ABOMINATION IN THE HOLY PLACE The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Times of the Antichrist by Kaplan A. Betschart
“Little children, it is the last hour: and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh …” (1 Jn 2.18)[1]
Today we shall consider the subject: “The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Times of the Antichrist.”
In Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman’s book about the time of the Antichrist—written before his conversion to the Catholic faith—is found the following quotation: “…the last persecution [will] be more awful than any of the earlier ones: […] being attended by a cessation of the Ordinances of grace, “the Daily Sacrifice;” and by an open and blasphemous establishment of infidelity, or some such enormity, in the holiest recesses of the Church […]”[2]. These words of Newman are a prophecy for the end times, in which religious life comes almost to a standstill, even also the daily celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Let us consider this point a little closer.
There are places in Sacred Scripture that seem to predict these events. Christ Himself refers to the prophet Daniel in the Gospel of Saint Matthew with the words:
“When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place […]” (Mt 24.15).
Indeed, in the prophet Daniel we read in three passages of the eradication of the daily sacrifice in the end times. These passages are as follows:
“And from the time when the continual sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination unto desolation shall be set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred ninety days.” (12.11)
“And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall defile the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the continual sacrifice: and they shall place there the abomination unto desolation.” (11.31)
“…it took away from him the continual sacrifice, and cast down the place of his sanctuary. And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice, because of sins: and truth shall be cast down on the ground, and he shall do and shall prosper.” (8.11 f.)
So what is meant by this taking away of the daily sacrifice? In order to be able to understand this better, we must remember that God commanded the Israelites through Moses to offer HIM a daily sacrifice. In the Book of Exodus it says, for example:
“This is what thou shalt sacrifice upon the altar: Two lambs of a year old every day continually. One lamb in the morning, and another in the evening. […] It is a sacrifice to the Lord, by perpetual oblation unto your generations” (29.38-39,42).
This daily sacrifice, which God had commanded to be offered, was a prefiguration (or type) of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And this type was taken away by the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70. “The sacrifice of the Temple, that is, of the lamb, morning and evening, in the Temple of God, was entirely abolished with the destruction of the Temple itself” (H. E. Manning)[3], since it could only be offered in one single place, namely the Temple in Jerusalem.
But, then, the prophet Malachias says:
“For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation” (1.11).
The Council of Trent teaches that this promise is fulfilled in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. But it is not only since the Council of Trent, but since the oldest days of Christianity, beginning with the Didache (Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles), then by Irenaeus, Justin, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Cyprian, that this passage of the prophet Malachias has been referred to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. They explained that here is meant the sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist, the True Paschal Lamb, which takes the place of the type, namely of the sacrifice of Jesus on Mount Calvary, which in an unbloody manner is continually renewed on our altars. The question now presents itself, whether the prophecy of the prophet Daniel about the eradication of the continual sacrifice and the abomination of the holy place also applies to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass of the Catholic Church. The sacrifice of the Old Testament, which was once the prefiguration of the Holy Mass, was—as already mentioned—taken away.
The (later Cardinal) Henry Edward Manning wrote on this question — even before his conversion to Catholicism:
“The Holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of Antichrist, and of these prophecies of Daniel, without a single exception, as far as I know, and they are the Fathers both of the East and of the West, the Greek and the Latin Church—all of them unanimously,—say that in the latter end of the world, during the reign of Antichrist, the holy sacrifice of the altar will cease. [fn. Malvenda, lib. viii. c.4, &c.] In the work on the end of the world, ascribed to St. Hippolytus, after a long description of the afflictions of the last days, we read as follows: “The Churches shall lament with a great lamentation, for there shall be offered no more oblation, nor incense, nor worship acceptable to God. The sacred buildings of the churches shall be as hovels; and the precious body and blood of Christ shall not be manifest in those days; the Liturgy shall be extinct; the chanting of psalms shall cease; the reading of Holy Scripture shall be heard no more. But there shall be upon men darkness, and mourning upon mourning, and woe upon woe.” [fn. S. Hippolyto tributus Liber de Consum. Mundi, § 34.] Then, the Church shall be scattered, driven into the wilderness, and shall be for a time, as it was in the beginning, invisible, hidden in catacombs, in dens, in mountains, in lurking-places; for a time it shall be swept, as it were, from the face of the earth. Such is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early centuries.”[4]
Manning cites examples from the history of the Church, in which this prophecy has already been fulfilled. In the first place he cites Muhammad, who may be seen as the forerunner of such an occurrence. “The Mahometan superstition,“ he writes, “which arose in Arabia, and swept over Palestine and Asia Minor, the region of the Seven Churches, and Egypt, the north of Africa—the home of St. Augustine, St. Cyprian, St. Optatus—and finally penetrated into Constantinople, where soon it became dominant, has in every place persecuted and suppressed the worship and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The Mahometan superstition at this moment holds for its mosques a multitude of Christian churches, in which the continual sacrifice is already taken away, and the altar utterly destroyed. In Alexandria and in Constantinople there stand churches built for Christian worship, into which the foot of no Christian has ever entered since the continual sacrifice has been swept away. Surely in this we see, in part at least, the fulfilment of this prophecy […] No doubt he [Muhammad] was one of the many forerunners and types of the Antichrist that shall be.”[5]
