Two general views, one about the Roman Catholic Church, the other about the European Union, circulated via shallow, amateurish analyses, became fashionable in 2010.
On the one hand, puerile punditry predicted the weakening of the Catholic Church through the widely publicized views that rampant pedophilia and a pope seen to be out of touch with reality were weakening the power of the Vatican. On the other, terribly thin analyses of the euro crisis rampant across the European Union maintained that the EU was about to fail as an effective potential world power.
In each case, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, both entities are actually being strengthened by their respective current crises.
Regarding the EU, our editor in chief debunked the prospect of its weakening in a powerful exposé of just what the immediate outcome of the euro crisis will be in his personal titled “A Monumental Moment in European History!” in the February edition of the Trumpet magazine.
With regard to the current and potentially increasing power of the Vatican, the text of Pope Benedict’s address to the Roman Curia, delivered December 20, gives real pause for thought to any real student of history, let alone of Bible prophecy.
During that speech, the pope made some rather startling statements. Early on he declared, “Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. Repeatedly during the season of Advent the church’s liturgy prays in these or similar words. They are invocations that were probably formulated as the Roman Empire was in decline. The disintegration of the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful coexistence among peoples. The sun was setting over an entire world. Frequent natural disasters further increased this sense of insecurity. There was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline.”
Take a close look at that statement. Here the pope is theorizing that the decline of the Roman Empire was responsible for the failure of the rule of Roman law and the cohesion of society, “the peaceful coexistence among peoples” that ostensibly ensued through the Roman imperial epoch. He infers that the decline of Roman hegemony led to the collapse of civilization at the time.
Benedict then goes on to infer that the state of the world today parallels that which prevailed at the time of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
“Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. Today too, we have many reasons to associate ourselves with this Advent prayer of the church. For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function. Consequently the forces mobilized for the defense of such structures seem doomed to failure” (ibid.).
A careful reading of this pope’s various homilies, encyclicals and addresses to his followers reveals his intention to mobilize his European congregation for the defense and the revival of Rome’s juridical and political structures as a means of reshaping global order. Nowhere is this intent more clearly revealed than in his December 20 address.
In his address to the curia, the pope posed his solution to the world’s current woes, a solution that sees the Roman Catholic religion at its very heart. In a crusading rallying cry to the Roman Curia, he laid down the gauntlet at the feet of the princes of the church, asking that they “wake … from the sleep of a faith grown tired, and to restore to that faith the power to move mountains—that is, to order justly the affairs of the world.”
Do you really grasp the true import of just what Pope Benedict xvi is proposing here? He is clearly indicating that only the religion of Rome offers the solution to global disorder, by demonstrating its power to “order … the affairs of the world”! That bespeaks a resurrection of “holy” Roman imperial power!
From the very beginning of his papacy—in the same vein as his predecessor Pope John Paul ii—Pope Benedict has called for a new crusade of Roman Catholicism to sweep Europe and return it to its “holy” Roman roots. That cry has grown more intense, more insistent and been delivered more regularly with the passing of each year of Benedict’s papacy. Now, in what is his clearest, most articulate condemnation of priestly pedophilia, the pope has challenged the entire Roman Curia to clean up the church and revive its power to “move mountains.” Full well Benedict knows this is but theological language for a revival of Rome’s power to move entire nations! The real implication is that this pope is clearly calling for a powerful crusade to be led by the princes of the church for a revival of Rome’s power to reshape global order.
But in all subsequent resurrections of Rome’s crusading, world-shaping power, while Rome provided the ideological foundation for those crusades, one other European nation historically rendered to it the military capability to enforce its ideology—the source of “the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them”—upon its constituents: Germany.
Thus, to the keen-eyed observers of history and, most especially, Bible prophecy, it is no mere coincidence that Pope Benedict is rallying his papal troops to this crusade to reshape the global order at the same time that Germany has patently become the nation intent on reshaping the order of Rome’s principal constituency—Europe—to its own design.
This is epochal history in the making.
We now see a German elite and a papal elite preparing to join forces in this seventh, and final, resurrection of that old Holy Roman Empire exactly as prophesied by Herbert W. Armstrong.
You really do need to face up to the challenge to prove Herbert Armstrong was right! The knowledge that today’s events in Rome, Berlin and Brussels were actually prophesied millennia ago is an eye-opener indeed. But what is even more inspiring is to truly understand the prophecies as to just where today’s events are leading. For, indeed, the whole world order is currently being reshaped. The results will prove disastrous to an Anglo-Saxon peoples waxed fat, indolent, morally corrupt and spiritually blind since God saved them from being overtaken by tyranny 70 years ago. But though cataclysmic in the short term, this will be but a massive sign of the imminence of the return of the only One who can truly reshape the global order under the key principles of God’s immutable law and of the fundamental moral attitudes it engenders!
Read our booklet He Was Right and begin to get a true and insightful perspective on the reshaping of today’s global order, how it will impact you and your loved ones and the massive reshaping of this world’s systems that will follow! •
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