What History would Always be in a Fallen World, Part III: the Way of the Saint for the Peoples of God
"It is the last hour," says St. John in his first Catholic Epistle, but, if some Fathers could break up the Old Testament into five sub-phases, why not break up the New? For even though the New age is the final dispensation, the Church has passed through various phases in her history.
Pagan Rome is not the same as the great age of Trinitarian and Christological heresies (Arianism, Monophysitism, Monothelyte heresy Nestorianism, Islam), which is not the same as the great schism, which attacks not God's nature but mainly Peter, the Supreme Apostolic Successor, which is not the same as the great heretical rebellion, which attacked not only Peter, but ALL Apostolic Succession and Tradition, which is not the same as the great supernatural death of so-called Enlightenment and general age of Solo-Ratio, in which all supernatural intervention and light was rejected in favor of mere natural light of reason, which is not the same as our modern age, which is utter darkness, which recognizes not even natural light, not even reason: atheism, relativism, the rejection of natural law in all facets of the Decalogue.
All these, in turn, are not the same as the probable glorious renewal coming, when Our Lady will vanquish all these heresies and darknesses by the power of chastisement, and bring in an age of peace, which in turn, will contrast so drastically from the great apostasy, in which the godlessness of our current age will not merely be local to former Christendom, but to all of humanity, excepting the Jews, whose eyes shall then be finally opened in full to the light they only partially saw!
Clearly, the Magisterium will eventually acquire a completely rigorous and academic and mystical understanding of the whole divine plan, knowing of all historical developments of Old and New, those phases that absolutely must be historical in some sense, that are not arbitrary or random outgrowths of the human drama, and without which, if they be removed from that same history, would put such a hole in the Divine drama, that the greatest possible good could not be attained in human history, its Redemption, which is the ultimate will of God.
When that is had, history being rigorously and systematically worked out, surely it will be able to be correlated to apocalypse, to give the fullest understanding of the most mysterious book of Scripture. For then, the correlation of the history will no longer be arbitrary or subjective, or lacking in systematic nature.
Is this time out of reach at present? Well since most fully approved Private Revelations spoken of above fill in the big picture of what remains for Church History, hmmm, maybe not.....