Roman Catholic Antichrist?

Yes, The Feasts of Israel picks on the Roman Catholic hierarchy, a lot, and lists numerous reasons why it fulfills all the Scriptural characteristics of the antichrist. But is that fair? After all, there have been good popes and bad popes, just like there are good people and bad people in every church denomination. And just look at all the good the Catholic church has done and all the godly Catholics who have given their lives in faithful service of God!

I contend that it is always fair to tell the truth, even when it hurts. How can we get the church back on track if we never learn the truth about why and when it got off track? Many of the problems in virtually every church denomination today actually originated from the Roman Catholic church of the Dark Ages. As I said in my essay on Completing the Reformation, the reason the Dark Ages were so dark is the church fell away from the simple truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and tried to control the world through the fear of eternal damnation and a promise of eternal bliss depending on whether or not you agreed with the current dogma of the Pope.

One problem here, and this is a point many miss, is that the Catholic church was pretty much all there was at the time – the only game in town, you might say. The Christian faith had spread over much of the known world within the first three or four centuries after Christ, but it was all one church. The early church fathers worked hard to keep heresies (such as gnosticism and montanism) out of the church. It was called “Catholic” because it really was universal. So when things went sour, it affected the entire church. We all still suffer the consequences.

Oh there were dissenters. Donatists, Waldenses, Albigenses, and others, all the way through the fifteenth century with John Wyclif and the Lollards, and John Huss and the Taborites. Many of the dissenters merely challenged the excesses of Catholic leaders who had become greedy and proud. They didn’t want to harm or divide the church; they wanted to reform it, to reduce the corruption and bring it back to the simplicity and purity of the gospel. (Some of these dissenters, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans, tried to reform the church with vows of poverty and piety, and later became an accepted part of the Catholic church.)

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