Apocalypse 9:6
And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it: and they shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them.
All men?
I see how life will become so much more difficult since purgatory will not be an option for those at the end of time. In this regard, yes, maybe they will desire to die but death will escape them. I see the possibility
It seems to me you're getting all worked up because of
misunderstanding, sspxbvm. Who said "all men?" That's your
interpretation. Certainly there could be very holy people who are
grateful for every minute of life they have, even if it is with great
suffering. Would that we could all suffer so! But that is not a trait of
our fallen nature. Natural man wants no discomfort. Therefore heresy,
Protestantism (denial of Purgatory), pain relievers, drugs, anesthesia.
Learning how to suffer the Catholic way is anathema to the modern
world.
So naturally, when there's a lot of misery after a devastating calamity,
the living will envy the dead. Does it say ALL of the living? No. It does
not. That's your interpretation. We've had Hiroshima, Nagasaki and
Chernobyl. At all of them, some of the living have envied the dead, but
not EVERYONE who survives envies the dead.
Take the recent great natural disasters we have had. The Indonesian
tsunami had corpses floating out to the ocean: did ALL of the survivors
who saw that wish they could have been among the corpses instead of
among the living? Perhaps some did, but most, no, not at all. They stood
there watching the corpses flowing out to the ocean and were thankful
they were NOT among them. Or take Katrina or the earthquakes: did
survivors wish they had died instead of lived? Perhaps some did, but
most of the survivors were grateful. Probably the thing that comes
closest to the Akita prophesy is something that happened in that same
country, with atomic explosions, which is evident there, that Our Lady
could say something to a visionary that she would understand, because
it is a concept in living memory: radiation sickness.
As for Padre Pio, he was saying only the Mass of the Immaculate
Conception, December 8th, every day during his last many months of
life, because he was unable to see, and had to say Mass by memory,
and that was the only Mass he knew reliably by heart, so he got special
permission to say it daily. Why would he have memorized a new liturgy
when he had been saying the Mass of the Immaculate Conception for
over 50 years by then? The 1962 missal didn't have anything new for
that Mass in its prayers. They had asked him to say the "transitional
rite" which was about 1967, and he tried to do so, under obedience,
and was physically unable to do so. I.e., he had too much pain (he had
the stigmata, you know - when someone asked him if it "hurts" he
replied, "What do you think? Does this look like fun to you? Of COURSE
it hurts!").
Akita doesn't have anything doctrinally wrong with it. The bishop who
reviewed it was quite meticulous. He was especially impressed that the
Bible the Angel had shown Sr. Agnes was the Douay-Rheims version,
translated into Japanese. He had to dust off an old copy he had not
used for a few years to verify with her that is what she had seen, and
she did so. She had not been aware of that older version before the
vision. It was Genesis 3:15 that was quoted, and the devil would never
want to bring that to anyone's attention.
As for Purgatory, even to the end of the world, people going
to purgatory will face the same kind of torment that anyone in
history has, because when you die your soul goes to the next
world, which is outside of time. Time is part of God's creation, along
with the physical universe, but heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo are
outside of time. We think of purgatory as being defined with hours, days,
years and such, but that is merely a way the Church has traditionally
indicated "duration" of temporal punishment in a way we can understand
it. Our Lady told the Fatima children that a friend of theirs would be in
purgatory till the end of the world. Those were words they could
understand. Notice, she did not say that the girl's purgatory would be
"longer" or "shorter" than someone else's purgatory. She said, "until the
end of the world," which is an absolute thing -- that is, it is the same for
everyone. When the world ends, it ends for everyone at the same time.
But the world may end for me or for you before that time: our own,
personal demise.
There really isn't language in this world to describe what purgatory is.
The suffering is real, and there is a duration, analogous to time, but it is
not "time" that can be measured with a clock. There are no clocks in
purgatory, nor computers, nor cars or any other machines. There is no
time in eternity. God's existence, the only true existence, is outside of
time. It is proper to say, "in eternity" rather than to say "for eternity"
because eternity is an unending "NOW" a state of pure being, existence
per se. This is why the change that they made in indulgences is based on a true
principle, that so many days, or 'quarantines' (a term meaning 40 days
of penance, like Lent) was no longer helpful for Catholic understanding
of the sufferings of purgatory, for time
as such is not a reality of
purgatory. So they updated it to plenary and partial indulgences. That's
really a good bottom line on our comprehension of "duration" in
purgatory: either a complete remission or a partial remission. But we
have no way of accurately describing any part as in "partial." Since
there is no physical reality that we share with purgatory, we can't
precisely quantify one partial sentence in relation to another. We can
know that one person's partial sentence may be greater (or lesser) than
another's partial sentence, but we have no way of saying if it is half, or
twice, or one-twentieth or two hundred times, relatively speaking.
Catholic prophecies say there will be a punishment from Heaven. It also mentions fire from Heaven. It seems Akita could be the Devil's way of distorting what will actually happen. Also, it is approved by Ratzinger or Pope Benedict XVI....what more proof do we need? The Archbishop didn't trust him. Why should we? Besides, the approval comes from the new church. Although they are leading their concilliar church and the Catholic Church it wasn't necessarily the Catholic Church who gave the approval.
You can't use the approval of the recent popes as PROOF that something
isn't legitimate. It doesn't work that way. If that were so, how could we
say that Padre Pio is a saint, or that Jacinta and Francisco are Blessed?
Or, that when the Pope and bishops consecrate Russia that their
consecration will be valid???
Topic: A few reflections (about Akita too) (Read 1825 times)