St. Nilus, pray for us!
Posted on 11/09/2004 9:57:26 AM PST by Pyro7480
The Prophecy of Saint Nilus
Did this saint forsee the crisis of the Church and world of our time?
St. Niluswas one of the many disciples and fervent defenders of St. John Chrysostom. He was an officer at the Court of Constantinople, married, with two sons. While St. John Chrysostom was patriarch, before his exile (398-403), he directed Nilus in the study of Scripture and in works of piety. St. Nilus left his wife and one son and took the other, Theodulos, with him to Mount Sinai to be a monk. The Bishop of Eleusa ordained both St. Nilus and his son to the priesthood. The mother and the other son also embraced the religious life in Egypt.
From his monastery at Sinai Nilus was a well-known person throughout the Eastern Church; by his writings and correspondence he played an important part in the history of his time. He was known as a theologian, Biblical scholar and ascetic writer, so people of all kinds, from the emperor down, wrote to consult him. His numerous works, including a multitude of letters, consist of denunciations of heresy, paganism, abuses of discipline and crimes, of rules and principles of asceticism, especially maxims about the religious life. He warns and threatens people in high places, abbots and bishops, governors and princes, even the emperor himself, without fear. He kept up a correspondence with Gaina, a leader of the Goths, endeavouring to convert him from Arianism. He denounced vigorously the persecution of St. John Chrysostom both to the Emperor Arcadius and to his courtiers.
Nilus must be counted as one of the leading ascetic writers of the fifth century. His feast is kept on 12 November in the Byzantine Calendar; he is commemorated also in the Roman martyrology on the same date. St. Nilus probably died around the year 430 as there is no evidence of his life after that.
(Excerpted from The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition)
The Prophecy
After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century, the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, people's minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable. People's appearances will change, and it will be impossible to distinguish men from women due to their shamelessness in dress and style of hair. These people will be cruel and will be like wild animals because of the temptations of the Antichrist.
There will be no respect for parents and elders, love will disappear, and Christian pastors, bishops, and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left.
At that time the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change. People will abandon modesty, and dissipation will reign. Falsehood and greed will attain great proportions, and woe to those who pile up treasures. Lust, adultery, homosexuality, secret deeds and murder will rule in society. At that future time, due to the power of such great crimes and licentiousness, people will be deprived of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which they received in Holy Baptism and equally of remorse.
The Churches of God will be deprived of God-fearing and pious pastors, and woe to the Christians remaining in the world at that time; they will completely lose their faith because they will lack the opportunity of seeing the light of knowledge from anyone at all. Then they will separate themselves out of the world in holy refuges in search of lightening their spiritual sufferings, but everywhere they will meet obstacles and constraints.
And all this will result from the fact that the Antichrist wants to be Lord over everything and become the ruler of the whole universe, and he will produce miracles and fantastic signs. He will also give depraved wisdom to an unhappy man so that he will discover a way by which one man can carry on a conversation with another from one end of the earth to the other. At that time men will also fly through the air like birds and descend to the bottom of the sea like fish.
And when they have achieved all this, these unhappy people will spend their lives in comfort without knowing, poor souls, that it is deceit of the Antichrist. And, the impious one! -- he will so complete science with vanity that it will go off the right path and lead people to lose faith in the existence of God in three hypostases.
Then the All-good God will see the downfall of the human race and will shorten the days for the sake of those few who are being saved, because the enemy wants to lead even the chosen into temptation, if that is possible... then the sword of chastisement will suddenly appear and kill the perverter and his servants.
St. Nilus, pray for us!
Catholic and Orthodox ping!
Bump.
Nice to see you, as always, Siobhan. Have you heard of this before?
I believe there may be some conflating of their lives in the hagiographies.
You are correct. The icon that was posted was my mistake. I just did a search, and I cannot find a proper icon.
Great catch with that pic!
Just yesterday, I read the following review of David Carlin's book "The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America". The review is written by: Rev. John F. Harvey, OSFS. It ties in well with the prophecy of St. Nilus.
