Here’s a Saturday night special —

In recent months, we’ve written about an unusually popular Catholic apocalyptic movement based in a modified version of  millenarian beliefs (the idea that there will soon be a literal 1,000-year period of peace, when Christ will reign “spiritually” on earth), and we have highlighted two key figures in this movement: Christine Watkins, the Sacramento-based author of the bestselling book, The Warning: Testimonies and Prophecies the Illumination of Conscience, and Fr. Michel Rodrigue, a French Canadian priest whose “prophecies” are central to the beliefs of the adherents of this movement.

Despite Fr. Rodrigue being publicly disavowed by the two bishops who have authority over him, and despite being forced into retirement from public ministry, many of his promoters have continued to insist that his alleged private revelations are still valid.

Yesterday a reader let me know that the well-known Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli recently explored The Warning and Fr. Rodrigue on the podcast, “Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World.” Akin does a good job of charitably and systematically working his way through each of the issues and problems raised by both the book and Fr. Rodrigue’s claims.

What he does particularly well is analyse the claims made by Watkins and Rodrigue in light of Canon Law, Church teaching, and the guidelines on private revelation provided by the CDF. Also, in the episode on Fr. Rodrigue, he enlisted help from his listeners to review Fr. Rodrigue’s videos, and in that way he was able to compile a wide variety of audio clips that he used to help illustrate some of his more problematic statements.

Here is the episode about The Warning:

This is the episode about Fr. Rodrigue:

Just one key omission I’ll note: In the first episode, Jimmy seemed to be laying the groundwork to explain how The Warning‘s imprimatur appears to have been obtained illicitly, but unless I missed it, he doesn’t actually get around to talking about it. Kevin Symonds explains that issue in this blog post.

You can subscribe to this fascinating podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and they are also posted on YouTube. The podcast’s homepage gives instructions on how to subscribe to a podcast if you haven’t done it before. (And while you’re at it, why don’t you subscribe to Peter’s Field Hospital, too?)

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Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.