A small group of American Catholics believe we are living in the ‘End Times’, a final epoch of mounting sin and grace preceding the Second Coming. Deeming themselves a persecuted minority embracing largely rejected, but nonetheless orthodox beliefs, these Catholics often call themselves a name they share with their evangelical cousins: the ‘Faithful Remnant’. Members of the Catholic Remnant have special devotion to the Virgin Mary and sometimes also refer to themselves or an associated group, person, or ritual as ‘Marian’. Many members of the Remnant believe that the Madonna, along with her son, Jesus, is increasingly intervening in the world today, appearing to various mystics with messages alternating between love, hope, repentance, and looming apocalypse. By apocalypse, I am referring to a future period of climatic, social, political, and economic chaos that the Remnant believes will visit the world in punishment for sin.

The narratives these Catholics tell about the End implicate sex and reproduction, the defining cultural markers of women's bodies under patriarchy, at the very heart of salvation and damnation. Only by binding woman and her sexual/reproductive flows can the spiritual and physical worlds be made safe and bountiful. Through a reading of the rhetoric of fluids in contemporary Catholic apocalyptic texts, this article will show how the body of woman, reduced to sexual and reproductive fluid, is not only a political, moral, and social battleground, but also an eschatological one.