Coronavirus and the “Mark of the Beast” Fr. Goring Warns
Comment from Youtube: “Amen, Father and thank you. I was discussing the issue of vaccines made from aborted fetal tissue after viewing yesterday’s video. I, too, will not vaccinate myself should this be the case. It is abhorrent and intrinsically evil. And this “rush to a cure” mentality is insane. We all now that rushing to anything i.e. judgement, “reopening”, even rushing our work, prayer,etc. you name it, produces mistakes and pitfalls that we may never recover from.”
To some, it appears Satan’s emissaries are poised to take advantage of the pandemic. Some Christian pastors believe the start of a Last Days battle for religious freedom began with the social distancing orders that have placed weekly in-person church services under fire. Tony Spell, pastor of Life Tabernacle, a Louisiana megachurch, defended his decision to hold a Palm Sunday service: “The church is the last force resisting the Antichrist, let us assemble regardless of what anyone says.” Another Louisiana pastor, Ronnie Hampton, decried the order “because Caesar is mandating how we conduct ourselves using the pretext of this virus to be able to conduct our lives and run our lives for us.”
American apocalypticists tend to be suspicious of government, of course. This is partly due to their conservative bent, but this suspicion is nearly mandated by a literalist reading of the Book of Revelation. John the Revelator’s arch-villains are political powers that institute totalitarian social controls while persecuting the righteous who refuse to profess their allegiance. The second beast of Revelation 13, commonly known as the Anti-Christ, will, according to many Christians, come to power in the chaos of the apocalypse. John described him as a miracle worker who will deceive the nations to worship the image of an earlier beast, a dragon with seven heads and ten horns that is sometimes identified as Satan himself.
