LIES OF MEN AND GODS—Some Catholic Leaders Convinced Pope Francis Is the “False Prophet”
by SkyWatch Editor Dr. Tom Horn
Researched by Pastor Gary Boyd
June 6th 2023
Both Catholics and Protestant evangelicals see the current pope, Francis, echoing a prophesied role in pushing…the system that Antichrist will employ. And, in fact, several Catholic Defenders of the faith—including the largest Catholic news agencies in the world, CAN and EWTN News, as well as several of Rome’s leading theologians like Archbishop Carlo Vigano—have recently stated publicly that Francis is this man from the book of Revelation and Daniel, even writing letters to then President Trump to warn him….
But for mystic Catholics, it’s much more than that. Many of them believe in the Prophecy of the Popes, which predicted nine hundred years ago that one hundred and twelve pontiffs, from the day that Saint Malachy had his divine vision in Rome and forward. One hundred and twelve popes would arrive, with the last one ruling over the Vatican when the Church and the world enter the Great Tribulation period, according to that prophecy. Well, Pope Francis, as you may know, is, or appears to be, pope number one hundred and twelve.… [Pope Francis’] namesake, the man that he chose to name himself after, Francis of Assisi, actually predicted that the final pope would be a deceiver….
Now, think about that for a minute, folks. Given that both recent popes and their closest advisors at the Vatican have considered whether Pope Francis is the last pope, Petrus Romanus, and that the reality “gives them the shivers” and is perceived by them as a “wake-up call,” is it any wonder that conservative scholars within the Catholic Church have taken this increasingly careful view of Pope Francis and the subsequent question of whether Pope Francis is the False Prophet from the book of Revelation? Is it the reason canon lawyers and theologians for the Vatican hosted a conference in Paris a while back to discuss how to depose a heretical pope?…
A respected Italian monsignor and a former consultor to the Vatican’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith—a man by the name of Monsignor Monsignor Nicola Bux has even gone on record as saying, Pope Francis needs to stop the “confusion and apostasy” he is sowing among priests and bishops, and he needs to do this by “correcting” his “ambiguous and erroneous words and acts.” Perhaps even more so than any others, influential Catholic Television Network director Jose Galat. He publicly claimed not long ago that Pope Francis is, in fact, the “False Prophet,” who, he says, is “paving the way for Antichrist.”…
There was an inquiry not long ago in which the Vatican launched an investigation into a Catholic group of exorcists known as the Herald, who, [the investigation] said, after “having discussions with Satan, have determined that Pope Francis is ‘the devil’s man.’”
When the secular world looks for a religious leader to rise up and solve all the problems of humanity, many will look to the pope, since his position has been historically associated with theocratic authority since the formation of the Roman Church hierarchy. Meanwhile, Western Protestants—who are right now scoffing at Rome for her current and future immorality and loose positions on idolatry—will be sitting there, patting themselves on the back for being theologically enlightened, ready to rise, willing to stand for something and make a change…except that it won’t, because it’s a cult.
Chapter 10: Protestant Babylon
The pope isn’t the only leader currently preparing our land and churches for a satanic covenant of End-Times proportions, and Catholics aren’t the only Christians who need to open their eyes to the present-day apostasy. Protestants often stand proudly puffed up, slinging their own version of anathema condemnations at the “Catholic Church’s spiritual failings,” citing such reasons as the worship of Mary, indulgences, sin-booth confession sessions using priests as mediators, discouragement of individual Bible study, dictatorialism in the history of the hierarchy/papacy, and so on. These authors are not insensitive to any of these complaints, and we agree that these topics are extremely concerning. But before Protestants can congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe, we, also, are contributing to the formation of a currently leaderless cult that will be too vulnerable to recognize Antichrist for what he is when he shows up to lead. There are so many examples of how we’re getting it wrong that it’s difficult to know where to start. But, because readers may assume that some of what’s about to be discussed is “heresy in some other denomination and therefore someone else’s problem,” it’s crucial to remember:
The most convincing and deceptive cult of all is one with members who “look like” and “act like” regular, everyday people who follow Christ.
Following Christ requires believing what the Bible says of Him, as well as strictly adhering to a list of tenets.
The members of the Western Church “look like”/“act like” regular, everyday people who follow Christ (with certain exceptions we will soon discuss), but…
The Western Church has forsaken both the key doctrines of Christ and central Christian tenets. Therefore:
The Western Church is the most convincing and deceptive cult of all.
