St. Louis de Montfort and the End Times

St. Louis de Montfort and the End Times

a.      First stage:  tragic state of the Church.  In the eyes of a missionary and mystic like Montfort, the state of the Church and the society of his time offered scarce consolation.  Although historians agree that conditions at the close of the seventeenth century improved as a result of the intense pastoral commitment of the French clergy, Montfort would disagree.  In his converging texts, he refers to the “universal failure” of contemporary Christian practice (TD 127), to the “corrupt kingdom of the world” (SM 59) and the reign of the enemies of God (PM 4).  The encroaching wave of sin takes on cosmic dimensions and does not spare even the Church herself:  “Your Gospel is thrown aside, torrents of inequity flood the whole earth carrying away even your servants.  The whole land is desolate, ungodliness reigns supreme, your sanctuary is desecrated and the abomination of desolation has even contaminated the holy place” (PM 5; see also PM 14: “the ever-swelling flood of iniquity”).  The Church herself has become a “languishing heritage,” “so weakened and besmirched by the crimes of her children” (PM 20).  Behind the domination of sin, Montfort sees the work of the devil, which is “daily increasing until the advent of the reign of anti-Christ” (TD 51).  Montfort is so dismayed that he invokes his own death if divine intervention does not bring a change: “Send me your help from heaven or let me die” (PM 14).  Thus does he feel compelled to send up a cry of alarm when confronted with such a grave and imminent danger: “The House of God is on fire! . . . Help!” (PM 28).

b.      Second stage:  divine intervention within salvation history.  This intermediary stage is the most dynamic and active, because during this stage we pass from the reign of sin to the reign of Jesus Christ in the hearts of men and women.  Montfort is convinced that the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ should not be projected into the hereafter but must come into existence on earth, in this world:  “Is it not true that your kingdom must come?” (PM 5).  This is the leitmotif of TD from its first sentence:  “It was through the blessed Virgin Mary that Jesus Christ came into the world, and it is also through her that he must reign in the world” (TD 1; cf. 13, 22, 49, 157, 217, 262).  Who will be able to transform the world?  For Montfort there is no doubt: God alone can accomplish such a task.  He will intervene with “a deluge of fire, love and justice” through the mediation of the Spirit and the manifold acts of Mary (PM 13, 15, 24-25; TD 49-56).  This divine intervention will be through and in mankind, especially through the “apostles of the end times” (TD 58).  Their task will be twofold: “destroying sin and setting up the kingdom of Jesus” (SM 59).

c.      Third stage:  the Second Coming and reign of Jesus Christ.  There is no doubt that “the whole Church expect[s] him [God] to come and reign over all the earth and to judge the living and the dead” (SM 58).  This Second Coming of Jesus will lead successively to the reign of Jesus in the world and to the Last Judgment, although not in tandem.  Here we see the characteristic vision of Montfort: the universal and stable reign of Jesus (PM 4) anticipated in time as an effect of his coming.  Jesus “comes in glory once again to reign upon earth” (TD 158), “the knowledge and the kingdom of Jesus Christ must come into the world” (TD 13), “you yourself will ask of Jesus, together with Mary, that he come with his kingdom on earth.”  It is not a visible and personal advent of Jesus and a temporal kingdom, as millenarians would hope for; Montfort insists that the kingdom of Jesus is “in the hearts” (TD 113) or “in our soul” (TD 68).  In other words, Jesus will reign when by the intervention of Mary, he is known, loved, and served (TD 49).  In TD 217, we have the logical and perhaps even chronological steps:  reign of Mary, coming of the Spirit, reign of Jesus Christ.  We also see here how Montfort spirituality has as its goal the establishment of the kingdom of Christ:  “When will that happy day come . . . when God’s Mother is enthroned in men’s hearts as Queen, subjecting them to the dominion of her great and princely Son?” (TD 217).

d.      Fourth stage:  the deluge of the fire of justice and the Last Judgment.  Montfort describes the end of time and the world from a pneumatological and then a Christological perspective.  In the first, the deluge of the fire of love will be followed by the deluge of the fire of justice, an expression of divine anger, which “reduces the whole world to ashes” (PM 16-17).  In the Christological version, the reign of Christ in the world is followed, as if in continuation of his Second Coming or the Parousia, by the universal judgment: God will “come and reign over all the earth and to judge the living and the dead” (SM 58).  Then the end times themselves will end, and the true eschatology—will begin.