Letter from Broadstairs, December 2025.

LETTER FROM BROADSTAIRS December 2025

Nova et Vetera

The Church during the time of tribulation [taken from ‘The drama of the end times,’ by the Pere Emmanuel, 1885] I/ Saint Gregory the Great, in his enlightening and prophetic commentaries on the Book of Job, opens the most profound appraisals on the whole history of the Church. He contemplates the Church at the end of time under the figure of Job in his humiliations and sufferings, exposed to the perfidious insinuations of his wife and the bitter reproaches of his friends. Such will be the lot of the Church towards the end of her pilgrimage when she will be deprived of any temporal support. Furthermore she will even be deprived of the brilliance of her supernatural gifts: ‘The power of miracles will be withdrawn, the grace of healing will be taken away, prophecy will cease…That’s not to say that there will be nothing at all of such things, but rather that everything will be diminished. Notwithstanding the recompense of the good which will be even greater given that they will reman faithful purely because of the heavenly reward, whilst the evil ones will fall away due to the absence of any temporal attraction.’ Whilst the Church could never be entirely silenced those who should preach from the roof-tops will be greatly subdued through fear. Saint Gregory speaks time and again of three categories of persons within the Church: the hypocrites or false Christians, the weak and the strong. In the times of anguish the hypocrites will manifest their secret apostasy; the weak will perish in great numbers; and even amongst the strong some will fall away due to being too confident in their own strength. However, the Church will lose neither courage nor confidence. She will be buoyed up by the promises of Our Lord Who pledged that these days will be abridged for the sake of the elect, and so she will devote herself with a tireless energy to the saving of souls. II/ In spite of the terrible scandal during these times of perdition, it must not be thought that the small and the weak will be necessarily lost. The way of salvation will remain open and accessible to all, but those who perish will have have strayed away from Holy Mother the Church. The Church herself will not be deprived of the means of preservation proportionate to the gravity of the peril, as indicated in Holy Scripture. She will remember the warning given by Our Lord Himself concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, but applicable also to this final persecution: ‘When you shall see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, as predicted by the prophet Daniel, those who are in Judea should flee to the mountains…’ In conformity with these instructions the Church will safeguard the weaker brethren in their flight to inaccessible places where the Beast will not reach them. On wonders how there will be such places given the world-wide means of communication, but Divine Providence will assure the safety of these fugitives as foretold by Saint John in chapter 12 of the Apocalypse. Here the Apostle presents the image of a woman clothed with the sun and crowned with stars, representing the Church, and her labours of childbirth recall how the Church gives birth to the elect in the midst of sufferings. Before her stands a red dragon, the image of the devil and his snares, but she flees into a desert place, as prepared by the Almighty, where, in the person of the weak faithful, she is protected and nourished for a period of three-and-a-half years, the duration of the persecution under the Antichrist. The end of this chapter contains details of the flight itself. The woman is given the great wings of an eagle so as to carry her into the desert. The devil in pursuit spews a mass of water like a river against her but the

earth comes to her aid and swallows the deluge. This enigmatic portrayal pertains to some momentous event that Almighty God will bring about in favour of His Church Whilst the weak will be praying in the place of refuge however, the strong and the courageous will be engaged in a formidable struggle with the enraged dragon for the whole world to see. III/ It is without question that in these last times there will be saints of heroic virtue, comparable to the Apostles themselves. Saint Augustin describes these valiant soldiers as being prudent and strong, wise and yet patient. He also affirms that although conversions will be more rare, they will be all the more striking, and this so that the grace of God may appear all the stronger in the face of the enemy and of the furious dragon. Amongst the saints of the last times there will be soldiers, heirs to the glorious lineage of the Maccabees and the Crusaders, Vendeens and Pontifical Zouaves, who will stand firm against the armies of the Antichrist. But as this latter will be above all an impostor and a seducer his principle adversaries will be the true apostles armed with the crucifix, combining the patience of the martyrs with the science of doctors. At the head of this intrepid phalange will appear two extraordinary envoys sent by God, two giants of holiness, two survivors from the ancient times, Enoch and Elijah, of whom we shall speak in the next article.

To be continued..