I want to point out an important book: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America by David Carlin. The author predicts that if the Church continues to go downhill at the same rate as in the last 40 odd years, she will have about as much influence on public affairs as the Lancaster Amish. As a sociologist and as a practising Catholic through many years, he has amassed the kind of data which will persuade the reader that Carlin is on target in his evaluation of the Church in America. He wrote the book reluctantly, adding four chapters at the end in which he recommends ways in which the Church in America can stop its slide into oblivion.
In Part 2, he describes how secularism succeeded Protestantism as the dominant culture of America. In the mid-sixties, Catholics had become full participants in American mainstream culture at the very time that our culture "was being revolutionized by a generalized rebellion against authority". Catholics became full participants in an increasingly secularized culture which rejected all revealed religions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Secularism’s moral theory rejected "a long list of traditional, religion based moral rules. Thus it endorsed - or at any rate, soon would endorse, once it realized the implications of its premises - sexual license, cohabitation, easy divorce, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and suicide."
As Catholics breathed in the toxic air of secularism, they accepted the view that one must tolerate religious teachings in direct opposition to Catholic truth. It really did not matter what you believed in so long as you were a good person. It did not matter even if you were anti-religious. "And now an even more drastic change, tolerance extended not just to doctrine, but to conduct." Of course, one would be intolerant of conduct which obviously hurt others, such as murder, rape and robbery, but everything else would have to be permitted. If you did not agree with this attitude, you were guilty of the great sin of intolerance. Carlin cites the example of no-fault divorce. From now on, divorces could be carried out by mutual consent, "simply because the two parties had grown tired of the relationship," or even without such consent. Now people were as free to leave a relationship as they were free to enter one.
The culture of secularism was embraced whole heartedly by some Catholics. They were lost to the Church. Other Catholics sought to work out a reconciliation between secularism and their Catholic religion. These were the "liberal" or "progressive" Catholics. Often priests who rejected Humanae Vitae and openly opposed the pope were leaders in this group. A third group did not accept secularism, or the liberal Catholic point of view. These were the conservative or traditional Catholics, some of whom yearned for the pre-Vatican II Church, but this was not true of other conservative Catholics.
What Carlin regards as the largest group are the bewildered Catholics, a mass of people which included many priests and "not a few" bishops. They remained attached to the Church as an institution without a clear understanding of what the Church stood for. They were not sure of their own beliefs, and consequently did not "engage in open resistance to that culture".
These four factions or groups can still be found today. But it is not clear which group, or combinations of groups will "definitively determine the future of American Catholicism".
Having described secularism, I want now to discuss the Principle of Personal Liberty which flows from it.
The Personal Liberty Principle
The grounds for the Personal Liberty Principle (PLP) are found in cultural relativism and ethical emotivism, both of which have been with us for several centuries. Cultural relativism means that actions are good according to the tastes of the prevailing culture. It is acceptable by those in some parts of America to directly shorten a person’s life because one is tired of living, and one is in complete control of one’s life. This leads to forms of the living will, in which one declares the conditions under which he will die. Ethical emotivism is a method of determining right from wrong on the basis of personal feelings. Animal rights people feel that it is morally wrong to shoot a deer during hunting season. One will note that both cultural relativism and ethical emotivism undermine the idea that there is an objective moral law. "Both lead to the conclusion that moral rules and values are, in the last analysis, simply a matter of personal preference."
The principle of personal liberty may be described as the person’s right to decide that certain actions are good, and others are bad. But how do they make decisions about their conduct? The individual believes that he can do anything that he desires, so long as he does not hurt any other person. As this principle was practised by the secularist it came to be applied to matters of sexuality. Sexual relations are a purely private matter. They are a source of great pleasure. One should not then be bound by religious or moral codes. So long as one does not directly hurt another person, one’s conduct is justified. Thus, sex before marriage, cohabitation, the viewing of pornography, and homosexual acts are viewed as private matters hurting no one. Directly shortening one’s life is the liberty exercised by the person.
