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Chapter one An Important Issue

When one raises questions about the lives of some of the wicked popes of Rome, the response usually comes back that it is true there were some wicked popes but that was back in early times and in the Middle Ages, in modern times the papacy cleaned up its act. Modern popes, it is claimed, have not been monsters of iniquity as their predecessors were.

This, of course, is small comfort to the truth seeker. For then such a response ADMITS that for more than a thousand years the popes of Rome for the most part were very evil men. Meaning that many men, who CLAIMED to be the Vicar of Christ on earth, the Lord of the Earth, Supreme Ruler of Mankind, were engaged in the worst of crimes against humanity, while at the same time making such preposterous and blasphemous claims.

So how could such an office have any thing to do with Christ when such monsters obviously occupied it many times down through church history? If the office was truly from God and was truly occupied by the very representative of Christ on earth then it admits of NO EXCEPTIONS. Such men are either the Vicar of Christ or they are not. It is obvious that they are NOT!

Again, people say, why bother with such things? Why dredge up the past? Let sleeping dogs lie. The answer is that modern evangelical spokesmen have brought the issue to the fore by praising the popes of Rome, as not only Christian, but as the greatest spiritual leaders in the world today. When evangelical and self-professed fundamental leaders praise the popes of Rome they put the camps they represent on notice: either they are going to accept what the spokesmen say or reject what they say. So far we have seen very little rejection of these statements.

So if this study accomplishes no more than to separate me from such spokesmen it will be well worth the labor expended. I do not want to be identified with anyone who praises the Roman Antichrist and calls him a great spiritual leader of men in the world today!

It is true that few seem to care about truth today. The debacle of the impeachment of the President of the United States underscores this attitude toward the truth only too well. The majority of Americans, it is claimed by those who keep statistics, are more interested in the economy than in truth.

Nevertheless the truth must be presented whether the majority are interested in it or not. The truth of Christ must be presented in the face of Antichrist. God’s servants are not guaranteed to get much of a hearing in this world. Still the voice must cry in the wilderness of carnal security, and material prosperity, and antichristianity,

In the Scriptures the voice asks the question: “What shall I cry? And the answer was: “All flesh is as grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withers; the flower fades; because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it: surely the PEOPLE IS GRASS. The grass withers, the flower fades: BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD SHALL STAND FOREVER!

The Word of the Lord states CATEGORICALLY: “But this MAN after He had offered ONE SACRIFICE for sins FOREVER, SAT DOWN on the right hand of God (Heb. 10:12). Christ put an end to all masses and to the Roman priesthood. As Dr. Ian Paisley put it so well: “God has sacked every priest that Rome ever ordained.”1

So whether anyone listens or not the voice still must cry out in the wilderness of this world. The Word of the Lord shall stand and the refuge of lies shall be swept away whether people are interested in the truth or not. God always has a remnant that are interested in the truth, and God ALWAYS has the LAST word whether men pay any attention or not.

For centuries after the Reformation there was a definite Protestant heritage that understood the evils of the papacy. That heritage slowly but surely has been eroded away by a weak and compromising spirit. But even apart from the weakness there has been a definite attempt by the papacy to DESTROY the Reformation heritage.

This effort has been going on for centuries and it is still going strong as of this writing. The effort has as its focal point the issue of the identity of Antichrist.

At the Council of Trent the Roman Catholic Church sought to rid the papacy of the stigma of Antichrist. All the Dissenters of pre-Reformation history, and all the Reformers without exception identified the papacy with Antichrist. So Rome, since the days of Joachim of Flores around AD 1190, has been working to remove the stigma of Antichrist from the papacy.

The Jesuits spearheaded the attack on Reformation Protestantism. One of the first things the Jesuits did was to put forth two new ideas of Antichrist. Francisco Ribera, a Jesuit priest put forth his idea of an evil man who would appear at the very end times and be the antichrist. Alcasar, a Spanish Jesuit put forth the Preterist idea of Antichrist, teaching that Antichrist rose and fell in the first century before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The amazing thing about these two views is that they are now the views of almost every PROTESTANT in the world today! The two Jesuit-originated ideas of the Antichrist are taught by almost every Bible-believing Protestant in the world today.

(I have had people say to me that the Jesuits now have very little impact upon Protestantism. This may be true, but if it is, the reason is easily seen: Protestants now promote the Jesuit’s ideas for them, so the Jesuits do not need to be active in Protestant circles today except as ecumenical spokesmen.)

