The Sign of Apocalypse XII

In the XVIIth century, Father Barthelemy Holzhauser distorted the traditional reading of the Apocalypse, describing its narrative as being structured on mostly secular events. He also corrupted the sense of a fundamental verse of chapter XIV, pretending that this verse alluded to a king in temporal order, which contradicts biblical language, ancient glosses and the best commentaries, since all those sources do not mention a secular king, but a pope sent by God for the restoration of the Church. The commentary of F. Holzhauser sadly had a lasting influence, in the same way as the prophetic subversion that plagued Judea before the coming of Christ, when the false prophets announced a temporal and glorious messiah, as opposed to the predictions of Isaiah mentioning a spiritual and suffering Messiah, rejected by His people, undergoing the torments of martyrdom until the death on the Cross. The purpose of the present book is therefore to reestablish the truth about the apocalyptic prophecies, as they were presented by the three best commentators of modern times, namely Fathers Gallois, Berry and Kramer. We will see that the apocalyptic narrative is not structured on the successive rules of temporal kings, but on the successive judgments of God against the prevaricators. In the Johannine Book, those are the excommunications of schismatics and heretics; the divine judgments are pronounced and executed by the Church, who holds the place of Christ. All those sentences converge to the final judgment, the Last Judgment. In chapter XII, the Apostle describes the central vision of the book of Revelation, and beyond its mystical dimension, this vision also has an eschatological meaning, in accordance with biblical metaphors. Since HEAVEN is a figure of the Church, reused from the Book of Isaiah, and since angels are bishops in the Apocalypse, the fall of apostate angels is therefore a figure of the prevarication of impious bishops in the end times; it is described by Saint John as a fall upon the earth, i.e. a loss of divine grace.