As difficult as this is to believe, Family Radio Worldwide founder Harold Camping’s prediction that the worldwide “rapture” will strike on May 21, 2011 has struck fear into the hearts of millions around the globe.
Camping’s message message is not only being trumpeted on websites, postcards, T-shirts, bus stops, RVs and billboards from coast-to-coast, but millions sincerely believe his latest prophesy, and are terrified.
The 89 year-old would-be prophet claims the Bible is a kind of calendar by which the dates of prophecies can be calculated. “Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment,” he told the Associated Press in January, 2011.
This is not the first time he predicted the end of the world. He did so back in the late 80’s when he began warning that the end would come in September, 1994. On Sept. 6, 1994, dozens of Camping disciples, dressed in their Sunday best, gathered inside Alameda’s Veterans Memorial Building in San Francisco to await the return of Christ. When nothing happened, Camping announced that he must have made a mathematical error and spent the next 10 years running “new calculations” before coming up with the new date.
Now he claims that God has revealed to him the true meaning of many of the dates and symbolic numbers in the Bible – all of which spell out the date May 21, 2011 as the time when the end will come. As he once explained, this date is “exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C., when the [great] flood began,” and these 7,000 years mirror the seven days God gave Noah to warn the world to get ready for the end.
The apocalyptic end of the world as we know it will come about with a “huge earthquake the likes of which has never been had in history,” he said in an interview, “and the graves will be opened all over the world.” Jesus will then gather up the saved – of which there will be only be about 200 million – and the unsaved will be left to rot. Five months later, on Oct. 21, “the entire universe will be annihilated.”
As preposterous as it all sounds, Camping has developed an almost cult-like following. Chris McCann, 49, of Darby, a married father of four who retired from his job in the mailroom at a financial-services company. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer in January of this year that he’s so confident Camping’s prediction will come true that he and 20 others recently flew to Ireland and Scotland to hand out May 21 tracts to anyone who would take one.
Allison Warden of Raleigh, N.C. is so convinced about Camping’s predictions she started a website called wecanknow.com and, along with a four-person team, has mounted billboards in 10 cities including Nashville, Atlanta, and Detroit where Camping’s message is not heard. The signs proclaim: “Save the date! The Return of Christ: May 21, 2011.”
“It’s amazing to think you’re alive when Christ is coming back,” Warden told the Inquirer. “It’s sort of surreal, but very exciting. This is the fulfillment of everything people in the New Testament era have looked forward to.”
Camping is not the only person to claim the Bible contains secret codes that reveal the time of the end of the world.
In the late 1990’s, Washington Post journalist Michael Drosnin published “The Bible Code” which details his technique for finding hidden prophecies in the Bible. One of his most interesting findings was that a meteor would strike the earth in 2012. This is the same year that many other people believe the world will end because this is when the Mayan calendar ends and when the “2012” movie predicted the Earth’s crust would destabilize and kill most of mankind.
As for Camping, he claims to have no plans for May 21 except to “watch and wait.” When asked how he might feel if he wakes up on May 22, he scoffed and said: “I would be disobeying God if I say there’s a possibility of that,” he said. “I mean it with all my heart. There’s no possibility – none, none, none – that it will not happen.”
The definitive Catholic teaching on the end times is contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church Nos. 668-682 .
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
