WILL THE WORLD END ON SEPTEMBER 28? The Blood Moon, the Stock Market and the “Rapture”

“The sky is falling!” cried Henny Penny in Grimm’s Fairy Tales after an acorn landed on his head.

This week in Utah, some stores are having trouble keeping their shelves stocked with emergency supplies. That’s because some conservatives have drunk the apocalyptic Kool-aid. They’ve listened to End-Times prophets who claim that the “Blood Moon”–the lunar eclipse–will mark the beginning of the end of life on our planet.

Writing about it in the National Catholic Register, I explain what’s been happening:

Could we be living in the Last Days? Some conservative groups—citing evidence gleaned from the Hebrew calendar, a lunar eclipse, prophecy, and even the stock market—predict that events leading to the end of the world will commence on September 28.

On that night, a lunar eclipse will darken the moon to a deep red, what is sometimes called a “blood moon.” This particular eclipse is believed by some to mark the beginning of the end. Those who anticipate the apocalypse point to a prophecy which says that leading up to the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ, there will be a series of four lunar eclipses (called a “tetrad”), coinciding with Jewish holy days….

I also give you a quick primer on “Pre-Trib,” “Mid-Trib” and “Post-Trib” theology, by which Fundamentalists explain what they believe about the Rapture–that point at which they believe they will, as St. Paul describes in 2 Corinthians, be “caught up into the air.”

And I explain what Catholics really believe about all that Rapture stuff. Go read it at the Register.