“[T]he Church shall be scattered, driven into the wilderness, and shall be for a time, as it was in the beginning, invisible, hidden in catacombs”.
IN The Present Crisis of the Holy See, (1861) Henry Cardinal Manning, D.D, the famous convert from Anglicanism, described what the ancient Fathers of the Church had foretold: a time when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would be taken away from Catholic altars. We are, from all appearances, living in those times.
He wrote:
Now, first of all what is this “taking away of the continual sacrifice”?
It was taken away in type at the destruction of Jerusalem. The sacrifice of the Temple, that is, of the lamb, morning and evening, in the Temple of God, was entirely abolished with the destruction of the Temple itself. Now the Prophet Malachias says: “From the rising of the sun even to the going down, My Name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My Name a clean oblation.” This passage of the prophet has been interpreted by the Fathers of the Church. Beginning with St. Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr, and I know not how many besides, to be the sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist, the true Paschal Lamb which came in place of the type—namely, the sacrifice of Jesus Himself on Calvary renewed perpetually and continued for ever in the sacrifice on the altar. Now has that continual sacrifice been taken away? That which was typical of It in old days has been already taken away. But has the reality been taken away? The holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of Antichrist, and of these prophecies of Daniel, without single exception, as far as I know, and they are the Fathers both of the East and of the West, the Greek and the Latin Church—all of them unanimously,—say that in the latter end of the world, during the reign of Antichrist, the Holy Sacrifice of the altar will cease. In the work on the end of the world, ascribed to St. Hippolytus, after a long description of the afflictions of the last days, we read as follows: “The churches shall lament with a great lamentation, for there shall be offered no more oblation, nor incense, nor worship acceptable to God. The sacred buildings of the churches shall be as hovels; and the precious Body and Blood of Christ shall not be manifest in those days; the Liturgy shall be extinct; the chanting of psalms shall cease; the reading of Holy Scripture shall be heard no more. But there shall be upon men darkness, and mourning upon mourning, and woe upon woe. Then, the Church shall be scattered, driven into the wilderness, and shall be for a time, as it was in the beginning, invisible, hidden in catacombs, in dens, in mountains, in lurking-places; for a time It shall be swept, as it were, from the face of the earth. Such is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early centuries.” [emphasis added]
