For those who know how to tell time, the new millennium will begin in four years. For those who think the first year of a new century ends with a double zero, it will begin in three years. Little matter. In at most five years (to give everyone a little slack) we will know that the prognosticators have been wrong – again. Doomsday will not have come, there will have been no rapture, and things will remain much as they have been, only a little worse. Catholic seers will have proved as wrong as Fundamentalist and New Age seers.
In 1988 Edgar Whisenant published a thin book titled 88 Reasons the Rapture Will Occur in 1988. Immediately popular with Fundamentalists, it sold three million copies. The next year, the rapture not having occurred, Whisenant discovered he had made a mathematical error, and he published a sequel explaining that the rapture would come in 1989. That book sold only thirty thousand copies—a decline of ninety-nine percent, but still a respectable sale.
Whisenant, who has not been heard from since, is not the only person to have made more than pocket change on predicting the imminent end of the world. Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, convinced her followers that the end was near, and many sold their assets and transferred the funds to her in preparation for the end, not giving much thought, apparently, to the maxim “You can’t take it with you.” If they couldn’t, how could she? Her followers hid themselves in the wilds of Montana, only to discover that the world went on without them, and, when they returned to the world, they had to go on without their money.
We snicker at such foolishness when engaged in by Fundamentalists and New Agers, but what is our attitude toward doomsayers within our midst? Somewhat less critical, it’s fair to say. Two groups vie for attention.
Doomsayers within the Marian movement attach themselves to purported apparitions, nearly all of which have occurred only within the last three decades. Some, such as Bayside, have been condemned repeatedly by the Church. Others have had monitums (warnings) issued against them. But no matter. If the Virgin Mary is said to appear and to predict disaster, the apparition must be true, regardless of what Church authority says.
Within the Traditionalist movement there is no appeal to alleged apparitions of recent years, but to old (and legitimate) ones such as Fatima and La Salette. Two problems arise: The prognosticators claim to know what they can’t know, such as the “third secret” of Fatima, or they rely on “predictions” that were not part of the original private revelation, such as the claim that “Rome will become the seat of the Antichrist”—a claim used, not too subtly, to undermine the authority of John Paul II.
Who is right and who isn’t? You’ll know in five years.