Know? Heaven? That's a tall order! "There was a silence in Heaven."

How about some gut feelings based on Scripture and prophetic tradition and reason and many years of horrifying experience?

I think that the basic problem here is that we have yet to comprehend the peculiar difficulties involved in the Apocalypse's being an inside job, so to speak. It would have been so much neater and simpler if it had been a matter of the Communists taking over the globe and attempting to exterminate all Catholics, all of whom would have been united in Faith and Morals. But an apparently lawful Council of what was apparently Christ's Church being the source of the real problems? The apparent Vicar of Christ? Catholics destroying themselves and others spiritually out of holy obedience?

"If this Sex Ed course is fine with my local ordinary and with Rome, who am I, little old I, not to teach it, even though Protestant Evangelical heretics have denounced it as skanky in the extreme?"

So much for simple Armageddons in which the good guys and the bad guys are clearly distinguishable.

As for what's going on on earth between the saints and the "damned" (but let's say the enemies of the saints), the saints are mostly paralyzed by the terms of the ancient contract between Christ and the leaders of His Church. "He who hears you hears me." Not for a second would any Catholic have thought that he had to hear a peep out of Gorbachev. But that same Catholic has heard faith-dissolving volumes from putative popes for generations as though they spoke for Christ.

"Ah, but we have to distinguish between good and bad laws and commands and initiatives..."

Ah, but not everyone is a theologian along the lines of Aquinas...

"Ah. but Christ would then supply extraordinary graces consistent with extraordinary spiritual threats."

Ah, but maybe not. Maybe He might WITHDRAW graces and leave us all spiritual Jobs, His only mandate to the devil in our case being that he touch not our innermost souls and minds...

Look at Archbishop Lefebvre. "The See of Peter being occupied by Antichrist...." "Holy Father, I accept Vatican II in the light of Tradition just as you do..." His attitude towards a secular and sociopolitical Beast would have been much more consistent.

We read in St John's Apocalypse that the Beast was given leave to VANQUISH the saints. Even saints marvel at the Beast and ask who is like unto it and who will do battle with it. I think that it was very tactful, very sweet, of the Divine Teacher to refer to the mass deception of the elect as only a possibility, rather than a matter of course, given the kind of apparent authority enjoyed by the real false prophets and false christs of the real Apocalyptic situation.

My hunch is that we probably all think of the holy persons in Heaven, even the three divine ones, as being kind of like the more well-disposed cardinals in Rome at this and that discastery in their attitudes towards the "lamentable abuses" and "unfortunate excesses" of the Vatican II church. We posit "romanitas" in the courts of both the God and the King of the Jєωs. We imagine them as being mildly displeased by maybe the worst New Pentecostal scandals, but beyond that too enraged against the REAL enemies of all that is holy and true -that is, the proud and ignorant and nasty and rashly judgmental hardliner sedevacantists- to have any time or energy left over for raising even an eyebrow at those on the opposite end of the spectrum, whose fidelity to the doctrinal and moral norms expressed by the Papal Magisterium would, shall we say, seem to lack a certain enthusiastic whole-heartedness.

We're not dumb. We're not weak. Our befuddlement and exhaustion are inevitable according to the workings of the Roman Catholic System. What's going on in Heaven? That's  the question? We IMAGINE that what is going on is that Christ is bound by whatsoever things are proclaimed by His latter day Rocks, and we hope that our own Defective Pontiff Emergency theologizing might undo at least some of the less tricky knots.

We may know by Reason that this is all absurd. But Reason affords us no communion with Jesus of Nazareth. Only Catholic Faith gets us there. So in the context of the implosion and subversion of the supernatural System of Faith, we are embarrassed about positing HIM in this way or that relative to the Vatican II popes and church. And therefore we become ashamed to look Him in the eye. We pretend that we are ashamed of ourselves and of fellow Catholics for being so dumb and so weak in the face of the Conciliar church assault, but the one of whom we are really ashamed is Christ. We simply can't believe that He let all this happen to us. But we know that He did.

The early martyrs were not tormented from WITHIN by musings such as, "Gee, maybe I, a mere peasant, AM being proud and not properly ecuмenical by refusing to show reverence to what is good and true in the religion of my people by burning this incense to Minerva."

But the saints of the Apocalypse are tormented and all but destroyed by such musings. "Maybe I HAVE been gulity of uncharitable rash judgment in not trying to see Koran kissing from the point of view of the putatively Petrine kisser, however questionable such ecuмenical activity remains... And it's not as though I have to kiss the Koran... And.... And... And..."

I think that our only antidote to despair is to develop a greater respect for the role of Right Reason and a certain calm and dry wit in dealing properly with all these endless abominations which fill our lives as Catholics. (Anyone who attempts to justify or excuse the Holy Face-slapping enormity of papal Koran Kissing is just not for real, man. End of story.). Also, we must think of the Messiah not as embarrassingly bound in Heaven by the terms of His ancient promise to the subsequently Roman Rock, but as coming on the clouds of Heaven to earth to take personal control of all things in His earthly household, according to the terms of another ancient promise.

"The Master will take that wicked servant and cut him in two and make him share the lot of the hypocrites."

Above all, we must love our Master and believe that He wills nothing but the best for us. We must learn to see the horror of our own post-Vatican II Catholic lives as something that has happened not to us, but above all to Him. We must be in awe of the mystery of the Divine King's mystical solidarity with the least of His scandalized brethren. Only in that way will we escape the degrading foolishness of our own instinctive "pious" imaginings about a Cardinal Christ who is a secret friend of Tradition but can say and do only so much for the time being, and is not above given mixed messages in a pinch such as Assisi II and III and IV and V...

Another thing niggles at me.  Jesus said that people will be marrying, etc, when He returns.  That means it will be life as usual with us, that somehow all the portentous things in Revelations will have escaped us somehow.  Having gone through this much of it and the way it came down, I am no longer surprised by that.  I'm sure the remainder will also be eminently over-lookable.

I also noticed the silence of the other forum members, which I took to mean that they are also in the dark.

Nah, if they have something to say, Cletus, they generally say it.  Being the weekend, many of them are probably absent, but if around they are always helpful.  

I've been thinking and thinking about what you said, and what keeps coming up is the "laying down" of His life, or in this case the Bride's life, since She must follow Him.  Even to the "abandonment" phase.  You speak of Him leaving us Job-like, which fits that, and certainly fits our helplessness.  If this is the case then it behooves us to make sure that we are members of the right body, because while all bodies will die, only One will resurrect.  

One of the things which is bothering me greatly since coming out of Novus Ordo Land (aka Never Never Land), is that so many more souls are being lost than I ever suspected.  I know we don't know that, only God does.  But the prognosis is grim, anyway.  Remember Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?  The proper question would have been "Why do good things happen to bad people", since Jesus said none is good but God.  I am in shock that I didn't see that before, and wonder how many other things escaped me.  It is all very sad.