The Prophecy of St. Nilus about Our Days

Saint Nilus of Mount Sinai

St. Nilus was one of the many disciples and fervent defenders of St. John Chrysostom. He was an officer at the Court of Constantinople, married, with two sons. While St. John Chrysostom was patriarch, before his exile (398-403), he directed Nilus in the study of Scripture and in works of piety. St. Nilus left his wife and one son and took the other, Theodulos, with him to Mount Sinai to be a monk. The Bishop of Eleusa ordained both St. Nilus and his son to the priesthood. The mother and the other son also embraced the religious life in Egypt.

From his monastery at Sinai, St. Nilus was a well-known person throughout the Eastern Church. Through his writings and correspondence, he played an important part in the history of his time. He was known as a theologian, Biblical scholar and ascetic writer, so people of all kinds, from the Emperor down wrote to consult him. His numerous works, including a multitude of letters, consist of denunciations of heresy, paganism, abuses of discipline and crimes. He also wrote about rules and principles of asceticism, especially maxims on the religious life. He warns and threatens people in high places, Abbots and Bishops, Governors and Princes, even the Emperor himself, without fear. He kept up a correspondence with Gaina, a leader of the Goths, endeavoring to convert him from Arianism. He denounced vigorously the persecution of St. John Chrysostom both to the Emperor Arcadius and to his courtiers.

St. Nilus must be counted as one of the leading ascetic writers of the 5th century. His feast is kept on November 12th in the Byzantine Calendar; he is commemorated also in the Roman Martyrology on the same date. St. Nilus probably died around the year 430, as there is no evidence of his life after that.

 

The Prophecy of St. Nilus

After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century, the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, people's minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable.

People's appearances will change, and it will be impossible to distinguish men from women due to their shamelessness in dress and style of hair. These people will be cruel and will be like wild animals because of the temptations of the Antichrist. There will be no respect for parents and elders, love will disappear, and Christian pastors, Bishops and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left.

At that time, the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change. People will abandon modesty, and dissipation will reign. Falsehood and greed will attain great proportions, and woe to those who pile up treasures. Lust, adultery, homosexuality, secret deeds and murder will rule in society.

Apostasy: At that future time, due to the power of such great crimes and licentiousness, people will be deprived of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which they received in Holy Baptism and equally of remorse.

The Churches of God will be deprived of God-fearing and pious pastors, and woe to the Christians remaining in the world at that time; they will completely lose their faith because they will lack the opportunity of seeing the light of knowledge from anyone at all. Then they will separate themselves out of the world in holy refuges in search of lightening their spiritual sufferings, but everywhere they will meet obstacles and constraints. And all this will result from the fact that the Antichrist wants to be Lord over everything and become the ruler of the whole universe, and he will produce miracles and fantastic signs.

Telephones, airplanes, submarines: He will also give depraved wisdom to an unhappy man so that he will discover a way by which one man can carry on a conversation with another from one end of the earth to the other. At that time men will also fly through the air like birds and descend to the bottom of the sea like fish. And when they have achieved all this, these unhappy people will spend their lives in comfort without knowing, poor souls, that it is deceit of the Antichrist. And, the impious one! – he will so complete science with vanity that it will go off the right path and lead people to lose faith in the existence of God in three hypostases.

The coming chastisement: Then the All-good God will see the downfall of the human race and will shorten the days for the sake of those few who are being saved, because the enemy wants to lead even the chosen into temptation, if that is possible... then the sword of chastisement will suddenly appear and kill the Perverter and his servants.

 

Notification by Cardinal Siri published on June 12, 1960

 

To the Reverend Clergy,

To all teaching sisters,

To beloved sons of Catholic Action,

To Educators intending truly to follow Christian Doctrine,

The first signs of our late arriving spring indicate that there is this year a certain increase in the use of men's dress by girls and women, even family mothers. Up until 1959, in Genoa, such dress usually meant the person was a tourist, but now it seems to be a significant number of girls and women from Genoa itself who are choosing at least on pleasure trips to wear men's dress (men's trousers).

The extension of this behavior obliges us to take serious thought, and we ask those to whom this Notification is addressed to kindly lend to the problem all the attention it deserves from anyone aware of being in any way responsible before God.

We seek above all to give a balanced moral judgment upon the wearing of men's dress by women. In fact Our thoughts can only bear upon the moral question.