Having described the PLP with its origins in John Stuart Mill’s understanding of liberty, Carlin demonstrates its serious flaws, referring to the PLP as a "singularly stupid principle". Nevertheless, many Americans have uncritically accepted it - such is "an indicator of the state of our national intellect and character. The dominance of this principle makes it difficult for Catholicism to flourish, or even to survive in America. It is the antithesis of Catholic morality. How can one be tainted by this principle and be really Catholic?"
Carlin adds that the PLP is composed of two inseparable sub-principles: (1) the autonomy principle, "which holds that we may do as we like, so long as we do not harm others" and (2) the tolerance principle which "holds that we must tolerate the conduct of others so long as this conduct does not harm people other than the actor himself."
Proponents of the gay-movement use the PLP in their effort to justify same-sex marriages. These unions are presented to the American people as alternatives to traditional marriage. If someone objects that such unions make no real contributions to the common good, he will be told that two people of the same-sex are not hurting anyone by their conduct. Their sexual acts are strictly a private matter, until one of them gets AIDS. When their union is know by children and teenagers, it impacts upon their perception of morality. They think marriage is not the only way to sexually express love. Such is a distortion of the meaning of marriage, of liberty, and true love.
We turn now to another application of the PLP, namely, married couples who become tired of one another and seek divorce. When they say that they are not hurting anyone else, they refuse to face the truth. Divorce brings deep unrest into the lives of the children, as I know from many years of counselling the victims of divorce. True, it did not hurt me personally, but it did leave scars on the children. Many other examples can be offered of the harm done by those who follow the PLP. Indeed it leads to habitual selfishness which ends up in addictive self-indulgence and loneliness.
The PLP principle is no reliable guide to conduct, but it allows one to rationalize any conduct in which one desires to engage. This is a dangerous moral principle. "But it is a principle that is immensely popular in American culture today." Yet for the last thirty or forty years our Catholic people have been living in this culture, and they will continue to live in this culture indefinitely.
Space does not permit me in this article to discuss the dismantling of the Catholic Ghetto in the sixties, the rebellion against the magisterium of the Catholic Church by dissident theologians in the sixties and seventies on the issue of contraception, and the deeper problem of Catholic self-identity in which Catholics began to believe that their religion was a mere denomination among other Christian churches instead of believing that it is the one true Church of Christ.
I hope I have whetted your curiosity to read Part VIII, entitled "Can the Fall Be Prevented?" (319-363). Carlin holds that it can be prevented under certain conditions, but he is uncertain whether the leaders of the Catholic Church in America and its faithful members are willing to take the steps which he regards as necessary.
In an appendix, Carlin presents statistical evidence of American Catholic decline(389). Here are a few samples of this decline: (1) Between 1965 and 2002 the number of priests in the United States dropped from 59,000 to 46,000, a drop of 22 per cent. (2) In 1965 the number of ordinations of new priests outnumbered the number of priests lost through death and departures by 725. In 1998, it was quite reversed, as death and departures outnumbered ordinations by 810. (3) In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians; in 2002 the number had dropped to 4700. (4) In 1965 there were 180,000 religious sisters in the United States; by 2002 the number had dropped to 75,500, with half of them past age 70.
Conclusion: Catholics loving their Church must turn to Jesus, the Head of the Mystical Body of Christ, telling Him that they will pray and do works of Penance for their Church. This will lead them to make sacrifices for the spiritual health of their families and parishes. The laity need to encourage our much maligned bishops to openly oppose gay rights legislation and legislation that restricts the God-given freedom of conscience which everyone has. There are many examples of this restriction of freedom; for example, pressuring doctors and interns to learn how to perform abortions; asking a doctor to directly shorten a person’s life because the relatives desire it.
I end with a prayer from the letter to the Philippians: "Brothers and Sisters. . . I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus."
I've seen this before. I don't believe it's authentic.
It would be better to ask them that. But I've seen this in several trad and neo-Cat places. No one ever provides where the source document is, though.
