Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Kerry WeberMay 12, 2011

The route of the elevated 7 train, which travels between Queens and Manhattan, passes by 5 Pointz, a now-empty artist space. The owners of the building encourage graffiti artists to paint the walls, resulting in a colorful array of designs and images (as you can see here). It's one of my favorite spots in the city, particularly when the sun hits it in just the right way at sunset. But for several months now, one image has caught my eye: cartoonish, enormous, pink letters and numbers reading, "May 21, 2011" (see right). When I first saw the date, I had no clue about its significance. Then I began to see messages with the command “Google May 21, 2011” scrawled in ink on temporary signs in the subway. So I did. Apparently, May 21, 2011, is judgment day.  Soon I began noticing full-blown subway ads with the same message and walking by men handing out pamphlets in the subway tunnels. (It would seem we commuters are especially in need of redemption.)

The cause is being promoted on an international level by a loosely associated group of Christians out to alert the world that now is the time to repent. This relatively small but vocal group is following the lead of Harold Camping, the 89-year-old leader of Family Radio Worldwide and a retired civil engineer, who says he's used the Bible to calculate the date of the Rapture. Salon.com has put together a helpful FAQ about the topic, and included a number of articles about individuals who have made plans for the end times and are doing their best to warn others. Despite the fact that Camping’s past apocalyptic predictions have proved incorrect, one of his followers has enough faith this time around to decorate a car with the date and a warning message, while others have made more drastic moves like putting off starting a family, deciding not to go to medical school, and using up their savings in order to devote time to spreading the word.

What's a Catholic to think? John W. Martens wrote a great post on the topic a little while ago on our Scripture blog, The Good Word. In it, he is sympathetic to this curiosity about the end times and adds that we have:

a deep human impulse to want to know and to understand and to be ready and prepared.... [W]e know it is true, that we will all come to an end, whether the world continues on or not, and most of us believe that we will be accountable for our lives. Yet, our personal ends are unknowable and we want to know. In the same way, we do not know how or when the world will end, but we know it will….

I always ask my students, and myself, though, a simple question: would it change the way you lived if you knew the end was May 21, 2011 or 2012 or 2013? If yes, then change the way you live your life now; this is what we have in our control. If we are able to minimize even somewhat the effects of sin and suffering in the lives of those around us, if we are all able to do this through small matters, then we are doing all that we can to prepare for the end, personal or cosmic, whenever it comes....

His advice seems especially sage when you consider price of the alternative: According to New York magazine, it costs $44,000 to cover 25 percent of the interior ad space of a subway train. Add to that the cost of the Judgment Day bus ads and the pamphlets, not to mention thousands of billboards erected across the United States, Canada, and even Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon, and you begin to realize: the apocalypse isn't cheap. (Although, from the look of its site, Family Radio seems to have skimped on Web development.) As I attempted to estimate Family Radio's advertising costs, I honestly wondered if the group was able to pay for all these ads upfront, or if they purchased them on credit, because they believed that the collection day would never arrive. I wrote to them to ask about the total cost of the campaign, but have received no response. NPR reported that the station is worth more than $100 million, so perhaps cash isn’t a problem.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I do not know the day nor the hour of Christ’s return. So, for all I know, this group could be right. But I’m going to go ahead and bet that the world will continue to exist beyond next Saturday, and therefore it pains me to see so much money spent on advertising, in the name of saving souls. The prominence of the Family Radio Web address in many of the ads smacks a bit too much of a marketing campaign, one that is more interested in getting folks to listen to Family Radio Worldwide programming than to the Gospels. In addition, the promotional materials I’ve seen are focused on proving that the May 21 deadline is correct, rather than on the spiritual implications of the day. The instructions under “How Do I Begin?” on the Family Radio Web site offer information on obtaining free tracts from the organization, followed quickly by phone number where listeners can buy more. I can only hope that, if the world doesn’t end on the 21st, Family Radio will use these funds to help support any individuals or families who stopped seeking income in order to devote more time to distributing the tracts.

But even if we assume that the 21st is the end, and there's no need to maintain any savings to fall back on, is spending huge sums of money on billboards the best way to help people prepare? Sure, we're all motivated by an impending deadline, but the Family Radio signs I’ve seen aren’t invitations to a relationship with Christ so much as they are warnings not to be left behind. They seem to promote repentance based on fear of what might happen to you if you don’t turn to Christ, rather than the loving relationship you’ll gain if you do. Essentially: hedge your bets.

So if not billboards, than what? Perhaps it would have been nice if Camping and his followers had used the money to hold a series of meals across the country, events to which everyone—young or old, rich or poor—was welcome. They could create a place where everyone had a chance to serve and be served, to experience community, to rejoice in the gift of this life and the blessings it offers. And there’d be pie. Lots of pie. I totally would have attended.

