The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Catholic Witness Stirs Two Continents

I. A Clarion Voice From the Catholic Church

Before beginning our examination of the many Protestant witnesses, we shall first listen to two Catholic voices at the turn of the century. Just as the long and fateful 1260 years of papal spiritual supremacy over the churches was drawing to its dramatic close, a clarion voice rang out from the very shadows of the Vatican, destined to be heard halfway round the world. The Jesuit priest MANUEL LACUNZA called attention to the prophetic predictions of Daniel, Paul, and John, and sounded out once again the prophetic warning and appeal that had so long been silenced by force. He was the first voice; and the Dominican Pere Lambert, of France, was the second. Not since the days of Joachim and the centuries preceding the Protestant Reformation had the like been heard. Now, from within the Roman communion, Catholic countries like Spain, France, and Italy, as well as virtually all of Mexico and South America, heard these prophetic voices in insistent tones. PFF3 303.1

Utterly disappointed and disillusioned by the absurdities and incongruities of the best-known Catholic expositors of millennial prophecy, Lacunza had recourse to Holy Scripture itself, and the light of the premillennial second advent broke upon him in all its impelling grandeur and simplicity. Like his contemporary, Lambert, the Dominican, he strongly urged investigators, especially those of the priesthood, to resort to the Book of God, which had been well-nigh consigned to oblivion. The two advents of Christ-the first in inconspicu ous humility, and the second in glory and majesty-he presented as the two great focal points of all prophecy and the goal of all history. Such was the essence of Lacunza’s burden and the theme of his message. Repeatedly he stressed the principle that those prophecies not fulfilled at the first advent will in verity be fulfilled at the second. His was an arresting voice, profoundly moving the Catholic and Protestant worlds alike. PFF3 303.2

From the days of Augustine onward the Catholic Church had held that Satan was hound by the first coming of Christ, that the millennium began either then or at the time of Constantine, and that the devil was loosed at the time of the assaults by Wyclif or Luther-or will be loosed when Anti-christ shall appear in his final form. Lacunza came to see the error and unhistoricity of such a position, and turned back to the teachings of the early church, adopting the position of two literal resurrections separated by an interval of one thousand years. PFF3 304.1

The results of his extended investigation he wrote out in the form of a lengthy manuscript. But he could not get permission of the ecclesiastical authorities to print it. So when he was found dead in 1801, on the bank of the river which flows near Imola, Italy, where he resided, his book had not yet been published. But even in manuscript form it awakened many in Europe and South America to the fundamental truth that the second advent is to take place prior to the millennium -a truth not only utterly lost sight of in Roman Catholicism, but by now largely obscured in large sections of the great Protestant communions. This was due to the devastating in roads of the Whitbyan philosophy of world conversion, and of Christ’s second coming at the close of the millennium. Lacunza’s revolutionary position was squarely a confutation of that postmillennial theory, increasingly popular among Protestants. PFF3 304.2

The singularity and significance of Lacunza’s contribution lay in its revolutionary interpretation-so far as Catholic positions were concerned-of Antichrist, and of his destruction at the beginning of the millennial period. This Lacuma placed as future and approaching, and introduced by the second, personal, premillennial advent of Christ, with the general resurrection of the wicked dead at the close. His thesis was therefore anathema to Rome. Later, when brought squarely and unavoidably before her for decision, it was consigned to the Index Prohibitorum, in harmony with her consistent position for centuries. PFF3 304.3

Political upheavals in Spain had weakened the grip of the church upon that unhappy land, and made favorable the printing of the first half-dozen editions. The power of the Inquisition was crippled and appeared about broken, so that it proved impotent to prohibit circulation and reading of the book. Final prohibition in all languages by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, at Rome, made authoritative by pontifical decree, thus brought the issue of the second advent, Antichrist, and tradition again squarely before the highest body of the Roman Church by one of her own learned and respected sons early in the nineteenth century. PFF3 305.1

Lacunza had challenged the inner heart of Catholic ex position, for he exalted the Bible above dogmatic tradition. His treatise also called a halt to the rapid retreat from the clear Protestant position on the advent. He identified Anti-christ not as some individual blasphemer, to harass the church in the future, but as the “moral body” of apostasy. He ex pounded the temple of God as the Christian church, and taught that the two-horned beast is not an individual, but the Roman priesthood, which lend their aid to the consummation of apostasy. PFF3 305.2

The providential circumstances of the propagation of his book made it an instrument to give marked impetus to the study of the second advent in Britain among those Protestants already awakened to the study of the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation. While there had been a small but steady line of Protestant students and writers on prophecy who held to pre-millennialism on the basis of an increasingly clear interpretation of the prophecies, symbols, and chronological periods (which features Lacunza but lightly touched), it was the province and accomplishment of Lacunza to clarify the whole premillennial issue, and to force home to open-minded Protestant prophetic students-as well as the closed minds of Catholic theologians this cardinal truth and principle. PFF3 305.3

Picture 1: LACUNZA’S REVOLUTIONARY EXPOSITION PLACED ON INDEX
Manuel Lacunza (Lower Right), and the Church in Imola, Italy, Where He Lies Buried (Upper Right); Title Page of Official Vatican Copy of Index Librorum Prohibilorum, With Inset Item Listing Lacunza’s Volume, Under Pseudonym “Ben-Ezra” (Left)
page 307

Little wonder that Lacunza in the last quarter of the eighteenth century did not see all the light on prophetic interpretation that others in Great Britain, Germany, and North America saw and carried forward to increasing perfection-particularly a quarter century after his death. Lacunza’s was a solitary voice almost from the shadows of the Vatican, just before the early dawn of the nineteenth-century revival of the advent hope and the beginning of the great second advent world movement that has since gone on with increasing force and volume. PFF3 307.1

Lacunza was verily one of God’s chosen heralds. Moving Catholics and Protestants alike, his book was one of the greatest single influences to stir mankind to the nineteenth-century restudy of the prophecies, and exerted a profound influence, through Edward Irving, on the Albury Park Prophetic: Conference of 182(5. The true significance of Lacunza’s life, witness, and influence cannot really be understood unless there-is acquaintance with those providences, political upheavals, and ecclesiastical decrees that shaped the whole course of his life. These must now be noted in some detail. PFF3 307.2