Firstly, when it comes to covering of the female body, the wearing of men's trousers by women cannot be said to constitute as such a grave offense against modesty, because trousers certainly cover more of woman's body than do modern women's skirts.

Secondly, however, clothes to be modest need not only to cover the body but also not to cling too closely to the body. Now it is true that much feminine clothing today clings closer than do some trousers, but trousers can be made to cling closer, in fact generally they do, so the tight fit of such clothing gives us not less grounds for concern than does exposure of the body. So the immodesty of men's trousers on women is an aspect of the problem which is not to be left out of an over-all judgment upon them, even if it is not to be artificially exaggerated either.

II

However, it is a different aspect of women's wearing of men's trousers which seems to us the gravest.

The wearing of men's dress by women affects firstly the woman herself, by changing the feminine psychology proper to women; secondly it affects the woman as wife of her husband, by tending to vitiate relationships between the sexes; thirdly it affects the woman as mother of her children by harming her dignity in her children's eyes. Each of these points is to be carefully considered in turn:

A. Male dress changes the psychology of woman

In truth, the motive impelling women to wear men's dress is always that of imitating, nay, of competing with, the man who is considered stronger, less tied down, more independent. This motivation shows clearly that male dress is the visible aid to bringing about a mental attitude of being "like a man." Secondly, ever since men have been men, the clothing a person wears, demands, imposes and modifies that person's gestures, attitudes and behavior, such that from merely being worn outside, clothing comes to impose a particular frame of mind inside.

Then let us add that woman wearing man's dress always more or less indicates her reacting to her femininity as though it is inferiority when in fact it is only diversity. The perversion of her psychology is clear to be seen.

These reasons, summing up many more, are enough to warn us how wrongly women are made to think by the wearing of men's dress.

B. Male dress tends to vitiate relationships between women and men

In truth when relationships between the two sexes unfold with the coming of age, an instinct of mutual attraction is predominant. The essential basis of this attraction is a diversity between the two sexes which is made possible only by their complementing or completing one another. If then this "diversity" becomes less obvious because one of its major external signs is eliminated and because the normal psychological structure is weakened, what results is the alteration of a fundamental factor in the relationship.

The problem goes further still. Mutual attraction between the sexes is preceded both naturally, and in order of time, by that sense of shame which holds the rising instincts in check, imposes respect upon them, and tends to lift to a higher level of mutual esteem and healthy fear everything that those instincts would push onwards to uncontrolled acts. To change that clothing which by its diversity reveals and upholds nature's limits and defense-works, is to flatten out the distinctions and to help pull down the vital defense-works of the sense of shame.

It is at least to hinder that sense. And when the sense of shame is hindered from putting on the brakes, then relationships between man and women sink degradingly down to pure sensuality, devoid of all mutual respect or esteem.

Experience is there to tell us that when woman is de-feminized, then defenses are undermined and weakness increases.

C. Male dress harms the dignity of the mother in her children's eyes

All children have an instinct for the sense of dignity and decorum of their mother. Analysis of the first inner crisis of children when they awaken to life around them even before they enter upon adolescence, shows how much the sense of their mother counts. Children are as sensitive as can be on this point. Adults have usually left all that behind them and think no more on it. But we would do well to recall to mind the severe demands that children instinctively make of their own mother, and the deep and even terrible reactions roused in them by observation of their mother's misbehavior. Many lines of later life are here traced out—and not for good—in these early inner dramas of infancy and childhood.

The child may not know the definition of exposure, frivolity or infidelity, but he possesses an instinctive sixth sense to recognize them when they occur, to suffer from them, and be bitterly wounded by them in his soul.

III

Let us think seriously on the import of everything said so far, even if woman's appearing in man's dress does not immediately give rise to all the upset caused by grave immodesty.

The changing of feminine psychology does fundamental and, in the long run, irreparable damage to the family, to conjugal fidelity, to human affections and to human society. True, the effects of wearing unsuitable dress are not all to be seen within a short time. But one must think of what is being slowly and insidiously worn down, torn apart, perverted.

Is any satisfying reciprocity between husband and wife imaginable, if feminine psychology be changed? Or is any true education of children imaginable, which is so delicate in its procedure, so woven of imponderable factors in which the mother's intuition and instinct play the decisive part in those tender years? What will these women be able to give their children when they will so long have worn trousers that their self-esteem goes more by their competing with the men than by their functioning as women?