On one side the Reconstructionists all promote the Jesuit Alcasar’s idea of an Antichrist limited only to the first century of the church. On the other side the rest of Protestantism, with the exception of a very small minority, promote the Jesuit Ribera’s view of antichrist limited only to the very end of the age. The Reformers’ view that Antichrist was past, present, and future, and tied into the papacy, has been almost completely discarded.

For two hundred years after the Reformation the Reformers’ view of Antichrist held its own. Then various spokesmen within the confines of Protestant Anglicanism began to call for unity with Rome. The Tractarians launched an all out effort to return Anglicanism to the fold of Rome, and in so doing REJECTED the Reformers’ view that Rome was Antichrist. In other words, the first move toward modern ecumenism had to deal with the issue of Antichrist. Certainly, no one in his right mind is going to call for unity with Antichrist. So one of the very first tasks of the ecumenists was to lift the stigma of Antichrist from Rome.

Since that time the move has gained great momentum. Now it is not only Anglicans who are praising the papacy as Christian, but Baptists, Presbyterians, and other self-professed Bible- believing Christians who are joining the chorus. So that at this very hour the papacy is not only being hailed as Christian, but the pope is called one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the world!

The speed up of the news media has also contributed to the growth in popularity of the papacy. At the turn of this century the pope was only a little-known Italian prelate out side of Italy and Ireland.

In just a few short years the pope of Rome has gone from being a virtual nobody in the modern world to the best known man in the world and the man who is now looked upon as and the leader of leaders. Ethelbert Bullinger, who believed that Mystery Babylon referred to a rebuilt Babylon in the Middle East, said,

It is not my wish in any degree to minimize the awful abominations of Romanism. We see in it one of the most filthy of all streams that have flowed from Babylon; but we do try to rise above a “Local Board” when we are dealing with God’s account of how He is going to close His great controversy with Jew and Gentile.2

So when Bullinger wrote about 100 years ago he felt that the Papacy was little more than the local board as far as the end- times were concerned. It is true that the Pope was considered an anachronism back then in Britain and America. But times have obviously changed dramatically and the Pope has gone from an unknown chairman of the board to the most visible man in the world.

Bullinger never lived to see the Treaty of Rome signed. He never lived to see a common currency come into vogue in Europe. He never lived to see the United States (which in his day was the most powerful Protestant nation on earth) become a total lackey of the Vatican. He never lived to see the advent of television which now enables the blasphemy of the mass to be beamed into two billion homes at the same time. He never lived to see the pope of Rome become the best known man in the world.

The popes of Rome keeping claiming the world as their domain, they keep pushing themselves into the limelight, seeking to become the cynosure of all peoples. So they need to be closely examined as to their self-professed credentials.

When one looks at the lives of some of these men who claimed, and still claim, to be the Vicar of Christ on earth, he sees a ghastly array of egregious evils both moral and spiritual, which cannot be matched by any other group of men, or by any other organization, in the annals of history. Other men and organizations have committed great evils, but never on such a wide scale and never for such a long time.

The evils are compounded by the fact that the popes of Rome not only claimed to be “Christian” but to be the leader of all Christians in the world, and the personal representative of Christ on earth. When the lives and teachings of the popes are examined it will be seen by any impartial observer, that some of the most wicked men who have ever lived on this planet were popes of Rome. Their lives and teachings mark them out as the representatives of evil rather than the representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The popes surpassed Nero and Caligula in crimes and sins. Because of their positions and their claims, they were far more evil than the most evil of the Roman Emperors. The very ideas of morality and honesty were vitiated by the monsters who sat in the papal chair. Even Bellarmine the great defender of Romanism wrote about the time preceding the Protestant Reformation:

there was no strictness in spiritual courts, no chastity in manners, no reverence in presence of what was sacred, no scholarship, in short almost no religion.3

And yet all these men up to this time of Bellarmine’s writing for the past fifteen hundred years CLAIMED TO BE THE REPRESENTATIVE OF CHRIST ON EARTH! During all these centuries impunity was sold to the living for a price; and deliverance even from death and purgatory could be obtained for the right amount of money.

