Fr. Lulfre sighed, evidently realizing that he still had some biting to do on this bullet. Deciding to give him a break, I told him, “If you’ve got a different assignment for me, Father, you certainly don’t have to be shy about proposing it. You have a ready listener here.”
“Thank you, Jared, I appreciate that,” he said—but still seemed reluctant to go on. At last he said, rather stiffly, as if he didn’t expect to be believed, “You will remember the special mandate of our order.”
For a moment I just stared at him blankly. Then of course I did remember it.
The mandate about the Antichrist.
The “Special Mandate”
In studying the history of the Laurentians, every novice learns that the original charter of our order includes a special mandate regarding
the Antichrist, enjoining us to be in the vanguard in our vigilance. We’re to know before all others that the Antichrist is among us—and we’re to suppress or destroy him, if that should prove to be possible.
At the time the mandate was written, of course, it was taken for granted that the identity of the Antichrist was a settled matter: It was Luther and his hellish company. As this confident understanding gradually became unfocused, the Laurentians began to argue among themselves about the means by which the mandate was to be fulfilled. If we were to be vigilant, what were we supposed to be vigilant for? By the middle of the seventeenth century, everyone in Europe had heard so many people accused of being the Antichrist that they were heartily sick of the whole subject, and speculation along those lines became more or less what it is today, the domain of religious cranks—except among the Laurentians, who quietly developed their own distinctive (and unsanctioned) Antichrist theology.
The Antichrist comes to us from a prophecy of John, who wrote in his first letter, “Children, it is the final hour. You’ve been told that the Antichrist is coming, and now not one but a multitude of Antichrists have appeared, so there can be no doubt whatever that the final hour is upon us.” When this “final hour” failed to arrive during the lifetime of John’s contemporaries, Christians of each succeeding generation looked for signs of the Antichrist in their own era. At first they looked for persecutors of the Church, preeminently Nero, who was expected to return from the dead to continue his war against Christ. When Roman persecution became a thing of the past, the Antichrist degenerated into a sort of folktale monster, a huge, bloody-eyed, donkey-eared, iron-toothed bogeyman. As the Middle Ages wore on and more and more people became disgusted with ecclesiastical corruption, the papacy itself began to be identified as the Antichrist. Finally popes and reformers spent a century belaboring each other with the bad name. When the Laurentians, with their special mandate, began to rethink the matter in the centuries that followed, they went all the way back to fundamentals and took note of the fact that prophecies are seldom literal predictions of future events. Often they’re not even recognized as prophecies until they’re fulfilled. Numerous examples of this occur in the New Testament, where events in the life of Jesus are described as fulfilling ancient prophecies that were not necessarily understood as prophecies by those who enunciated them. Laurentian theologians reasoned this way: If prophecies about Christ must wait upon their fulfillment to be understood, why shouldn’t the same be true of prophecies about Antichrist? In other words, we can’t really know what John was talking about until it actually happens, so the Antichrist is almost certain to be different from whatever we imagine him to be.
If someone tells you that Saddam Hussein is the Antichrist (and he has in fact been nominated for that honor), you’re absolutely right to laugh. The Antichrist isn’t going to be a worse sort of Hitler or Stalin, because worse than them will just be more of the same in a higher degree—sixty million murdered instead of six million. If you’re going to be on guard against the Antichrist and not just some ordinary villain, you have to be on guard against someone of an entirely new order of dangerousness.
And that’s where things stand at the end of the second millennium. But not exactly. This is just the “official” word, and the impression you get on receiving it in the Laurentian novitiate is that the Antichrist thing is a dead issue and has been so for nearly two centuries.
What I now learned from Fr. Lulfre was that this impression is a false one, engendered as a deliberate policy in the novices, primarily to forestall babbling that could end up as an embarrassing story in the sensationalist press. The policy works. Among the peasantry of the order, the subject of the Antichrist never comes up. At the topmost levels, however, a discreet watch is still kept. Very occasionally—maybe once in fifty years—a worrisome individual pops up, and someone from the order is sent out to have a look.
Someone like me. Someone exactly like me.
The candidate
The candidate was one Charles Atterley, a forty-year-old American, a sort of itinerant preacher who had been circling the middle states of Europe for a decade, picking up a fairly large but unorganized following that seemed to defy all demographic sense and wisdom. It included young and old and everything in between, both sexes in roughly equal numbers, mainstream Christians and Jews, clergy of a dozen different denominations (including the Roman Catholic), atheists, humanists, rabbis, Buddhists, environmentalist radicals, capitalists and socialists, lawyers and anarchists, liberals and conservatives. The only groups notably unrepresented in the mix were skinheads, Bible-thumpers, and unrepentant Marxists.
Atterley’s message seemed difficult to summarize and was typically characterized as “mind-boggling” by those who were favorably impressed and as “incomprehensible” by those who weren’t. I told Fr. Lulfre I didn’t understand what made him seem dangerous.
“What makes him dangerous,” he said, “is the fact that no one can place him or his product. He’s not selling meditation or Satanism or goddess worship or faith healing or spiritualism or Umbanda or speaking in tongues or any kind of New Age drivel. He’s apparently not making money at all—and that’s disquieting. You always know what someone’s about when he’s raking in millions. Atterley’s not another example of some familiar model, like David Koresh or the Reverend Moon or Madame Blavatsky or Uri Geller. In fact, his presentation and lifestyle are more reminiscent of Jesus of Nazareth than anyone else, and that too is disquieting.”
“Disquieting I understand,” I said. “Dangerous I don’t.”
“People are listening, Jared—possibly to something quite new. That makes it dangerous.”
This I could understand.
Anyone who thinks the Church is open to new ideas is living in a dreamworld.
The assignment
Atterley was presently in Salzburg, Fr. Lulfre said. I was to go there, listen, watch, hang out, and report back. When I asked who my European contact would be, I was told there would be none. I was to contact no one in the order under any circumstances. I would travel under my own name, making no secret of my priesthood but not broadcasting it either. I would travel in civilian clothes, as if vacationing.
“Why doesn’t someone in Europe handle this?” I asked.
“Because Atterley’s an American.”
“But he’s talking to Europeans.”
“Don’t be simple, Jared. Europe is just a rehearsal. Whatever else the United States has lost in the last three or four decades, it’s still the world’s style setter, and nothing will catch on everywhere unless it catches on here first. Atterley knows this, if he’s half as bright as people think he is, and when he’s ready for us, he’ll be here, count on it. And that’s why you’re going to Europe: We want to be ready for him before he’s ready for us.”
“You seem to be taking him very seriously.”
Fr. Lulfre shrugged. “If we don’t take him seriously, then we might as well not take him at all.”
After discussing a few mundane matters, like travel agencies and credit cards, I got up to leave, a heavy question in my mind causing me to drag my feet. At the door I finally got it out.