The Antichrist

In The Antichrist, Fr. Vincent P. Miceli attempts to relate the prophecy of the Anitchrist to the major disaster of our time - the nightmare, admitted by all now, of the world-wide collapse of Christianity. Three modern popes - Pius X, Paul VI, and John Paul II - have speculated on the possible presence among us of the "man of sin", even as they fought to turn back the ever-advancing darkness of satanic nihilism. Has St. Paul's prophecy concerning the coming of the "general apostasy", as prelude to the lawless one's arrival, been fulfilled in our generation? Has the fall of the major messianic utopias - the American dream, the Socialist welfare fantasy, the Marxist revolutionary paradise - produced the sufficiently Godless, disillusioned, diseased womb of society from which "the lord of this world" will be born?

Fr. Miceli traces the Antichrist prophecy through the Old and New Testaments, through Greek and Latin Fathers, through medieval thought and relates his startling findings to the decadence of our civilization. Fr. Miceli studies some of the false prophets in history who are the precursors, shadows, portents of the coming climax of evil to be incarnated in the person of the false Messiah, the Antichrist. He explorers the modern phenomena of the presence of mini-Antichrists within the Mystical Body of Christ who work as demolition squads to bring down the marvelous edifice of God. In a final, most interesting chapter, "Mary and the Antichrist", Fr. Miceli attempts to harmoniously close the circle of salvation history by portraying the Woman's, the Child's, and the Serpent's roles in the drama of salvation from the beginning to the end of time. Satan's victory in the seduction of Eve, the connivance of Adam, the imposition of death on the children of men is brought to a frenzied climax in the Antichrist's final assault on Mary and her children in and outside the Church through the instruments of eroticism, violence, organized terrorism, legalized abortion, and universal war. But Mary, the Prophetess of the last days, cooperates today more openly and publicly with her glorious Son and her persecuted children to defeat the Antichrist and crush forever his kingdom of darkness.