Chapter 28
The Deadly Wound Inflicted
"And I saw one
of his heads as it were wounded to death" (Revelation 13:3). The
fulfillment of this prophecy precisely coincided with a second prophetic
utterance concerning this first beast of Revelation. ". . . and power
was given unto him to continue forty and two months" (Revelation 13:5).
As we have seen in the pre-millennial prophecies of
Daniel and Revelation, the literal numbers are always associated with a
symbol (see chapter entitled "Time, Times and the Dividing of Time").
The term "months" is a symbol of 42 thirty-day months, the days being
symbolic of years. Thus the Papacy was to rule Europe for 1260 prophetic
days or literal years. That spiritual-temporal rule commenced, as we
have shown, in 538. Thus, if this prophecy was to be proven valid, the
apparent demise of the Papacy must occur in 1798.
Right on schedule that prophecy was fulfilled. On
September 22, 1774 Pope Clement XIV died. Cardinal Giovanni Angelico
Braschi was elected his successor in 1775. As Pope Pius VI, he was to
preside over the receipt of the deadly wound. Born on December 27, 1717,
the new pope was fifty-seven at the time of his election. He was to die
August 29, 1799 at the age of 81, an exile and supposedly the last of
the long line of popes.
Few know that this intelligent lawyer, trained by the
Jesuits, was courting when Pope Benedict XIV offered him the post of
canon in Rome, at a time when he was not a priest. Indeed it was not his
intention to take holy orders. Far from it! He was engaged to be
married. He weighed the conflicting options and decided to accept entry
to the priesthood while his fianceé entered a convent. He eventually
rose to the post of Papal Treasurer and was appointed a Cardinal in 1775
by his predecessor.
Pius’ twenty-four year reign was the culmination of a
century of rapidly declining Vatican influence in Europe as the Papacy
moved toward its inexorable demise. Throughout Europe fierce fires of
anticlerical discontent were raging and the successive popes of the
eighteenth century were impotent to quell these violent conflagrations.
Gone were the days when mighty potentates humbly
suffered humiliation at the hands of popes. When King Henry IV of
Germany displeased Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century he was
summarily excommunicated. In deep penitence, no doubt motivated by
self-interest and fear of the loss of his temporal power, the king
wended his way to Canossa in northern Italy to personally repent of his
claimed misdeed before the Pope. Asserting the arrogance of the Papal
court of the day, Pope Gregory left Henry in the snow for three days
before deigning to have him ushered into his supposedly august presence.
Henry IV accepted the Dictatus papae issued by
Gregory VII in 1075, which included the outrageous assumption of rule
over Europe:
All matters affecting the well-being of the
Christian commonwealth are to be finally decided by the Pope, who
himself cannot be judged by anyone. (Encyclopaedia Britannica,
vol. 17, p. 206, 1963 edition)
We wonder if he included God in this prohibition.
Further, the Dictatus papae declared that,
A council is ecumenical only if the Pope has
summoned it or authorized its decrees; the pope alone may wear the
imperial emblems and alone has the right to demand the osculatio
pedum [kissing of the feet], he may dispose kings and emperors and
princes and create new kingdoms; he alone is the universal bishop. (Ibid.)
While the popes of the eighteenth century may have
lamented that they no longer possessed the powers of their eleventh
century predecessors, prophecy had spoken and every year of this century
took them one step closer to the deadly wound to be inflicted two years
prior to that century’s close.
As Hagenbach stated,
Pope Pius VI, whom the changed times did not permit
to summon heretical sovereigns to the threshold of the Apostolic
church, was compelled—since all written attempts had failed—to use the
last resort of a journey to Vienna, in the year 1782. An old man, of
handsome appearance and form, and, though unhealthy, yet eloquent and
gifted with a melodious voice, he was self-sufficient enough to
suppose that important results could follow this journey. But he
achieved no more than to be treated with great respect, and to leave
behind with the people, on whom he had pronounced his blessing, an
imposing impression. He did not rescue a single cloister whose
downfall had been determined. (Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, History of
the Church in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, Scribner, New
York, 1869, Vol. 2, p. 432)
On Pius’ own doorstep, Emperor Joseph II’s brother,
Leopold, was the Grand Duke of Tuscany which included the city of
Florence. He acted along similar lines to his imperial brother. So
loathed was he by church dignitaries that Bishop Ricci, Bishop of
Pistoia, called a synod in 1786 in which extreme positions were taken in
opposition to the Duke. But eight years later Pius found it prudent to
condemn the edicts of the 1786 synod.
