By Tequila Mockingbird
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/28/25 – I remember sitting in the wooden desks of Catholic school at Blessed Sacrament, the air thick with chalk dust and incense. The nuns, those black-and-white clad messengers of fear and faith, would lean in close and ask us questions that no child should ever be asked:
“Do you want to see the end of the world?”
They weren’t speaking in riddles. They believed—no, they knew—that we would live to see it. They rooted their warnings in the visions of Bernadette and the stories that came out of Fatima, tales that spun miracles into prophecies and prophecies into inevitabilities.
The way they described it still haunts me: streets lined with empty buildings, hollow shells of what once was. Cities without people, life drained away but the structures left standing like teeth in a skull.
The nuns said the end would come when the “lowest common denominator” rose to power. Not kings, not saints, not artists or scholars, but the very bottom rung of human character—the weakest, the greediest, the cruelest—handed the keys to the world. That, they said, would be the final signal.
And in their quiet certainty, they made us believe. We sat there, children in plaid skirts and pressed shirts, trying to imagine what it meant to walk down empty streets, to pass rows of hollow windows staring back at us.
They were not telling ghost stories. They were giving us what they thought was truth, passed down from visions, woven into the Catholic imagination, sealed into our bones.
To this day, I can’t walk down a deserted street without hearing their voices, without wondering if this is what they meant, if the prophecy has already started.
Maybe the end of the world doesn’t come with fire or trumpets. Maybe it comes quietly, with silence where laughter once was, with power resting in the hands of those least equipped to carry it. Maybe the nuns were right all along.