As we’ve said, central tenets apply across the board. Both the Catholic Church with all its sects and the Protestant Church with all its denominations are bound to them, and this numbered list applies to both. However, due to the fragmented denominations in Protestantism that tend to represent seemingly countless variations of doctrine, assigning “cult” as a label for the whole of the Protestant Body is a more enigmatic and complicated process.
Deeds vs. Creeds
When ruminating about the disease of the Protestant Church, truly “being” followers of Christ and not just “looking like” followers of Christ is by far the most important consideration, since any other position is a cultic counterfeit.
The creed of the Church says, “I follow Christ.”
The deeds of the Church say, “I don’t follow His tenets or believe what the Word says about Him.”
For instance: The Christian statistics research group, Barna Group, in its definition of the term “biblical worldview,” identifies six universal nonnegotiables within Christianity as a belief system, based on interdenominational tracking of central Christian tenets compiled since 1995. These essentials, which apply to all Protestant denominations, are:
“[A]bsolute moral truth exists.”
The Bible is wholly reliable and accurate.
Satan is a real being, not merely a symbol of sin.
Simply being a good person does not send one to heaven.
Jesus came to earth and was sinless.
“God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.”
These authors (and everyone in the SkyWatch TV and Defender Publishing circle) concur with every item on this list. Though we would likely add several things, we certainly wouldn’t take anything away from these rudimentary, fundamental components of Christian belief. However, Barna reports, only a staggering 17 percent of practicing Christians in the US have a “biblical worldview” based upon belief in these six things.
That may come as a shock (it certainly did to us!), but it’s a plausible statistic when we really dig to see what today’s Western Christians actually believe: One study reports that 45 percent of American Christians admit that “certainty about [Christ] is impossible,” and only 34 percent believe He is “involved in their life,” whereas another study states that 46 percent of born-again Christians believe that Jesus sinned while He was on earth. One report shows that only 41 percent of self-identified US Christian adults in the Baby Boomer generation consider Scripture to be “totally accurate in all of its teachings,” and this staggeringly low number only jumps to 43 percent for the same category of believers in the Millennials, Gen-X, and “Elders” generations. Between 1993 and 2018, Christians declined from 89 percent to 64 percent in their belief that witnessing to the lost is a duty of their faith, whereas 47 percent of Millennial-aged, practicing Christians actually think evangelism is morally wrong, as it may pressure someone to change faiths! These authors don’t know what’s worse: the fact that so many Christians don’t think the Great Commission is their responsibility—or the fact that, out of 1,004 regular Christian church attenders in the US who were asked about the Great Commission in 2017, 25 percent couldn’t remember what it was and 51 percent had never even heard the term in their lives! This means at least 76 percent of Christians are ineffective in spreading the Gospel. Maybe the numbers would be more impressive if we knew how to pray with people, but as it currently stands, only 2 percent of praying Americans do so with another person present.
As of October 2020, the latest large-scale research and statistics report reflects that 58 percent of evangelicals have “demoted the Holy Spirit to symbolic status,” denying His role as a true Person of the Trinity. A lie is no longer a sin, according to 40 percent, so long as “it advances personal interests or protects one’s reputation,” and premarital sex is agreeable to half of all evangelicals. Salvation can be earned by doing good, 48 percent say. Abortion is morally acceptable to 34 percent, which makes sense when 44 percent don’t think the Bible’s teaching on the subject is clear and 40 percent don’t believe human life is even sacred. This is probably why 39 percent don’t respect anyone who holds to a different faith (which is ironic, since the entire faith system being described here isn’t orthodoxically any religion). Pentecostals/charismatics aren’t any more impressive, however: 69 percent reject absolute moral truth; 54 percent disagree that human life is sacred; 50 percent claim the Bible is ambiguous about abortion; and 45 percent are not born again! But of all groups, mainline Protestants take the lead for syncretizing their Christianity with the secularized culture of the West: 63 percent say God is not the provider of truth and the Bible cannot be trusted to fully represent God-given principles; a shocking 81 percent believe that people can be their own moral compass because humans are essentially good; only 33 percent make it a habit to confess sins and seek forgiveness from God, and a meager 13 percent read their Bibles regularly. The summary provided by the study states: “Sixty percent (60%) of mainline Protestants’ beliefs directly conflict with biblical teaching.”
When our creeds don’t match our deeds, that’s called “hypocrisy.” Keep that in mind.
It’s not all about what data the veteran research group Barna collects, though.
