PARKVILLE, Australia (Catholic Online) – Catholic
mothers should not be concerned about giving birth to a child on
June 6, 2006, as the superstition surrounding the date and its
connection to the coming of the Antichrist lack biblical foundation,
said an official of the Australian bishops conference.
Jesuit Father Richard Leonard, director of the Film Office of the
Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, in a statement entitled
“Catholic Film Office takes on ‘The Omen’ superstition,” reacted to
the release of the remake of the 1976 movie on the date “6-6-06,”
and its relation to the New Testament Book of Revelation’s reference
to the symbol of evil being 6-6-6. The statement appeared on the
CathNews Web site (www.cathnews.com).
“It is being claimed that some Australian mothers do not want to
deliver their babies, especially their sons, on the 6/6/06,” the
priest said. “Given the superstitions of some birthing parents in
Australia, it seems we have to take this film more seriously than it
deserves.”
According to the Book of Revelation (13:18), the reader is
invited to “calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number
that stands for a person. His number is 666.” The Catholic Church
discovered, after careful analysis in the 16th century, that the
Christian calendar, currently in use, was four years off, he said.
He added that, as the church left the error in place, the actual
June 6, 2006, took place in four years ago.
“Parents can take heart from the fact that the 6th June is not
6/6/06 at all,” he said. “We assume that Satan knows that the sixth
day of the sixth month in ‘06 was in fact the 6th June 2002.”
The Jesuit priest suggested that Catholics should “pay no heed to
the so-called ‘devil’s number,’” as current biblical scholarship
concludes that references to “’the beast’ are not to personified
evil in Satan, but to the Roman Empire as the brutal occupying force
in the Near East.”
He added that the more time progressed away from that era “the
more ‘the beast’ was taken to be another, malevolent force in the
world, the devil incarnate.”
He recommended that parents, especially those “blessed enough to
have a son” on that day, consider “to baptize him Damian after the
early 3rd-century Christian martyr or after St. Peter Damian of
Ravenna or Blessed Damien of Molokai.”
“Superstition be dammed,” he said.
“I take evil far too seriously to think ‘The Omen’ is telling me
anything realistic or important,” he said.
He added that Catholics should consider to reflect “on the 32,000
people who, on average, die every day of starvation,” and how those
in the developed world “could feed them if we chose to, but we are
generally too busy eating ourselves to death.”
“That,” he said, “is personified evil.”
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