What Is the Great Apostasy?

Home › Questions › The Great Apostasy

What the Church teaches

The Catechism teaches: “Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.” It describes that trial as “a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth,” culminating in the deception of the Antichrist (CCC 675). The heart of apostasy is an exchange: the truth of God traded for a solution that seems easier, such as a paradise built within history without God (CCC 676). The Church will pass through this trial “when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection” (CCC 677).

Newman and Benedict XVI

St. John Henry Newman, gathering the teaching of the Fathers, put the link between apostasy and the Antichrist in one sentence: “The Man of Sin is born of an Apostasy, or at least comes into power through an apostasy.” Looking at his own century he saw “a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world,” yet whether it would bring forth the Antichrist, he said, “we cannot know.” His counsel was watchfulness, not alarm: “every generation of Christians should be on the watch-tower, looking out” (Newman on the Antichrist).

Pope Benedict XVI described the modern form of the temptation: “Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man” (Spe Salvi 30). Announcing the Year of Faith, he spoke of “a profound crisis of faith that has affected many people” (Porta Fidei 2). He answered it not with predictions but with a call to rediscover the faith (Benedict XVI on hope).

Did the Church fall away long ago?

Some Christians use “the Great Apostasy” in a different sense: not a falling away still to come, but one that already happened to the Church itself. Some Protestant writers have held that the early Church fell into corruption, often dating the decline to the age of Constantine in the fourth century, and that the pure gospel survived only in small groups until it was recovered at the Reformation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches a fuller form of the idea: that after the deaths of the apostles the gospel was corrupted and “the Lord withdrew the authority of the priesthood from the earth,” until it was restored through Joseph Smith beginning in 1820 (Gospel Topics: Apostasy). Those who hold these views are seeking the faith of the apostles, and that desire deserves respect. Many Protestants reject the idea; the Augsburg Confession, for example, teaches “that one holy Church is to continue forever” (Article VII, trans. Bente and Dau).

The Catholic answer begins with Christ's promises. “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). The Catechism draws the conclusion: the Church “is built on a lasting foundation,” “She is indestructible,” and “She is upheld infallibly in the truth” (CCC 869). Scripture foretells that many will fall away, not that the Church will vanish. And history bears witness to continuity: St. Irenaeus, writing around 180, learned the faith from St. Polycarp, who had known the apostle John, and the faith he describes, the Eucharist, the bishops in succession from the apostles, the resurrection of the body, is the faith the Catholic Church still professes (St. Irenaeus).

The Church does not claim that her members have always been faithful. She confesses that the Church, “clasping sinners to her bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification, follows constantly the path of penance and renewal” (CCC 827). Sin in the Church is real; the apostasy of the Church is what Christ promised would never happen.

How to live it

The warning is meant to make us watchful over ourselves, not suspicious of others. The great falling away is prepared by many small ones, and the remedies are the ordinary means the Church has always offered:

• Faithfulness. “But you, remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it” (2 Timothy 3:14). Hold to the faith handed on in Scripture and Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
• Prayer. Jesus asked whether he would find faith on earth at the end of a parable about “the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary” (Luke 18:1).
• The sacraments. Confession heals the small departures before they become large ones, and the Eucharist keeps us joined to the Lord who is coming.
• Charity. Jesus named the sign of apostasy as love growing cold (Matthew 24:12). The answer is love kept warm, toward God and toward our neighbor.

“But the one who perseveres to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13). For the deceiver whom the apostasy prepares, see Who Is the Antichrist?; for the Church's passage through the final trial, see Is There a Rapture?

Read more on this site