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End-of-the-world Qualms - A Topical Religious Theme and a Pastoral Problem
Jean Vernette

An anguished climate of Apocalypse Soon
Have we come to the end of the ages? A kind of immense fear seems to have got hold of people today, in an anguished climate of "Apocalypse Soon". Not so long after the great cataclysm of World War Two, with its 55 million dead, we are in fact living in a period full of all kinds of catastrophes: economic and social upheavals ("the crisis"), conflict and revolution (fruits of the cold war), atomic threats, and even certain incomprehensible climatic variations.

"Considered globally, this disparate series of misfortunes might suggest that a major upheaval is in progress and generate a strong existential anguish, expressed in some cases on the religious plane. Because of its serenity in the face of all these upheavals, the Catholic faith, in which the idea of eschatology is relegated to a distant background, could not allow the individual to appropriate this anguish. Hence the incredible success of the eschatological movements."(1)

The Jehovah Witnesses axe announcing "the end of the present system of evil things" and conscientiously revising their forecast each time their prediction fails to materialize. In addition there are the Saint-Erme Group, the disciples of Christ of Montfavet, the Mahikari, the Universal Church of God, the Radians, certain Pentecostal groups, and Catholic micro-groups exploiting the "secrets" of Fatima or San Damian, Garabandal or Kerizinen, Ares or Dozulé. All of them announce the imminent end of the world and the advent of a new era. Similarly, oriental movements are announcing the world's entry into the iron age, the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, which will be followed by the disintegration of the universe. Certain Baha'u'llah preachers are predicting a partial peace in the year 2000. On the other hand, some interpreters of the Cabbala have calculated that the beginning of the Jewish New Year in the year 5744 of the Creation (8 September 1983) ushered in TASHMAD, that is to say, "destruction", "ruin", "apostasy" (according to the ancient Jewish method of transposing numbers into letters). And in the view of other prophets, the approach of the year 2000 is reactivating the widespread panic traditionally associated with °the terrors of the end of a millennium".

All this amounts to a real explosion of prophecies, vying with each other in their catastrophic message.Some astrologers see in the stars the great upheaval brought about by the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. The Centuries of Nostradamus, recently reviewed by J.C. de Fontbrune, has proved to be a best-seller and sold a million copies. People are also resurrecting St Malachy's Prophecy, which hints at the destruction of Rome and the Last Judgment under the reign of the second successor of the present Pope. This proliferation of prophecies, I should add, is provoked and fostered with a view to creating a reading public for such material...

Neo-rural communities are getting ready for the apocalyptic times by returning to Nature.(2) Some of them, disillusioned by our social way of life, would like to speed up the inexorable trend. "The world has become unbreathable; everything must be destroyed to make room for something better." Our attention is being drawn to groups of "mutants", the forerunners of the world's New Age — ecolocosmic communities like Findhorn, initiation societies or gnostic centres like the Universal White Brotherhood. Further excitement is being caused by the New Adventurers of the Spirit,' "a hidden host of new spirits who will come safely through the apocalypse thanks to the newness of their gifts(4)

A New Age, a New World, is eagerly awaited: and so millennialisms are bath with us. The medieval "fanatics of the Apocalypse" (5) were poor people, longing to improve their material condition, who found in the imminent "end of the world" prophecies a powerful mainspring for the creation of a new model of society and a new paradise after Christ's return. Similarly, the "religious movements of oppressed peoples” (6) mirrored a reaction against colonial oppression which was expressed on the religious plane as an escapist attempt to combine with the dominant forces in order to be protected from them.

Today's protest — and the hope of another world following the destruction of the present one — is observable among people undergoing frustration in areas other than those of wealth and power: the meaninglessness of existence, loneliness and anonymity, a lath of interpersonal communication and social acknowledgment, a need for the religious and the sacred, the rejection of an asphyxiating mode of social life. The New Religious Movements are proliferating because they seem to meet these thwarted needs.

A theme revealing the contemporary religious mentality
The end of the world theme thus reflects the contemporary religious mentality. It lies at the meeting-point of sensibilities and trends of thought which govern a number of spontaneous reactions to the double crisis of civilization and the Churches, as experienced today in the West. It also concerns the realm of politics, for every messianism involves some kind of relation to society; every millennialism is the potential vector of a movement of social and political emancipation. It has close connections with the religious sphere, for it influences the outlooks of most of the New Movements which have sprung up with the gradual decline of the great instituted religions.

It links up with present-day social issues:
— the ecological inspiration, understood as prophecy about the self-destruction of man and nature, and as a search for the golden age;
— the pursuit of non-violence and the sacred;
— the global climate of anguish regarding man's individual and collective destiny, which is giving more and more credibility to seers, soothsayers and astrologers.
It is expressed in increasingly diversified theological formulations: the cyclic time of Hinduism, the historical eschatology of Christianity, the "liberated" optimism of neo-paganism.
The pastoral approach to the end of the ages theme thus introduces us into a realm crammed with new religious phenomena, a kind of very substantial micro-culture which, set against the background of a return to religion, a shifting of the sacred and an awakening of neo-paganisms, is already profoundly modifying the contemporary landscape. So the whole question is undoubtedly posed to the Churches and to their pastoral work.

Notes
* Father Jean Vernette is Vicar General of the diocese of Montauban, France. He teaches Pastoral Theology and does special research into the question of religious sects, having published many articles on this subject.
The present article is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and of the Review, Lumen Vitae — an international review of religious education.
Vol. XL, 1985 No. 2 is entitled Apocalypse Revisited: The End of the World. Out article is in fact the introduction to a five-part article, pp. 132-152.
1. Cf. E. Foucart, "Le phenomene des sectes, essai de synthèse", in Cahiers du Centre de Recherche en Soc. Re!., vol. 2/1982, p. 92 (Laval University, Quebec).
2. D. Leger, B. Hervieu, Des communautis pour les temps diffciles, Centurion, 1983.
3. Paule Salomon, Les Nouveaux Aventuriers de l'Esprit, Albin Michel, 1979.
4. Aime Michel, in Question de No. 16 (1977), P. 18.
5. Norman Cohn, The pursuit of the Millennium, London.
6. Vittorio Lanternari, Les mouvements religieux des peuples opprimés, reissued Maspero 1983.