But the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was partly taken away also in Europe by a terrible storm of heresy. Manning writes:
“…the continual sacrifice [has] been taken away […] for instance, in all those churches of Protestant Germany which were once Catholic, where the holy sacrifice of the Mass was daily offered […] throughout Norway, and Sweden, and Denmark, and one half of Switzerland, where there are a multitude of ancient Catholic churches—throughout England, in the cathedrals and the parish churches of this land, which were built simply as shrines of Jesus incarnate in the Holy Eucharist, as sanctuaries raised for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice […] What is the characteristic mark of the Reformation, but the rejection of the Mass, and all that belongs to it, as declared in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England to be blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits? The suppression of the continual sacrifice is, above all, the mark and characteristic of the Protestant Reformation. We find, then, that this prophecy of Daniel has already its fulfilment both in
the East and West,—in the two wings, as it were; while in the heart of Christendom [sc. Rome] the Holy Sacrifice is offered still.”[6]
Finally Manning comes to speak of his own time (he lived 1808-92), in which he experienced above all the conflict against the Papal States. His forceful words from that time have an astonishingly prophetic meaning also, one might say, for our time:
“What is the great flood of infidelity, revolution, and anarchy, which is now sapping the foundations of Christian society, […] but the abomination which desolates the sanctuary, and takes away the continual sacrifice? The secret societies have long ago undermined and honeycombed the Christian society of Europe, and are at this moment struggling onward towards Rome, the centre of all Christian order in the world. The fulfilment of the prophecy is yet to come; and that which we have seen in the two wings, we shall see also in the centre [Rome]; […] The continual sacrifice will be taken away, and the sanctuary will be cast down. What can be more literally the abomination which makes desolate than the heresy which has removed the presence of the living God from the altar? If you would understand this prophecy of desolation, enter into a church which was once Catholic, where now is no sign of life; it stands empty, untenanted, without altar, without tabernacle, without the presence of Jesus [e.g. Basle Minster]. And that which has already come to pass in the East and in the West is extending itself throughout the centre of the Catholic unity.”[7]
Thus writes H. E. Manning. If we recall the present circumstances within the Catholic Church and what happens with the Holy Mass, one may come to the conclusion that we are experiencing a new and powerful phase of the abomination of the holy place—the threatening shadow of the Antichrist. That which is nowadays presented by professors and preachers across the world to future priests and to the faithful about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrament of the Altar, as so-called Catholic theology, has often nothing more to do with the Catholic faith. The fruits of such teaching are the ruined celebrations of Mass in many parishes. To be precise, when priests celebrate a Mass with the intention of “presiding at a meal celebration”, then that is no longer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (q.v. Crucifixion image of the Grünwald altarpiece with text). Only God knows, in how many Catholic Churches today the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has already been taken away. Professor Hacker wrote in his article, “Verschwörung gegen die HI. Messe und das Altarsakrament” [“Conspiracy against Holy Mass and the Sacrament of the Altar”] (in Una Voce Korrespondenz, 1/1978), among other things, that “without planning a detective investigation”, one must “nowadays use the term conspiracy, simply to describe a fact …”
The enemies of the Church make this remark with pleasure. Thus the Parisian Masonic journal of the Grand Orient de France, L’humanisme, wrote in 1968 of a “gigantic revolution in the Church”, which already contains “the prelude of victory”, a victory from a Masonic point of view, of course. And further on in the same journal it mentions with all the clarity that could be wished for: “Among the pillars that are most easily collapsing, we note … the real Eucharistic presence, which the Church could impose on the medieval masses, and which is disappearing with the progress of intercommunion and ‘inter-celebration’ [Interzelebration] of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors … If the traditional structures are collapsing, then the rest will follow”[8].
“[T]he Church of God will return into its state of suffering,” writes Manning, “as in the beginning”; but “the imperishable Church of God, by its inextinguishable life derived from the pierced side of Jesus, which for three hundred years lived on through blood, will live on still through the fires of the times of Antichrist.”
The Servant of God Niklaus Wolf von Rippertschwand composed a litany, which has a similar endeavour. With these following invocations we shall conclude this sermon:
When all shall shout: Peace, peace! We have nothing to fear, and so the end is at hand (cf. 1 Thess 5.3) —
Be merciful unto us.
When the Son of Perdition shall be worshipped in the Temple (cf. 2 Thess 2.4) —
Be merciful unto us.
When the shepherds shall be struck and the sheep dispersed (Mt 26.31) —
Be merciful unto us.
When many must bear the character of the beast (cf. Rev 13.16 f.) —
Be merciful unto us.
When it shall be given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them (cf. Rev 13.7) —
Be merciful unto us.
When the abomination of desolation shall be in the holy place (Mt 24.15) —
Be merciful unto us.
When he (the Son of Perdition) shall defile the sanctuary and shall take away the continual sacrifice (cf. Dan 11.31) —
Be merciful unto us.
Amen.
Translated by Gwilym Mair H.T. Evans, Seminarist of FSSP
[1] All Biblical quotations are from the Douay-Rheims translation.
[2] John Henry Newman, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), c. ii. ‘The Patristical Idea of Antichrist’, 98 f.
[3] Henry Edward Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See (London: Burns & Lambert, 1861), 78
[4] ibid., 79
[5] ibid., 80
[6] ibid., 80 f.
[7] ibid., 81 f.
[8] Quotation (with own translation) from Bishop Dr Rudolf Graber, Athanasius und die Kirche unserer Zeit (Abensberg 1973), 74
