Michael Scanlan’s Amazing Prophecy

I’ve been puzzled about the spike this week in the stats for this post about Michael Scanlan and the University of Steubenville.  A friend of mine put me on to an email blast from Ralph Martin; a video version of this is below:

My response to this was as follows:

Now I understand the major spike in the stats for my piece on Michael Scanlan.

There were many people in the 1970’s who were looking for/prophesying about a time when Christians would be “at sea” so to speak. But then two things happened.

The first was the election of John Paul II as Pope in 1978. He managed to set the RCC’s “house in order” as best as possible. The Renewal suffered the consequences of this but it happened.

The second was the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. He too put some things in order.

To some extent these two events with others stalled the collapse foreseen at the time (tbh I was looking for a collapse, too.) But now things have shifted and we’re back facing the abyss again.

One note: when Ralph Martin speaks of “Christ’s body” he interprets that eucharistically, in a good #straightouttairondale way. I doubt that this is what Scanlan had in mind. The powers that were in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (and that includes Ralph Martin) had a strong remnant theology undertow, which drove the whole covenant community movement. The “body” he was referring to was the group of saints which were not part of the falling away he refers to elsewhere. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of the covenant community system, it goes against some basic Catholic teachings, something that the Church was “looser” about at the time than it was under JPII.