Even worse, within his own clergy he saw the rise of
Febronianism in Austria. This view had been enunciated by von Hontheim
who wrote under the name of Febronius. His views cut at the very core of
Papal power and prestige. He denied the universal preeminence of the
Pope, stating that the Bishop of Rome was merely an equal among bishops.
In the political sphere Febronius incited Roman Catholic monarchs to
severely reduce Papal power.
When, in 1786, The Punctuation of Ems was
issued, it was a serious blow to Pius VI’s control of his clergy. This
document supported the ideals of Febronianism and was issued at the
behest of three bishops who also ruled as princes in small
territories—Mayence, Trèves, and Cologne.
To the south the Bourbon king of Naples added to
Pius’ woes. King Ferdinand IV had married Maria Carolina, daughter of
the powerful Queen Maria Theresa of Austria. Ferdinand’s queen possessed
her mother’s genes; her ambition knew no bounds. She instigated the
appointment of an Englishman, John Acton, with the rank of Minister.
With Acton’s assistance Naples secured a rapprochement with two
nations which were far from favored in the precincts of the
Vatican—England and Austria.
These situations were daunting
in themselves. But when on July 14, 1789, all hell broke loose in
France—the "elder daughter" of the Roman Catholic Church—Pius’ fate was
sealed, as atheism replaced Catholicism as the "faith" of the populace.
Prelates, priests and Roman Catholic laity suffered under the
revolutionary regime.
The fifth head of the beast was in its death throes
and the sixth head, atheistic nationalism, was about to usurp its role
as leader of the forces in opposition to God’s precious truth.
Meanwhile the bloody French Revolution decimated the
clergy and religious orders of France, and Roman Catholic property was
confiscated.
British peer, Baron Macauley, in his book the
History of the Popes, published in 1846, well summed up the power of
the atheistic movement generated in France in the eighteenth century:
Had the [atheistic] sect which was rising at Paris
been a sect of scoffers, it is very improbable that it would have left
deep traces of its existence in the institution and manners of Europe.
Mere negation—mere Epicurian infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly
observes—has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no
motive for action. It inspires no enthusiasm. It has no missionaries,
no crusaders, no martyrs. If the Patriarch of the Holy Philosophical
Church [Voltaire] had contented himself with making jokes about Saul’s
asses and David’s wives, and, with criticizing the poetry of Ezekiel
in the same narrow spirit in which he criticized that of Shakespeare,
the [Roman Catholic] Church would have had little to fear. (p. 88)
Macauley perceptively isolated the genius which was
to leave an indelible atheistic blot upon the entire map of Europe.
The real secret of their [the infidels’] strength
lay in the truth which was mingled with their errors, and in the
generous enthusiasm which was hidden under their flippancy. They were
men who with all their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and
earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race.
(Ibid.)
The injustices both instigated and tolerated by the
Roman Catholic Church were to toll the Church’s own death knell in
France and Continental Europe itself:
While they [the atheists] assailed Christianity
with a rancor and an unfairness disgraceful to men who called
themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure than
their opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races
that Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture,
arbitrary imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital
punishments, the delays and chicanery of tribunals, the extractions of
farmers of the revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant
subjects of their lively satire and eloquent disputations. (Ibid.)
The response of the Roman Catholic Church was not to
repair injustices, but rather to use its authority against this dissent.
Such a response was bound to prove ineffectual. The result of this
pitiful tactic was the French Revolution.
Even among the clergy of France there were some who,
rejoicing in the new license, flung away their
sacred vestments, proclaimed that their whole life had been an
imposture, insulted and persecuted the religion of which they had been
ministers, and distinguished themselves even in the Jacobin Club and
the Commune of Paris, by the excess of their impudence and ferocity. (Ibid.,
p. 89)
Atheism spread from France all through Europe.
Atheism—
became conqueror in its turn; and not satisfied
with the Belgian cities, went raging over the Rhine and through the
passes of the Alps. . . . Spain was now the obsequious vassal of the
infidels. Italy was subjugated to them. (Ibid., pages 89, 90)
Thus the sixth head of the first beast of Revelation
13 spread throughout Europe and beyond. The deadly wound of the Papacy,
inflicted because of its own folly, provided the opening that atheism
and its incipient political arm, Communism, grasped to usurp the
pathetically weakened Papal role, as chief opposition to the truth of
God.
Macauley recognized that his age was still too close
to that of the infliction of the deadly wound to trace the healing of
that wound.
Some future historian. . . . will, we hope, trace
the progress of the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century." (Ibid.,
p. 90)
In this book, written about 160 years later, we have
attempted to address Baron Macauley’s desire. That revival has taken two
centuries to reach its fast approaching prophetic climax.
Macauley made a comment, still valid today: he
concluded that,
No [European] Christian nation which did not adopt
the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth
century [has ever] adopted them. Catholic communities since that time
have become infidel [and we could add, Communist] and become Catholic
again, but none has become Protestant. (Ibid., p. 91)
Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton in his work,
Lord Acton on the States of the Church had concluded that,
She [the Roman Catholic Church] had resisted the
outward assault of the Protestant Reformation to be sapped by the
Revolution which had its seat in Catholic countries, and extensively
prevailed in the Church herself. The spirit of opposition to the Holy
See grew in energy, and the opposition to its system and ideas spread
still more widely. (reprinted 1940 by R.I. & F.E. Lally)
Lord Acton was not alone in drawing comparisons
between the Reformation and the French Revolution as they impacted Rome.
In a pointed statement in The Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, p. 192,
the American author Ellen Harmon White wrote in 1884,
Romanism had enjoined image worship; now [during
the French Revolution] divine honors were paid to the vilest objects.
The work which the papacy had begun, atheism completed. The one
withheld from the people the truths of the Bible; the other taught
them to reject both the Bible and its Author. The seed sown by priests
and prelates was yielding its evil fruit.
The Reformation which had been crushed in France was,
as a consequence, bearing its baneful fruits in the late eighteenth
century.
King Louis XVI, soon to suffer the guillotine as a
consequence of the Revolution, compliantly acceding to the demands of
the revolutionaries, agreed to totally reorganize the Roman Catholic
Church more to their liking.
Rome had not hitherto been confronted, without
prior consultation, with anything like this entire reorganisation of
the French Church, this turning of the hierarchy of her authority
upside down, this spoliation presented as a fait accompli. It
was more than even Pius VI, an elderly and conciliatory pontiff, whose
reign came at the conclusion of a long period of decline in the power
and prestige of Rome, was prepared to accept. On July 10, 1790, he
wrote to Louis XVI telling him he should not approve the new laws. But
the Pope’s letter arrived on July 23, and the King had [already]
approved the Civil Constitution. (E. E. V. Hales, The Catholic
Church in the Modern World, Hanover House, New York, 1958, pp. 37,
38)
With the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, the
cause of the Papacy worsened. Indeed, by 1797 Napoleon had determined to
exterminate the Papal line.
One of the first measures of the new government
[the Directory] was to despatch an order to Joseph Bonaparte at Rome,
to promote, by all the means in his power, the approaching revolution
in the papal states; and, above all things, to take care that, at the
pope’s death [he was ill, 1797], no successor should be elected to the
chair of St. Peter. (Archibald Alison, History of Europe,
Harper, New York, 1852, Vol. 1, pp. 543, 544)
Napoleon counted on the ailing Pope’s death
certificate to fulfill his termination of the Papacy. Since in 1797 the
Pope was so gravely ill that his physicians confidently anticipated his
death that year, Napoleon awaited his demise. The Jesuit priest and
historian, Joseph Rickaby in his Lectures on the History of Religion
stated that,
When in 1797, Pope Pius VI fell grievously ill,
Napoleon gave orders that in the event of his death no successor
should be elected to his office, and that the Papacy should be
discontinued. (Catholic Truth Society, London, 1910, Vol. 3, Lecture
24, p. 1)
Contrary to all expectations Pius made a remarkable
recovery. How accurately does Bible prophecy outline the future! Had
Pius died in 1797 as expected, the 1260-year rule of the Papacy would
have fallen short by one year. God does not deal in approximations in
his prophecies.
With the recovery of the Pope, Napoleon lost
patience. By 1798 he felt it was time for decisive action to implement
his will, despite the the Pope’s compliance with the harsh treaty of
Tolentino forced upon him by Napoleon in 1797.
General Berthier was chosen to lead what amounted to
a coup d’etat. He entered Rome on February 10, 1798 and unilaterally
proclaimed a Republic. The pontiff refused to recognize the declaration,
a recognition which would have violated his oath of office. He firmly
refused to resign his post.
That the head of the church might be made to feel
more poignantly his humiliating situation, the day chosen for planting
the tree of liberty on the capitol was the anniversary of his election
to the sovereignty [Feb. 15]. Whilst he was according to custom, in
the Sistine Chapel, celebrating his accession to the papal chair, and
receiving the congratulations of the Cardinals, Citizen Haller, the
commissary-general, and Cervoni, who then commanded the French troops
within the city, gratified themselves in a peculiar triumph over this
unfortunate potentate. During that ceremony they both entered the
chapel, and Haller announced to the sovereign Pontiff on his throne,
that his reign was at an end.
The poor old man seemed shocked at the abruptness
of this unexpected notice, but soon recovered himself with becoming
fortitude; and when General Cervoni, adding ridicule to oppression,
presented him the national cockade, he rejected it with a dignity that
shewed he was still superior to his misfortunes. At the same time that
his Holiness received this notice of the dissolution of his power, his
Swiss guards were dismissed, and Republican soldiers put in their
place. (Richard Duppa, A Brief Account of the Subversion of the
Papal Government, 1798, G. G. and J. Robinson, London, 1799, pp.
46, 47)
Duppa recorded the pitiful journeys of Pius from Rome
to Valence.
The time, however, was arrived, when it became more
desirable to send him [the Pope] entirely out of the way, in order
that his effects might be disposed of with a better grace.
It was decreed that he should go; and on the
morning of the 20th of February [1798], about seven o’clock, he left
Rome, accompanied by three coaches of his own suite, and a body of
French cavalry, to escort him safely into Tuscany; and on the 25th
arrived at Siena, where he was requested to remain till further
orders. Here he was received into the monastery of S. Barbara of the
order of S. Augustin, whose members sorrowfully welcomed him at the
gate, and offered all that their Convent could bestow, to console him
under his misfortunes.
An earthquake having taken place at Siena in the
month of May, the Pope was removed to a Carthusian Convent within two
miles of Florence. . . .
He was suffered to remain in the Carthusian Convent
until the 27th of March, 1799. He was then removed to Parma; from
whence he was conducted to Briançon in France, and afterward to
Valence, where he died on the 29th of August of the same year. (Ibid.,
pp. 50—54)
Thus had the deadly wound, long foretold, been
inflicted upon a power thought at its zenith to be so powerful that no
potentate, no general nor any force could remove it. Had such
individuals valued Scripture, no such misapprehension could have been
harbored.
Equally, those who in 1798 saw Pius’ unceremonious
removal from office as the final chapter in Papal rule could never have
validly held this mistaken view had they prayerfully studied Scripture,
for it had unequivocally stated that following the receipt of the deadly
wound,
and his deadly wound was healed; and all the world
wondered after the beast. (Revelation 13:3)
No historian has better described the apparent death
of the Papacy than George Trevor in his book, Rome: From the Fall of
the Western Empire, stated,
The object of the French directory was the
destruction of the pontifical government, as the irreconcilable enemy
of the republic. . . . The aged pope [Pius VI] was summoned to
surrender the temporal government; on his refusal, he was dragged from
the altar. . . . His rings were torn from his fingers, and finally,
after declaring the temporal power abolished, the victors carried the
pope prisoner into Tuscany, whence he never returned (1798).
The Papal States, converted into the Roman
Republic, were declared to be in perpetual alliance with France,
but the French general was the real master at Rome. . . . The
territorial possessions of the clergy and monks were declared national
property, and their former owners cast into prison. (London: The
Religious Tract Society, 1868, pp. 439, 440)
Thus 1,700 years after the apostle John, writing in
exile on the Isle of Patmos, had foretold the infliction of the deadly
wound upon the Papacy, the wound was inflicted precisely in the year
indicated.
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