“Apocalypse Now”: The Pope Rewrites the Script

In his latest Wednesday catechesis, Benedict XVI has deciphered for the faithful the enigma of the book of Revelation. It is not the Dragon that triumphs, but the Lamb: “Do not be afraid of the silence of God”.
by Sandro Magister
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...[Pope] Benedict XVI has worked the miracle of synthesizing and clarifying in a simple way the meaning of the Apocalypse, in an address of only 1200 words.

The aim of the book, he said, “is to unveil, from the death and resurrection of Christ, the meaning of human history.”
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Here follows the complete catechesis Benedict XVI dedicated to the Apocalypse. The text is the one written beforehand, without the improvised comments that the pope added here and there, in the colloquial style he typically uses when addressing the faithful:

John, the Seer of Patmos
by Benedict XVI, August 23, 2006

Dear brothers and sisters, in the last catechesis we meditated on the figure of the apostle John. At first we tried to see how much can be known of his life. Then, in a second catechesis, we meditated on the central content of his Gospel, of his Letters: charity, love. And today we are again concerned with the figure of John, this time to consider the seer of Revelation.

We must immediately make an observation: Whereas his name never appears in the fourth Gospel or the letters attributed to the apostle, [the Book of] Revelation makes reference to John's name four times (cf. 1:1,4,9; 22:8). On one hand, it is evident that the author had no reason to silence his name and, on the other, he knew that his first readers could identify him with precision. We know moreover that, already in the third century, the scholars argued over the true identity of the John of Revelation.

Continued here...