Antichrist And The Beast From Revelations

[Guest]

I was watching ewtn the other night and the show I was watching had two priest taking questions from viewers. One of the questions was what catholics believed about the antichrist comeing and the rapture. Ok, so I know as a catholic we dont believe in seperate raptures. The priest said that we dont, but he also went on to say that we dont believe in a antichrist comeing ? I rewinded two times because I thought I might of misheard his reply. The bible and revelations is pretty clear that an antichrist is going to come and set up some type of system where christians wont be able to buy or sell and will have to take a mark. And if they dont they will be killed. What does the catholic church teach about this ? I hear alot of talk about revelations from protestants but I havent heard much catholic teaching. Thanks alot, Godbless

[Thy Geekdom Come]

Part of the reason you haven't heard much in Catholic circles about the Book of Revelation is because the Catholic Church doesn't have a simple explanation for it. As a sample of apocalyptic literature, Revelation is a series of visions which can be interpreted in numerous ways (Scott Hahn, for instance, believes that Revelation is very closely tied to an early description of the liturgy). I'm not aware of any passages in Revelation that necessarily mean anything about the antichrist keeping people from being able to buy and sell, although I know fundamentalist scholars generally include this as part of their vision of the endtimes. The Catholic teaching on the antichrist is that there will be one, but also that there are numerous antichrists throughout history. Apocalyptic literature often is both a commentary on current events and a vision of the future (in the Hebrew tradition, history often repeats itself, meaning that the situations of today are a foreshadowing of the future, which is more because human nature is pretty constant and eventually the same sins will cause similar situations to crop up in the future). The priest probably was not meaning to say that there will not be an anti-Christ, but that the anti-Christ referred to in the literal sense of the Book of Revelation is a past anti-Christ, not a future one (usually understood to be Emperor Nero). We know that there are multiple senses of Scripture, one of which is the anagogical, which points to future events. In the anagogical sense, the anti-Christ of Revelation refers to many anti-Christs who have now come and gone, as well as to the final anti-Christ, whom the Catechism does mention (CCC 675-676).

I hope this helps. I understand that you may want to post a follow-up question, since I'd like to know what specific verses address buying and selling in the endtimes.

God bless,

Micah