Is there an official Catholic teaching on the Olivet Discourse?
A viewer asks Robert to point them to the Catholic teaching on the Olivet Discourse.
Answer
There is no official Catholic teaching on the Olivet Discourse, so if you want the Church's definitive teaching on it, you are not going to find one. What you will find is the Fathers, the medievals, and modern theologians all commenting on Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke, but you will not find a single monolithic, dogmatic study of the Olivet Discourse in Catholicism. As I said last week, only about a dozen verses in the whole Bible has the Catholic Church dogmatized, that is, made the official, infallible interpretation of the Church, and the rest of the Bible is open. You may have had many saints who believed one thing about the Olivet Discourse and a few who did not, and the same with the medievals, but they are not many. This takes study: you have to go in and find it out, read the Catholic commentaries, and work through it. I have an interpretation of the Olivet Discourse that I like, which I have studied for about forty years and finally put into my commentary, and there I also reference everyone else who addresses it. In my commentary on the Gospel of John I also lay out the four branches of christological thinking of that day that the councils addressed, so that is a good place to start.