@Sunstone for Catholics and Orthodox Christians, the idea of Jesus returning to earth to live out another human life with a ministry and reign as some kind of temporal king (as Protestant millenialists and Muslims believe) is heresy.
The Gospel of John, after all, has Jesus say that "
My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest" (
John 18:36). We are, however, also told "
neither shall people say, Lo! here, or lo! there; for lo! the Kingdom of God is within you." (
Luke 17:21)
St. Louis de Montfort insisted that the kingdom of Jesus - when His will shall be done on earth as in heaven - will one day before the End of Time be manifested more perfectly "
in the hearts" (
TD 113) or "
in our soul" (
TD 68) of human beings, in such a manner that Jesus will reign when, by the intervention of Mary, he is known, loved, and served by all people (
TD 49).
Montfort's entire spirituality - which has been approved as doctrinally sound by the Church - has as its goal the establishment of the kingdom of Christ on earth in this way:
"‘When will that happy day come . . . when God’s Mother is enthroned in men’s hearts as Queen, subjecting them to the dominion of her great and princely Son?’" (TD 217).
He states that this shall be accomplished through the "apostles of the end times," two mighty saints:
"Toward the End of Time, God will raise up great men full of the Holy Spirit and imbued with the spirit of Mary, through whom this powerful Sovereign will work great wonders in the world, so as to destroy sin and to establish the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, her Son, upon the ruins of the kingdom of this corrupt world...
Almighty God and his holy Mother are to raise up great saints who will surpass in holiness most saints… Such are the great men who are to come. By the will of God, Mary is to prepare them to extend his rule...
It was through the blessed Virgin Mary that Jesus Christ came into the world, and it is also through her that he must reign in the world...
Wherever they preach, they will leave behind them nothing but the gold of love, which is the fulfillment of the whole law...
Such are the great men who are to come. But when and how will this come about? Only God knows. For our part we must yearn and wait for it in silence and in prayer: "I have waited and waited"...”
(Secret of Mary, 59 This End of Time is no other than the Second Coming of Christ. (SM 58) and True Devotion 58)
This relates to the concept of the "
Social Reign of Christ" propagated by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 Encyclical, Quas Primas, which established the feast of Christ the King, where he stated:
http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi...as-primas.html
"Thus the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men...
When once men recognize, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony...The result will be a stable peace and tranquility, for there will be no longer any cause of discontent...
Peace and harmony, too, will result; for with the spread and the universal extent of the kingdom of Christ men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished.
If the kingdom of Christ, then, receives, as it should, all nations under its way, there seems no reason why we should despair of seeing that peace which the King of Peace came to bring on earth...
Oh, what happiness would be Ours if all men, individuals, families, and nations, would but let themselves be governed by Christ!
“Then at length,” to use the words addressed by our predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, twenty-five years ago to the bishops of the Universal Church, “then at length will many evils be cured; then will the law regain its former authority; peace with all its blessings be restored. Men will sheathe their swords and lay down their arms when all freely acknowledge and obey the authority of Christ, and every tongue confesses that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”
As you can see, Pius XI believed that the "
Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ" really would be established in men's hearts and souls throughout the entire world by the intercession of His Most Blessed Mother and that this would lead to, as Pope Pius notes: "
that peace which the King of Peace came to bring on earth...for with the spread and the universal extent of the kingdom of Christ men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished."
In our understanding Christ will not return in person to earth, rather the Kingdom of God, the
New Jerusalem, will be established through the the formation of the new universe - or new "
heaven and earth".
But prior to the dissolution of the world and the Antichrist, we may experience a social reign of Christ within the hearts of all humanity, whereby wars will be either significantly reduced or vanish and the entire world will discover unity for a time, before it ends.
So this doesn't mean that we reject out-of-hand the idea of temporal peace on earth that millenial Protestantism, Judaism, Islam and the Baha'i Faith believe that the Messiah will or has already inaugurated.
We just reject the idea that Christ will personally implement and reign over this when he comes. Any such epoch must precede both the Second Coming and the final persecution.
In the 13th century, St. Bonaventure theorized that there was "
progression" in our understanding of the deposit of faith which would at some stage lead the Church to become an "
ecclesia contemplativa", in which the mystical union St. Francis of Assisi had with Christ would become the general state of many or even most believers.
St. Bonaventure explains this in his, 'Analogies On The Six Days'. Here St. Bonaventure argues that each of the days of creation in Genesis prefigures one of the so-called seven ages of the Old Covenant and each of these ages in turn prefigures one of the seven ages of the New Covenant.
He divides history before and after Christ into seven ages first of Israel and then of New Israel, the Church. Christ, he argues, is the Tree of Life at the centre of this concordance between the Two Testaments. In this way, he rejects Joachim of Fiore's divisions into aged of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It's one God acting in one sacred narrative of history.
For example, the Old Covenant ages include the fifth age, ‘the age of kingly glory’ and the sixth age ‘the age of the prophetic voice’. The title of the New Covenant age corresponding to the latter is the age of clara doctrina – clear doctrine. It started with Charlemagne.
In Bonaventure’s schema what follows next is the seventh ‘age of quiet’, prefigured by the ‘age of half-way rest’ in the Old Testament, when the Jews were delivered from Captivity in Babylon by Cyrus the Great and led back to Israel by Joshua, the High Priest and Prince Zerubbabel, who together rebuilt the Temple, restored divine worship and enabled the Israelites to dwell in their own land again in period from Ezra until the birth of Christ, not long prior to which they were conquered by the Romans.
For St. Bonaventure - and Pope Benedict XVI, then father Ratzinger, explains this in a 1959 thesis he penned on the subject - St. Francis had already entered into "
seventh age of peace," through his mystical union with Christ.
In the thesis, Ratzinger wrote:
"...The theology of history of Saint Bonaventure culminates in the hope of an age, within history, of Sabbatical calm donated by God...It is not that peace in the eternity of God which will never end and which will follow the dissolution of the world. It is a peace which God Himself will establish in this world which has seen so much blood and tears...
Revelatio refers not to the letter of Scripture, but to the understanding of the letter. And this understanding can be increased. If we were to suppose the possibility of a period of time in which the power of genuine mystical elevation were granted to all human beings, then - in this perspective - we could refer to such a time as a time of revelation in quite a new sense...
When this age arrives, it will be a time of contemplation, a time of full understanding of the scripture and, in this respect, a time of the Holy spirit who leads us into the fulness of the truth of Jesus Christ..."
St. Bonaventure differentiates this "period of peace" from the millennial heresy of Joachim of Fiore, which posited a "definitive intra-historical fulfilment, an inner, intrinsic perfectibility of history".
St. Bonaventure argues in his
Collations on the Hexaemeron (1273):
"...The seventh time or age, that of quiet, begins with the shout of the angel (Rev. 10:&-7)...It is necessary that One Ruler, a defender of the Church, arise...No one knows how long that time of great peace will last since ''when they said 'Peace and security,' then suddenly destruction came upon them" (1 Thessalonians 5:1-3)..."
The peace is not intended to serve as an end in itself: as if we could hope to find perfect happiness other than in the Beatific Vision in the afterlife. Rather, it is a means towards the real end:
the Second Pentecost, the preaching of the gospel to the ends of the earth, the full incoming of the gentiles prior to the conversion of the Jewish people.