You don't have to be a lit crit to realize that no fifth-century author would ever say "After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century." They just wouldn't.
So even if there is some sort of sermon castigating sinners, or even Nilus' actual prophecy, you know the text has been tampered with, at the very least.
But to me the whole thing sounds contrived. When I first saw it, I tried to search out a source, any shred of a textual source, behind it, and came up empty-handed. Everyone just repeated the whole thing verbatim. Some said it was approved by Pope So-and-so, but that thread led nowhere.
It also started circulating fairly recently (late-80s or mid-90s, I think), and does not appear in, say, Catholic end-time books from the '50s.
I'm even a bit suspicious of the use of the name "Nilus." It sounds to me like whoever invented it was making an "inside joke" about the Protocols of the Elders of Sion, published by Sergei Nilus in 1905.
Also, if this was a hoax, I would have found at least one site on the Internet refuting it.
I didn't say I doubted the existence of Saint Nilus. I said I doubted that he wrote this piece, at least as it is quoted here. It may well be one of his "denunciations of heresy" reworked into a prophesy about the "middle of the 20th century."
Not necessarily. It would take some effort and expertise to be able to say absolutely that either a) Saint Nilus never wrote or said anything of the sort, or b) that this quote was written in so-and-so's basement a few years ago.
It's easy for me to suspect that it's invented, but would be quite difficult and time-consuming to prove that it's invented.
It's also a question of whether this alleged prophecy has risen to the level of importance to get someone's attention to search out it's authenticity.
Since it's not a matter of dogma or morals, any Catholic is free to believe it authentic or not. My own personal opinion is to doubt it.
Now, if someone would give me a page number from Migne, or something, I'll reconsider.
Related prophecies....
http://www.olrl.org/prophecy/prophecy.shtml
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/privaterevelation/lasalet.html
http://www.olrl.org/prophecy/akita.shtml
Condemned by the Holy Office.
It has come to the attention of this Supreme Congregation that certain ones are not lacking, even from among the ecclesiastic assemblage who, responses and decisions of this Holy Congregation itself having been disregarded, do proceed to discuss and examine through books, small works and articles edited in periodicals, whether signed or without a name, concerning the so-called Secret of La Salette, its diverse forms and its relevance to present and future times; and, this not only without permission of the Ordinaries, but, also against their ban.So that these abuses which oppose true piety and greatly wound ecclesiastical authority might be curbed, the same Sacred Congregation orders all the faithful of any region not to discuss or investigate under any pretext, neither through books, or little works or articles, whether signed or unsigned, or in any other way of any kind, about the mentioned subject. Whoever, indeed, violates this precept of the Holy Office, if they are priests, are deprived of all dignity and suspended by the local ordinary from hearing sacramental confessions and from offering Mass: and, if they are lay people, they are not permitted to the sacraments until they repent.
Moreover, let people be subject to the sanctions given both by Pope Leo XIII through the Constitution of the offices and responsibilities against those who publish books dealing with religious things without legitimate permission of superiors and by Urban VIII through the decree "Sanctissimus Dominus Noster" given on 13th March 1625 against those who publish asserted revelations without the permission of ordinaries. However, this decree does not forbid devotion towards the Blessed Virgin under the title of Reconciliatrix commonly of La Salette.
Given at Rome on 21st December, 1915.
Aloisius Castellano, S. R. and U. I. Notary.
"Moreover, let people be subject to the sanctions given both by Pope Leo XIII"
Pope Leo XIII himself had a vision of the devil pleading for an opportunity to put the Church on trial.
Such was the horror of this vision that he was moved to add the Leonine prayers to every Low Mass and compose numerous encyclicals on the importance of the rosary (and not the modernist illuminati version either).
Unfortunately the modernists have dropped the Leonine prayers, and perverted the very words of Consecration.
So much for being subject to the sanctions of Pope Leo XIII.
Why not be subject to Pope Pius XI and "Mortalium Animos" rather than defending the current pope's promotion of ecumania (indifferentism repackaged)?
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