The class, presented through the Pastoral Ministry Formation Program on four Saturdays in January and February, is open to the public.

"I think it will be great fun – one of the most exciting and challenging classes I’ve ever taught," Father Hildebrandt said. "The nature of the material is just so marvelous, but it will be challenging because we’re going to cover the entire book in just four Saturday mornings."

The Book of Revelation was written by the evangelist St. John in the latter part of the first century. At the time, he was imprisoned in a Roman penal colony on the Island of Patmos amid intense persecution of Christians.

Prior to his arrest, John had been made bishop of Ephesus, a city in Turkey to which he had brought Jesus’ mother Mary to escape persecution.

"He built a house for her and was asked to serve as the bishop," Father Hildebrandt said. "Eventually, when he was arrested and imprisoned, he could not get to his Church to celebrate Mass. Because he could not celebrate the Liturgy on earth, the Lord lifted him up in a vision to partake in the Liturgy of Heaven. And that experience forms the structure of the Book of Revelation.

"The book is essentially a pastoral letter from a bishop," Father Hildebrandt explained.

In order to understand the book, people need to have a knowledge of the Catholic faith, and especially Catholic liturgy, he said.

"The Book of Revelation begins with a greeting — a penitential rite — then a large section on the reading of a scroll, which is the Liturgy of the Word. In John’s day, the Scriptures were written on scrolls. The entire next section is the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, which in the early Church was one of the names for the Eucharist.

"In addition to Liturgy, the book also draws heavily on the Old Testament, on the Jewish peoples’ understanding of their relationship with God, and on the events that were happening when the book was written," Father Hildebrandt said. "We will be looking at all those things.

"Of all the people on the face of earth, those who should most easily understand the meaning of the Book of Revelation are the Catholics. But we don’t read it," Father Hildebrandt added. "We hear about it from the fundamentalist Protestants. The Protestants want desperately to understand it, but they are so cut off from the Catholic and Jewish Traditions that they do not recognize what they are reading. So they end up having very strange interpretations of it, and most Catholics don’t know enough to correct them because we haven’t read it. Yet the whole thing is a profoundly Catholic book."

He explained that the "Left Behind" movie and book series are "totally erroneous in their approach. I’ve read the entire ‘Left Behind’ series and will refer to them briefly in the last class," Father Hildebrandt said.

According to Cecil Maranville of Good News Magazine, the "Left Behind" novels "revolve around the story line that non-Christians are ‘left behind’ when Christ secretly and suddenly removes true believers from earth. Christians who are driving cars, piloting planes and going about their everyday activities abruptly disappear — and those ‘left behind’ are baffled by their mysterious disappearance. Political and sexual intrigue is spliced into the religious theme of the books in the name of spreading the message to as wide an audience as possible."

"I want to let people know what the Book of Revelation is actually about," Father Hildebrandt explained. "We can let them know that they’re reading something Catholic. There are tons of references to angels, to the Church, to sacraments, especially Baptism and Eucharist, to the communion of saints, and to Mary. It’s replete with images that come out of the very heart of our faith. And I’m going to use this class to direct peoples’ attention to that."

The class will be taught Saturdays from 8:30 a.m.-noon, Jan. 24 (meets 10:30 a.m.-noon the first day), 31, Feb. 14 and 28 at ITV sites throughout the diocese. Cost is $41 if taken for college credit through Newman University, or $20.50 if taken just for fun. For more information, call Coleen Stein at (620) 225-2156.