@Praeter
Concerning your quotes of Leo XIII:
Satis Cognitum on the visibility of the Church.
If there are no shepherds during the time of tribulation before the return of Our Lord, then this doesn't mean that the Church has become invisible. Rather, the Church suffers an eclipse. If some can't see a visible object, then this doesn't make the object invisible. Jerome says about
the religion of God at the time of the Maccabees that it
suffered an eclipse (see
St. Jerome, Commentary on Daniel). And Antiochus Epiphanes is a prefiguration of Antichrist.
Leo XIII also teaches that the Church is to remain visible to the end of time:
Satis Cognitum, LeoXIII: “… the Church is so often called in Holy Writ a body, and even the body of Christ – ‘Now you are the body of Christ’ (I Cor. xii., 27) - and precisely because it is a body is the Church visible: (…) those who arbitrarily conjure up and picture to themselves a hidden and invisible Church are in grievous and pernicious error: (…)
If there are no shepherds during the time of tribulation before the return of Our Lord, then this doesn't imply that the Church doesn't exist anymore or is not a body anymore.
[Leo XIII:] The connection and union of both elements [i.e., visible and invisible] is as absolutely necessary to the true Church as the intimate union of the soul and body is to human nature. The Church is not something dead: it is the body of Christ endowed with supernatural life.
If there are no shepherds during the time of tribulation before the return of Our Lord, then the Church isn't necessarily dead. There still are faithful and there still are sanctifying graces by Baptism, Reconciliation (perfect Contrition, Trent, Session 14, Chapter IV), Eucharist (spiritually, see Trent, Session 13, Chapter VIII), and Marriage.
[Leo XIII:]As Christ, the Head and Exemplar, is not wholly in His visible human nature, which Photinians and Nestorians assert, nor wholly in the invisible divine nature, as the Monophysites hold, but is one, from and in both natures, visible and invisible; so the mystical body of Christ is the true Church, only because its visible parts draw life and power from the supernatural gifts and other things whence spring their very nature and essence. But since the Church is such by divine will and constitution, such it must uniformly remain to the end of time (in aeternitate temporum). If it did not, then it would not have been founded as perpetual, and the end set before it would have been limited to some certain place and to some certain period of time (locorum esset temporumque certo spatio defintlus); both of which are contrary to the truth. The union consequently of visible and invisible elements because it harmonizes with the natural order and by God's will belongs to the very essence of the Church, must necessarily remain so long as the Church itself shall endure.”
There is no problem here. A lack of shepherds during the time of tribulation would not contradict these teachings. The
union of visible and invisible elements is not destroyed, if there are no shepherds during the great tribulation.
Conclusion: The teaching of Leo XIII in
Satis Cognitum on the visibility of the Church does not imply that the opinion of John Chrysostom has to be rejected. If the consummation of the world starts with the abomination of desolation and lasts through the great tribulation, then the Church is still in the same sense visible, with or without shepherds.