The Roman Catholic Harold Camping

Sure, Roman Catholics don't have problems with end-times fanatics... sure... (yawn). This came in my e-mail today from my dear friends at Sophia Institute Press:

-- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE --

Mystery book on
'End Times' reappears
--- Beloved by St. Thérèse of Lisieux!

It's one of those books that come out of nowhere --- almost literally --- just when the world needs it most.

Is it all correct --- what it reveals about the future, both for the world and the soul? From the vantage point of earth, who can say? It is written by a human. But a great saint --- Thérèse of Lisieux --- was so taken by this book that it spurred her entry into the convent.

"Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life," she says. "The impression I received from it is too intimate and too sweet for me to express. All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged into my soul a happiness not of this earth." (It was while reading this book that Thérèse asked her father's permission to enter the convent.)

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Completed in 1881 by Fr. Charles Arminjon, an aged French priest, Fin du Monde Présent et Mystères de la Vie Future surfaced just long enough to draw Thérèse into the convent and then, for more than a century, plunged back into obscurity.

Now, with the help of a pious devotee of St. Thérèse who spent decades searching for the original French edition, and then years translating it, we have the honor of placing before you the very first English translation of this urgent, hope-filled, and chilling work:

With pious audacity, Fr. Arminjon devotes the first chapter to the end --- the end of the world:

"Although Christ chose to leave us ignorant of the exact time of the end of the world," Fr. Arminjon says, "He deemed it fitting to give us detailed information on the matter and circumstances of this great event." "The end of the world, Christ says, will come at time when the human race, sunk in the outermost depths of indifference, will be far from thinking about punishment and justice. It will be as in the days of Noah, when men lived without a care, built luxurious houses, and mocked Noah as he built his ark. 'Madman! Dreamer!' they cried. Then the flood came and engulfed the whole earth." "So," writes Fr. Arminjon, "Christ warns us that the final catastrophe will take place when the world is at its most secure: civilization will be at its zenith, markets will be overflowing with money, and government stocks will never have been higher." "Mankind, wallowing in an unprecedented material prosperity, will have ceased to hope for heaven. Crudely attached to the pleasures of life, man, like the miser in the gospel, will say "My soul, you possess goods to last for many years. Eat, drink and be merry."

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"Unprecedented material prosperity"?
We've enjoyed it for decades, building the "luxurious houses"
Fr. Arminjon speaks of. The world's "markets have been overflowing with money" --- until the crisis slammed us last year like a tsunami come from nowhere, its full force yet to be felt.

Is this the end?

Fr. Arminjon claims no special knowledge, nor is he a sensation-monger. On the contrary, he insists that we "steer clear of every perilous opinion, relying neither upon dubious revelations nor upon apocryphal prophecies, and making no assertion that is not justified by the doctrine of the Fathers and of Tradition."

Which is precisely what makes this book so chilling for the sober-minded among us: Fr. Arminjon's conclusions are grounded in the Fathers of the Church, Tradition, and the Bible.

He always speaks with thoughtfulness and prayerful prudence: which is why these pages moved Thérèse so completely, and why they will lead you, too, to share so many of his conclusions about the end of the present world and the mysteries of the future life that Father so ably illuminates here.

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Finally, you'll be grateful that Fr. Arminjon does not merely sketch the darkness ahead; he paints as well a vivid picture of the sweet means Jesus has given us to fill that darkness with light; and of the rich bounty He has in store for all who stay faithful.

It is the sweetness of this book that caught St. Thérèse up in a fervent love of God and nourished what her biographer describes as her "impatience for the joys of Heaven and her paramount esteem for a life wholly consecrated to Divine Love."

The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life: the book our world desperately needs, not only to show us how to read the signs of the times, but also to equip us to bear ourselves as Christians, no matter what the future brings.

The End of the Present World
and the Mysteries of the Future Life
by Fr. Charles Arminjon.
336 pgs ppbk $19.95