But, as it stands, I’m not making any special plans. If the world is still around next Sunday, I’ll maintain my usual routine of riding the 7 train past 5 Pointz and enjoying the view as I head into Manhattan for the 11:30 a.m. Mass. Because, although there is a discouraging lack of lemon meringue at my parish, I’ve found it is a place where everyone is welcome, where I am able to serve and be served, and I’m able to give thanks for the blessings in my life. Even without billboards, I’m reminded every week that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. And I also get the chance to look around at my friends and neighbors and to recognize in them the ways in which Christ is already among us.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
Juan Lino
12 years 10 months ago
Beautiful piece Kerry - thanks!
Jim McCrea
12 years 10 months ago
"What's a Catholic to think?"   Why should this even be an issue that Catholics need to think about?  Unless, of course, John Hardon, SJ, has given it credence.  Then we all need to pack our bags and be on the Rapture corner at about 6:00 PM.
12 years 10 months ago
About the end of the world and all the current blabber, Jesus said, "Only the Father knows, not even the Son." That's good enough for me.
Marie Rehbein
12 years 10 months ago
All the high schools in the city where I live have graduation that day - maybe they simply misidentified the apocolypse....?
Chuck Anziulewicz
12 years 10 months ago

I know that there are many, MANY Christians who believe that a ''Rapture'' is indeed going to eventually occur, and that at some unknowable date millions of people all over the Earth are going to vanish into thin air, leaving only their clothes and their dentures behind. This sounds nutty enough. All Harold Camping has done is set a date. Does that somehow make him NUTTIER?

Not only is the so-called “Rapture” NOT going to occur on May 21st, it isn’t going to occur EVER. And I can promise you this with absolute 100% certainty. There will be no “Rapture,” no “Second Coming,” no “End Of Days.” There most certainly will continue to be wars, plagues, and natural disasters as there have always been, but there won’t be anything supernatural about them. And most importantly there is no such thing as “prophecy” … except for the self-fulfilling kind.

In a perverse sort of way, I actually WISH that Harold Camping was right! What an interesting day that would be! What would be even more interesting is if the Apocalypse were to occur in a more spectacular fashion, not in the anthropomorphical sense the authors of the ''Left Behind'' series have portrayed, but as more of a Stephen Spielberg production, with boiling clouds, trumpets, angels descending out of the sky, Moon turned to blood, the whole nine yards. Imagine coming to the realization that it was all coming true, just as the evangelists had been warning for years, and that there was something more awesome than just the cold, hard, physical reality we inhabit. Imagine actually watching people disappear into thin air! Wouldn't THAT be something???

Yet in the final analysis, it's that cold, hard, physical reality that I will content myself with. My life is not so meaningless that I need the fear of a ''Rapture'' and the ''End Times'' to make sense of it all ... nor do I need Heaven or Hell to bribe me into behaving decently, thank you very much.

Since the death of Jesus, people in every generation for over 2,000 years and hundreds of generations have wanted to be the one that experiences the end of days. None has. There must be a clue in there somewhere for you.

If you waited at a bus stop for 2,000 years, at what point would you conclude that the bus wasn't coming? Or would you just stand there … FOREVER … because somebody had stuck up a ''bus stop'' sign?
Stanley Kopacz
12 years 10 months ago
May 21?  Phew!  I didn't think we were going to last that long.
12 years 10 months ago
Jim: We still have time to get to Confession. Whew! Where have you been?

Stanley: lol.
Dale Rodrigue
12 years 10 months ago
I don't believe it personally, but...
Didn't St Malachy predict the end during the next pontificate after B16?

Ah, well, hope I get my tax refund before May 21, you know the IRS is slower than the second coming of Christ!
12 years 10 months ago
It is interesting that we are approaching a physical disaster of possilby mega proportions and what would people say if it hit on May 21. That is the Mississippi flood with nuclear reactors possibly flooded and petroleum refineries flooded out.  Does a nuclear reactor being flooded ring a bell.  Did Ms. Weber put this up on May 12 by design.


I am always fascinated by the culture that accepts end of the world situations.  When I first arrived in California many years ago there were guys in Sandwich boards parading around San Francisco predicting the end of the world in October of that year and to go to Mt. Tamalpais to be rescued.  We are a year early for the Mayan calendar scenario and is Nostradamus around to guide us.
Danny Haszard
12 years 10 months ago
Watchtower Jehovah’s Witnesses have little credibility with their own fairy tale primary doctrine of Jesus ‘invisible’ second coming October 1914








Watchtower society false prophets declare end of world in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1975, and 1984....

 Actual news releases on Armageddon 1975 prediction

http://www.dannyhaszard.com/1975.htm 


-





Danny Haszard been there!




Traci Neal
12 years 10 months ago
Well done, Kerry!

The latest from america

"We, the members of the Society of Jesus, continue to be lifted up in prayer, in lament, in protest at the death and destruction that continue to reign in Gaza and other territories in Israel/Palestine, spilling over into the surrounding countries of the Middle East."
The Society of JesusMarch 28, 2024
A child wounded in an I.D.F. bombardment is brought to Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, on March 25. (AP Photo/Ismael abu dayyah)
While some children have been evacuated from conflict, more than 1.1 million children in Gaza and 3.7 million in Haiti have been left behind to face the rampaging adult world around them.
Kevin ClarkeMarch 28, 2024
Easter will not be postponed this year. It will not wait until the war is over. It is precisely now, in our darkest hour, that resurrection finds us.
Stephanie SaldañaMarch 28, 2024
The paradox at the heart of Christianity is that we must die in order to live again. And few movies witness to that truth like “Romero” (1989).
John DoughertyMarch 28, 2024