Farrar wrote,

A priesthood calling itself the Church –a priesthood whose vices were the complaint of the theologian and the motive of the novelist, the despair of the good and the execration of the multitude –claimed absolute authority over men’s bodies and souls. . . made it easier for the rich than for the poor to escape damnation and gave even to the grace of God the aspect of capricious concession to the purchased intercessions of the Virgin Mary.4

Farrar elaborated:

The name of faith was prostituted by being bestowed on the abject acceptance of unproved postulates; the name of morals was conferred upon blind obedience to human traditions; the name of grace was confined to the mechanical operation of perverted sacraments; the name of truth to a mass of infallible falsehoods; the name of orthodoxy to the passive repetition of traditional ignorance. The results were frightful. There was mental coercion and moral disorder.5

Farrar then asked the following series of questions?

How could Rome be respected when the world saw such pontiffs as Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Clement VII.? How could the world tolerate on the lips of simonists, nepotists, adulterers, and worse, the claim to absolute dominion over religion, the claim to be the sole interpreters of Scripture, and the immediate recipients of the power and authority of Christ? 6

Dean Fredric W. Farrar was certainly no ranting fanatic. He held the high and honored position of Dean of Canterbury, and Chaplain to Queen Victoria, and also chaplain of the House of Commons. Yet even this highly respected and mild mannered Anglican scholar, at the turn of this century, blasted in no uncertain terms the wickedness of the popes of Rome. This is why it is nothing short of incredible, that evangelicals and self- professed fundamentalists, in such a short time should now be praising the very men that Farrar so rightly condemned.

The difference is that Farrar studied and knew church history, while the men of today who are called great prophetical scholars seem to be almost totally ignorant of church history. An ignorance of church history is almost universal today. Yet prophecy cannot be understood apart from history. Perhaps the church could use some historical speakers today to help counteract the ignorant prophetical speakers which are everywhere in this generation.

Men speak of a future-only Antichrist while ignoring totally the historical Antichrist. In so doing they have invented the best of all possible opponents. In fact, it would be impossible to invent a nicer opponent. For the future-only Antichrist has NEVER affected anyone in ALL of church history, He is NOT NOW affecting anyone, and he NEVER WILL affect any Christian, because all Christians will be gone before he can even appear! When he does appear he will attack only Jews. And even at that he will only do so for three and a half years!

So a nicer opponent would indeed be difficult to invent. According to this Jesuit idea the future-only Antichrist may be a hideous monster capable of every evil imaginable and with the power to carry it out, but he NEVER EVER does anything to any Christian.

The Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards ALL thought they were being persecuted and destroyed by the Antichrist. The Protestant Reformers all thought likewise.

It has taken several hundred years to remove the stigma of Antichrist from the Papacy that was laid upon her by all the Dissenters of church history before the Reformation, and by all the Reformers and those who followed them for two centuries after the Reformation. The Jesuit’s two views of Antichrist now rule practically all Bible-believers’ eschatology. A remarkable triumph of Jesuit casuistry!

While multitudes of Christians now follow the Jesuits, the work of Antichrist proceeds on every side. The neutralized wonder boys of modern Protestantism ignore the inroads of Romanism while warning about a future monster who harms nobody NOW. They totally ignore the work of the present Antichrist while warning everyone about a future Antichrist who will never affect one Christian if their eschatology is correct. It is a remarkable achievement of the Jesuits. No wonder modern “Christianity” is in such a pathetic state as the church approaches the end of the second millennium.

When ungodly men claim to be the Lord of the Earth, the Supreme Ruler of mankind, the Vicar of Christ, such claims mark them out as vicious sinners and blasphemers above the rank of ordinary cutthroats and apostates who never made such ungodly and blasphemous claims.

The following popes made the most blasphemous claims concerning their own persons while living lives that would have embarrassed ordinary sinners. They cannot be dismissed as if they never existed. THESE MEN LIVED! WHAT IS MORE, THEY LIVED AS THE POPES OF ROME! THEY WERE THE HEAD OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC “CHURCH.” THEY WIELDED ALL THE HORRIBLE POWERS THAT WENT WITH THAT POSITION. THEY STAND, ACCORDING TO ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS AND SCHOLARS, IN THE LONG CHRONOLOGICAL LINE OF THE POPES, AND YET THEY WERE SOME OF THE WORST MISCREANTS WHO EVER CURSED THE WORLD WITH THEIR PRESENCE!

References

1. Paisley, Ian, Revivalist, Oct., 1998, p. 13. 2. Bullinger, Ethelbert, The Book of Revelation, Kregel Reprint, pp. 509-510. 3. Farrar, Frederic W., History of Interpretation, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Ml, Reprint, 1961, p. 311. 4. Ibid., p. 310. 5. Ibid., p. 311. 6. Ibid., p. 309. -8