Why, we ask, ever since men have been men, or rather since they became civilized—why have men in all times and places been irresistibly borne to make a differentiated division between the functions of the two sexes? Do we not have here strict testimony to the recognition by all mankind of a truth and a law above man?

To sum up, wherever women wear men's dress, it is to be considered a factor in the long run tearing apart human order.

IV

The logical consequence of everything presented so far is that anyone in a position of responsibility should be possessed by a sense of alarm in the true and proper meaning of the word, a severe and decisive alarm.

We address a grave warning to parish priests, to all priests in general and to confessors in particular, to members of every kind of association, to all religious, to all nuns, especially to teaching sisters.

We invite them to become clearly conscious of the problem so that action will follow. This consciousness is what matters. It will suggest the appropriate action in due time. But let it not counsel us to give way in the face of inevitable change, as though we are confronted by a natural evolution of mankind, and so on!

Men may come and men may go, because God has left plenty of room, but the substantial lines of nature and the not less substantial lines of Eternal Law have never changed, are not changing and never will change. There are bounds beyond which one may stray as far as one sees fit, but to do so ends in death; there are limits which empty philosophical fantasizing may have one mock or not take seriously, but they put together an alliance of hard facts and nature to chastise anybody who steps over them. And history has sufficiently taught, with frightening proof from the life and death of nations, that the reply to all violators of the outline of "humanity" is always, sooner or later, catastrophe.

From the dialectic of Hegel onwards, we have had dinned in our ears what are nothing but fables, and by dint of hearing them so often, many people end up by getting used to them, if only passively. But the truth of the matter is that Nature and Truth, and the Law bound up in both, go their imperturbable way, and they cut to pieces the simpletons who upon no grounds whatsoever believe in radical and far-reaching changes in the very structure of man.

The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people's sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection. Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and—at the end of the line—souls in despair and taking their own lives. All of which human wreckage gives witness to the fact that the "line of God" does not give way, nor does it admit of any adaption to the delirious dreams of the so-called philosophers!

V

We have said that those to whom the present Notification is addressed are invited to take serious alarm at the problem in hand. Accordingly they know what they have to say, starting with little girls on their mother's knee.

They know that without exaggerating or turning into fanatics, they will need to strictly limit how far they tolerate women dressing like men, as a general rule.

They know they must never be so weak as to let anyone believe that they turn a blind eye to a custom which is slipping downhill and undermining the moral standing of all institutions.

They, the priests, know that the line they have to take in the confessional, while not holding women dressing like men to be automatically a grave fault, must be sharp and decisive.

Everybody will kindly give thought to the need for a united line of action, reinforced on every side by the cooperation of all men of good will and all enlightened minds, so as to create a true dam to hold back the flood.

Those of you responsible for souls in whatever capacity understand how useful it is to have for allies in this defensive campaign men of the arts, the media and the crafts. The position taken by fashion design houses, their brilliant designers and the clothing industry, is of crucial importance in this whole question. Artistic sense, refinement and good taste meeting together can find suitable but dignified solution as to the dress for women to wear when they must use a motorcycle or engage in this or that exercise or work. What matters is to preserve modesty together with the eternal sense of femininity, that femininity which more than anything else all children will continue to associate with the face of their mother.

We do not deny that modern life sets problems and makes requirements unknown to our grandparents. But we state that there are values more needing to be protected than fleeting experiences, and that for anybody of intelligence there are always good sense and good taste enough to find acceptable and dignified solutions to problems as they come up.

Out of charity we are fighting against the flattening out of mankind, against the attack upon those differences on which rests the complementarily of man and woman.

When we see a woman in trousers, we should think not so much of her as of all mankind, of what it will be when women will have masculinized themselves for good. Nobody stands to gain by helping to bring about a future age of vagueness, ambiguity, imperfection and, in a word, monstrosities.

This letter of Ours is not addressed to the public, but to those responsible for souls, for education, for Catholic associations. Let them do their duty, and let them not be sentries caught asleep at their post while evil crept in.

Giuseppe Cardinal Siri

Archbishop of Genoa

(from: Dressing with Dignity)

Instruction

INSTRUCTION ON THE FEAST OF THE VISITATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

By Rev. Fr. Leonard Goffine

 

Why is this festival called the Visitation of Mary?

BECAUSE on this day Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth, whom, as the angel had told her, God had blessed with a son in her old age.

