Question:
My professor says Catholics believe that time is both circular and linear. How does that work?
Answer:
It seems that your professor is mistaken. The Church’s definitive teaching about the new heaven and new Earth that Christ inaugurates at the end of time precludes the cyclical view of time.
With regard to the new heaven and new Earth, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “It will be the definitive realization of God’s plan to bring under a single head ‘all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth’ (CCC 1043, emphasis added).
If the Church believed time was cyclical, the realization of God’s plan wouldn’t be definitive but repeated over and over again. Elsewhere the Catechism speaks of this realization as coming “at the end of time” (CCC 1060).
The Church’s view of time, therefore, is linear and not cyclical.
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