From the desk of the Tar Heel disciple:
November 27, 2025
“The Church's Ultimate Trial”
Under this striking title, the Catechism of the Catholic Church provides three relatively short paragraphs explaining it's teaching on a topic that is little addressed in most Catholic pulpits. It is the opinion of this disciple that these are important themes, and are especially suitable for an Advent meditation, when we are invited by the Church through her liturgy to “prepare the way of the Lord,” and to contemplate the “last things.”
Perhaps so little attention is paid to these teachings given the danger of judgmental analysis of the current state of the Church and of the world by biased individuals. But a sincere believer’s mediation on these texts, and of the Scriptures on which they are founded, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, provide a sure foundation for the Christian life and a safe way to prepare for the second coming of Christ in glory, as the holy season of Advent demands.
675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.573 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth574 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.575
676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,576 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.577
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.578 The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.579 God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.580
The numerous footnotes in this important but often overlooked section of the Catechism are almost entirely from Sacred Scripture. They can be explored online: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
or in a physical (book) edition of the same:
