Chapter 38
A Turning Point in American
History
December 7,
1941, was a turning point in American foreign policy and national
thinking. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii focused America
outward. It had been attacked by an Asian nation and the USA has never
forgotten this lesson. Ever since then it has grown to become the
security officer of the world.
In the First World War it was the sinking of the
passenger liner, the Lusitania, by German U-Boats which led to the
United States entering the conflict. In a decided sense the country had
invited the attack by secretly concealing armaments destined for the
Allies in its passenger liners. The ill-fated passengers little dreamed
they were travelling on a vessel which was, in fact, a huge bomb
awaiting ignition. It took this tragic loss of life to permit the Monroe
Doctrine to be temporarily ignored.
Evidence has been put forth in support of some
historians’ view that the White House was well aware of the planned
attack upon Pearl Harbor, but did nothing to thwart the attack in order
that American opinion would become sympathetic to their nation’s entry
into the war.
Whatever the truth of this theory, one matter is
certain, America from this point on was launched into a policy course
which would, exactly half a century later, lead President George Bush,
Sr., in 1991 to make the claim that the United States was then the lone
superpower in the world. He was wrong. Revelation chapter 3 distinctly
identifies, along with the United States, a second end-time
superpower—the Vatican (also known as the Holy See).
President Bush’s declaration, unchallengeable as it
was in terms of military might, was a boast that exceeded reality. Bush,
Sr., had failed to factor in one nation whose military might was all but
zero, whose sovereign territory extended a mere one-sixth of a square
mile and whose resident population of about 1,000 was the least on
earth—the Holy See. Scripture had foretold of two last-day superpowers,
not one. And in the crucial element of power—worldwide influence—the
Vatican of the twenty-first century has no peer. Rome stands supreme,
for its deadly wound has healed and all the world is wondering after it.
In 1990 Malachi Martin, an Irish Roman Catholic
priest, a retired Professor of the Vatican’s Gregorian University, a
historian and most importantly a Vatican insider having been a close
associate of the Jesuit Cardinal Bea, a Vatican administrator, revealed
the Vatican’s self-assessment of its own political importance.
The title page of Martin’s book, The Keys of This
Blood, summarized its theme:
The struggle for World dominion between Pope John
Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev [then President of the Soviet Union
(U.S.S.R.)] and the Capitalist West [which he defined as the United
States and Western Europe]
At first sight this competition appeared ludicrous.
It was true that the United States and its allies in Western Europe were
in fierce competition with the Soviet Union for world domination. That
competition between two nations of massive military strength, determined
political will, and lust for world dominion, was settled in favor of the
United States in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Mikhail
Sergey-evich Gorbachev lost his power. Of the three competitors cited by
Malachi Martin, only two, the Vatican and the United States remained.
Although Russia was a nation of massive area,
eventually expanding its territory to more than eight million square
miles, and in 1884 was a significant and powerful empire, Ellen Harmon
White did not cite her as a player in the end-time scenario. In this she
had a decided advantage over Malachi Martin writing more than a century
later. That advantage was that although she was not a cleric and Martin
was, she saw the end-time players through prophecy and Martin did not.
The Bible speaks of just two end-time superpowers, not three.
But whereas Martin saw these three powers in
competition, Ellen Harmon White’s Bible-based perspective saw two, the
United States and the Vatican in alliance. Indeed this cooperation was
already in place as Communism crumbled in East Europe as Martin wrote.
How could the Papacy be seen in the same league as
the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s? Martin rightly
summed it up:
Pope John Paul II, the 264th successor of Peter the
Apostle . . . was himself the head of the most extensive and deeply
experienced of the three global powers. (Ibid. p. 17)
By "extensive" Martin referred to the intelligence
system of the Roman Catholic Church composed of its hierarchial clerical
operatives and its devout laity. Further, a state which is also a
religious faith has a moral power which, when exerted over more than a
billion spiritual subjects, carries a power which transcends armies,
navies and air forces; it carries more fire power than guns, tanks,
naval vessels, military aircraft and intercontinental missiles combined.
Indeed, when backed by the weaponry of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) it has all those too.
While looking through prophetic spectacles, White saw
this as did the Apostle John 1,800 years earlier in vision.
Malachi Martin’s years of association with the
Vatican at close range makes his revelations of Papal aims credible. He
stated that,
The chosen purpose of John Paul’s pontificate, the
engine that drives his papal grand policy, and that determines his
day-to-day, year-to-year strategies—is to be victor in that
competition, now well under way. For the fact is that the stakes John
Paul has placed in the arena of geopolitical contention include
everything—himself, his papal persona, the age old Petrine Office he
now embodies, and his entire Church Universal, both as an
institutional organization unparalleled in the world and as a body of
believers united by a board of mystical communion. (Ibid.)
Clearly the present pontiff harbors no doubts that
the deadly wound has been healed. For centuries Roman Catholics have
been seeking a new Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) who could exert
sufficient power to lord it over powerful rulers. In Pope John Paul II
they have the reincarnation of their Hildebrand at last. It has taken
them over nine centuries to find him, but find him they have. When John
Paul spoke to President Reagan about American foreign aid for birth
control in third world countries, expressing his displeasure, Reagan
ceased it (Time, February 24, 1992). When, in 1998, the man who
imagined himself to be the most powerful man on earth, President Bill
Clinton, breached papal protocol and sat before John Paul had taken his
seat, the President was rebuked by papal aids for his faux pas.
Clinton humbly apologized to the Pope. In matters of protocol it is the
more powerful who impose their wills upon their inferiors. Clinton may
not have been compelled to stand in the snow for three days in order to
render his apology as Hildebrand, Gregory VII, demanded of King Henry
IV, but he had learned his place in the world pecking order.
In her 1884 volume Ellen Harmon White wrote surely of
the days in which we now live when she stated,
The Roman Church is far-reaching in her plans and
modes of operation. She is employing every device to extend her
influence and increase her power in preparation for a fierce and
determined conflict to regain control of the world, to re-establish
persecution, and to undo all that Protestantism has done. Catholicism
is gaining ground in our country upon every side. Look at the number
of her churches and chapels. Look at her colleges and seminaries, so
widely patronized by Protestants. These things should awaken the
anxiety of all who prize the pure principles of the gospel. (Spirit
of Prophecy, Vol. 4, p. 382)
Ellen Harmon White also warned against the
allurements of the Roman Catholic religion:
Many suppose that the Catholic religion is
unattractive, and that its worship is a dull, stupid round of
ceremony. Here they mistake. While Romanism is based upon deception,
it is not a coarse and clumsy imposture. The religious service of the
Romish Church is a most impressive ceremonial. Its gorgeous display
and solemn rites fascinate the senses of the people, and silence the
voice of reason and of conscience. The eye is charmed. Magnificent
churches, imposing processions, golden altars, jeweled shrines, choice
paintings, and exquisite sculpture appeal to the love of beauty. The
ear also is captivated. There is nothing to excel the music. The rich
notes of the deep-toned organ, blending with the melody of many voices
as it swells through the lofty domes and pillared aisles of her grand
cathedrals, cannot fail to impress the mind with awe and reverence. (Ibid.,
pp. 382, 383)
It is true that in March 2000 Pope John Paul II
apologized for the past sins of Roman Catholics. The apology did not
satisfy those who recognized that many of the Roman Catholic faithful
who committed those sins were priests, prelates and popes. But even
these papal apologies were evaluated by Mrs. Harmon White in 1884.
The Romish Church now presents a fair front to the
world, covering with apologies her record of horrible cruelties. She
has clothed herself in Christlike garments; but she is unchanged.
Every principle of popery that existed in ages past exists today. The
doctrines devised in the darkest ages are still held. Let none deceive
themselves. The popery that Protestants are now so ready to embrace
and honor is the same that ruled the world in the days of the
Reformation, when men of God stood up at the peril of their lives to
expose her iniquity. She possesses the same pride and arrogant
assumption that lorded it over kings and princes, and claimed the
prerogatives of God. Her spirit is no less cruel and despotic now than
when she crushed out human liberty, and slew the saints of the Most
High. (Ibid., pp. 387, 388)
Fourth, the Papacy could not invoke worldwide
persecution. In 1884 it appeared that the Papacy was in a state of
feebleness. We marvel at Ellen Harmon White’s courage to defy the
contemporary state of the Roman Catholic Church and to focus on its
prophetically specified future. Listen as one Roman Catholic historian
describes the seemingly almost insurmountable odds confronting the
Papacy at the very period in which Ellen Harmon White wrote:
In Italy, processions and outdoor services were
banned, communities of religious [orders] dispersed, church property
confiscated, priests conscripted into the army. A catalogue of
measures, understandably deemed anti-Catholic by the Holy See,
streamed from the new capital [Rome]: divorce legislation,
secularization of schools, the dissolution of numerous holy days.
(John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, p. 14)
If Papal stocks were low at its back door, Italy,
they were no more promising elsewhere in Europe.
In Germany partly in response to the divisive dogma
of the infallibility, Bismarck began his Kulturkampf ("culture
struggle"), a policy of persecution against Catholicism. Religious
instruction came under state control and religious orders were
forbidden to teach: the Jesuits were banished; seminaries were
subjected to state interference; church properties came under the
control of lay committees; civil marriage was introduced in Prussia.
Bishops and clergy resisting Kulturkampf legislation were
fined, imprisoned, exiled. In many parts of Europe, it was the same:
in Belgium, Catholics were ousted from the teaching profession; in
Switzerland religious orders were banned; in Austria, traditionally a
Catholic country, the state took over schools and passed legislation
to secularize marriage; in France there was a new wave of
anticlericalism. The conviction had been widely and confidently
expressed by writers, thinkers, and politicians across Europe—Bovio in
Italy, Balzac in France, Bismarck in Germany, Gladstone in
England—that the Papacy, and Catholicism with it, had had its day." (Ibid.,
pp. 14, 15)
That this bleak outlook would be dramatically altered
during the course of the twentieth century was hardly anticipated except
in the writings of John, the Seer of Patmos.
Ellen Harmon White’s heritage surely was her abiding
trust in the Scriptures as a guide to the past, the present and the
future. This was the secret to her accurate portrayal of today’s events
over a century before their fulfillment. Her words were inscribed at a
time when the Papacy was impotent and the United States weak and
isolationist. The chapter in her 1884 book entitled "The Scriptures a
Safeguard" could well serve as the motto of her life. Mrs. Whites’
connection with the Apostle John was that she implicitly believed the
inspired prophecies of the Apostle, despite contemporary evidence to the
contrary. Her connection with John Paul II was that, believing prophecy,
she saw the day when the Papacy of John Paul would achieve the healing
of the deadly wound.
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