INTROIT: I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, and my soul shall be joyful in my God: for He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation: and with the robe of justice He hath covered me, as a bride adorned with her jewels. (Isai. Ixi. 10.) I will extol Thee, O Lord, for Thou hast upheld me: and hast not made my Enemies to rejoice over me. f/fr.xxix.) Glory ect. 

 

EPISTLE: (Cant. ii. 8—14.) behold, he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills: my beloved is. like a roe or a young hart. Behold, he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices. Behold, my beloved speaketh to me: Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come. For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land: the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle is heard in our land: the fig-tree hath put forth her green figs: the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one: and come: my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall, show me thy face, let thy voice sound in my ears: for thy voice is sweet, and thy face comely.

EXPLANATION: The Church here applies this lesson to Christ's love for His Mother, from whom He received His flesh. From the beautiful words of this day's lesson, thou mayest, therefore, comprehend the love which Jesus and Mary had for each other, and consider that Jesus so loves thy soul, that He calls on thee to rise up, that is, to leave earthly thoughts, and come to Him, to live for Him only, and entertain thyself in prayer with Him only, like Mary who because of this was so beautiful in His sight.

COLLECT: O Jesus, sweet Bridegroom of my soul, come, hasten with Thy grace to visit my soul, that she may be purified and sanctified by Thy love, come prepare her for Thy worthy dwelling, visit me as thou once didst visit with Mary the child John and sanctify him. Do not permit my ears ever to close to Thy warning voice, but grant that I may always obey Thy holy admonitions, and thus become ever more and more pleasing to Thee.

GOSPEL: (Luke i. 39—47). At that time, Mary rising up, went into the hill-country with haste, into a city of Juda: and she entered into the house of Zachary, and saluted Elizabeth. And it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb: and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost, and she cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord. And Mary said: My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

LESSON I. Mary rising up went into the hill-country, and as St. Luke says, with haste: "And tell us now, O Mary," exclaims St. Alphonsus Liguori, "why dost thou hasten so?" "I have a duty to fulfill she replies, "which the love of my neighbor requires. I go to assist a pious family." — In like manner you also should hasten to carry help and consolation to your neighbor. II. Mary visited her cousin out of true love, not from inconsiderate curiosity or according to the custom of the world. From such motives we should make all our visits. They should aim always only at the honor of God and the spiritual advantage of our fellow-men, they should not come from false politeness or through bad intentions, which alas! are too often the motives of worldly visits. III. Mary in this visit gives a special example of humility, when she, although the Mother of God, visits the mother of His servant, John, saluting her first, and rendering her for three months the services of a maid. -— Learn from Mary, and sincerely ask her to obtain for you the virtue of humility. IV. When Mary was praised by her cousin and called blessed, she turned the praises at once to God and gives Him all the honor. — When we do any good, we should always give the honor to God, not to ourselves, as the prophet says: Not to us, not to us, but to thy name give glory! V. When Mary entered into Zachary's house, wonderful grace entered with her. The infant John leaped for joy, because sanctifying grace was then given to him, before he was born; Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost, and Zachary, St. John's father, was soon to be consoled by regaining the use of speech.

"It is then but true," exclaims St. Alphonsus Ligouri, "that through thy mediation, my Queen and Mother, God's graces are dispensed and souls sanctified! Forget me not, Oh! my beloved Mother Mary, forget not me, thy servant, who loves thee and places in thee all his hopes!"

EXPLANATION OF THE MAGNIFICAT

What does this canticle contain?

THE praise of God, Mary's gratitude and humility. In it she praises God, and rejoices that He saw the humility of His hand-maid, and made her the Mother of His only-begotten Son, and, therefore, all generations shall call her blessed. She says that God's mercy is great from generation to generation to those that fear Him: He humbles the proud and casts them down from their seat, which they had erected in their conceit, but gives His grace to the humble and exalts them: He richly fills those who hunger and thirst after virtue and heavenly treasures, but lets those who think themselves rich, go away empty; He receives all true Israelites for His worshipers and leads them to salvation, which He promised to their fathers. "God is mighty;" says St. Augustine, "if thou exaltest thyself, He turns from thee; if thou humblest thyself, He descends to thee."

SUPPLICATION: O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living- God! who didst descend from the heights of heaven into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, didst remain for nine months in it, deigning to visit and sanctify St. John through her, grant, that we may participate, through the practice of good works and especially of humility, in the fruits of Thy holy Incarnation.