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Recent Failed Prophecies

This Rock Volume 11, Number 1   January 2000     Up Front By Karl Keating   Letters   Dragnet   Apocalypse Not By James Akin   Recent Failed Prophecies   Failures To Come   Poorly Versed By Margaret Finley   Speak The Truth In Love By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput   Fathers Know Best Astrology   Chapter & Verse La Salette: Sorting Fact From Fiction By James Akin   Conversion Story Logical Conclusion By Christopher Bennett   Reviews   Quick Questions    Subscribe    Permissions

In the 1970s Hal Lindsey's book The Late Great Planet Earth had many thousands of people thinking the end was upon us, and the Second Coming would take place no later than the next decade. In 1988, Edgar Whisenant gave us Eighty-Eight Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. When that didn't work out, he gave us The Final Shout Rapture Report (1989), explaining why he had been off by a little bit. And in his book 1994, Harold Camping explained why that was the year the last things would come to fruition.

Not only have Protestants like Lindsey, Whisenant, and Camping jumped the gun, so have the New Agers. In the early part of this century, famous clairvoyant Edgar Cayce claimed there would be a disastrous shift of the North and South poles in 1998, ushering in a new golden era. John Mini, a Bay Area acupuncturist and New Age writer, predicted that August 13, 1999, would be "the day of destiny" according to the Aztex calendar, which supposedly ran out on that date. (According to Mini, "We hadn't heard about August 13,1999, because the Catholic Church dad everything in their [sic] power to eradicate the Aztec civilization and erase the legend of August 13,1999, from our memories forever.")

On the Catholic side, the Italian priest Fr. Stephano Gobbi, claimed to have received a revelation from the virgin Mary concerning a period beginning in 1988: "In the period of ten years there will come to completion that fullness of time which was pointed out to you by me [Mary], beginning with La Salette all the way to my most recent and present apparitions…In this period of ten years there will come to completion the time of the great tribulation, which has been fortold to you in Holy Scripture, before the second coming of Jesus…In this period of ten years all the secrets which I have revealed to some of my children will come to pass and all events which have been foretold to you by me will take place" (Message #389 d,f,and h; emphasis in the original).

The ten-year period ended and the things mentioned in the prophecy don't seem to have happened.