generation. And that is this: two-thirds of the Catholic bishops in the United States will collude with the spirit of antichrist in the coming generation and will glibly and complacently join in the fun of the sham Christ and his sham Church.

Now, friends, I know this sounds just a tad apocalyptic. I know I sound as if I’ve put on a bad wig and am imitating Michael Voris, who has rightly been pointing out the sins of the liberals, while using the Orwelian tactics of a Ministry of Mis-information demagogue to do so. I know I sound as if I’m a furious mad-trad, building a bunker with my bare hands to ward off the coming persecution, even though I have an obsessive-compuslive fear of getting my hands dirty. I know I sound as if I’ve performed the audio book version of too many end-of-times Michael O’Brien novels (which are quite good, by the way).

But here’s why I’m not really crazy.

And here’s why Fr. Schall is not really crazy. This is the last paragraph of his article:

Constitutional assurances of free speech, free exercise of religion, and limited government no longer carry much weight against entrenched “democratic” ideologies, something both John Paul II and Benedict XVI foresaw. Few of us like to think this way about America, no doubt. We recall the Polish bishops before 1939. But our “invasion” does not come from the outside. It comes from within our souls, as all disorders of polity do.

It comes from within our souls, as all disorders of polity do.

That’s a great line, and it shows both the strength and the sanity of the Christian Faith.

The heart of this prophecy is the trouble in our hearts.

What the “professional prophets” such as Michael Voris fail to proclaim in their jeremiads is love – the love of the pierced heart of Our Savior which looks upon the Battle of the End Times not as a battle of “us vs. them” but as a battle for the salvation of souls, which is fought in each and every human heart and can only be won by the grace of God, by joining in His everlasting sacrifice, by suffering, by loving our enemies; and by realizing that the answer is not Activism (the heresy that nothing we do matters unless we effect some sort of broad social change – which underlies the motivations of the Lying Apologists and the errors of some in the pro-life movement); the answer is not paranoia and hunkering down (the neo-Puritanism of the mad-trads), closing our hearts to our neighbors and to the world; the answer is none of these things.

In the coming persecution, the answer is within you. It is the Kingdom of God, which is within you, among you, and the only “order of polity” that is not “disordered”, for the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City of True Polity, is the fruit of our hearts united with His.