Ligonier Ministries conducts up-to-date surveys about the state of the Church, and researchers there have dedicated themselves to reporting every two years about how Protestant churchgoers in the West feel regarding the central doctrines of Christianity. The most recent survey, conducted in partnership with LifeWay Research, was released in September of 2020. The findings were appalling. Thousands of people of all faiths, as well as atheists and those with undisclosed or undecided positions, weighed in. In total, 48 percent agreed that the Bible was merely one of our world’s historic “sacred writings” that record “ancient myths,” but that it does not contain any truth, and 52 percent denied the divinity of Christ. This is sad for the public, surely, but far, far worse were the numbers reported specifically about the belief of evangelical Christians in the West, which start off bad and only get worse:
26 percent think that church ministries cannot be effective to the world unless their worship services are “entertaining.”
39 percent agree that “material blessings” are a guaranteed reward of faith (that evil prosperity gospel of recent decades is still clinging on…).
46 percent take a relaxed position on sin, agreeing that people are generally “good by nature.”
65 percent believe that Jesus is a being whom God created (as opposed to belief in the Incarnation of God, the Word made flesh, aka the way through which salvation is even possible—cf. John 1:1, 8:58; Romans 9:5; Hebrews 1:1–4).
30 percent agree with the statement that “Jesus was a great teacher, but was not God” (an outright denial of Christ’s divinity).
18 percent answered that the Holy Spirit can tell a Christian to do something that the Bible expressly forbids (folks, 18 percent may look like a small and encouraging number, but remember that it represents almost one-fifth of all evangelicals, which is alarmingly high considering how blasphemous it is to suggest that the Spirit of God would lead us in the opposite direction of His own Word!).
And, finally, the most demoralizing statistic of all is that:
42 percent (almost half!) of all evangelicals embrace the blatantly syncretistic/idolatrous heresy that “God accepts the worship of all religions.”[xii]
President and CEO of Ligonier Ministries, Chris Larson, is correct in his rebuke when he writes, “People inside the church need clear Bible teaching just as much as those outside the church.” Elsewhere, the ministry’s chief academic officer, Stephen Nichols, who also sits as president of Reformation Bible College, offered his opinion after seeing the crushing blow of the survey: “As the culture around us increasingly abandons its moral compass, professing evangelicals are sadly drifting away from God’s absolute standard in Scripture.… This is a time for Christians to study Scripture diligently.”[xiv]
No, Stephen, that time was yesterday. Today, we are late, and the injury our tardiness has caused the Body is a festering maggot pool.
Take a moment to look at what train-wreck statement this single study makes about what we believe as the people of God: Theologically speaking, the denial of Christ’s divinity is a return to Arianism, the belief that Jesus was “created by God,” which naturally denies that He “is” God. This heresy mostly died out in the fourth century after the Council of Constantinople in 381 when the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianus, and Gregory of Nyssa—brilliantly silenced Arius’ otherwise baseless “theology.” According to this survey, Arianism is now the position of 65 percent of all evangelicals! Meanwhile, the number of people who accept within their heart that Christ’s work on the cross was for “entertaining” worship or “material blessings” makes these authors gag. Even the age-old “they mean well” retort cannot be offered here. There is simply no excuse to mix any part of our Savior’s salvation mission with pop culture. On the other hand, almost half of us believe that people are generally good by nature—so, meh…who needs saving, anyway? We can just save ourselves. Or maybe that Holy Spirit—who apparently tells us to carry out acts that contradict His own Word—can lead us to that other world religion He also accepts. Maybe that religion will have a messiah in it that can help us out—since a third of us don’t even believe Jesus is God at all!
This is the summation of our “Christianity,” guys. It’s what one journalist calls “self-constructed, Build-A-Bear, buffet-style belief…[that] the Westernized, New-Agey offsprings of Eastern pantheisms” can feel comfortable with. And maybe this is why, when Christians experience doubt crises in their faith in God, a “pastor or spiritual leader” is only the person they would think to seek help from a mere 18 percent of the time.
Without true fruit, the Church is just a social club. What were once corporate goals of holiness, godliness, sanctification, and seeking the presence of God have been replaced with greatly rehearsed entertainment and production spectacles. Some of these places of “worship” have gone so far that (in our opinion), if Jesus were to appear in these buildings, He would overturn tables and clear them out: “And [He] said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). These authors wonder what Jesus would think of some of the churches that—after paying inflated salaries to ministers and staff, covering administrative expenses, installing flashy facility upgrades and amenities (such as espresso stands and gift shops), and establishing ostentatious “worship concert” services—delegate less than 5 percent of their massive, megachurch budget to the kind of charitable endeavors Jesus championed (feeding the poor, caring for widows and orphans, etc.).
Astonishingly, the respected, check-before-you-donate organization, Charity Navigator, in their “Financial Efficiency Performance Metrics” analysis, states that seven of every ten charities they appraise (the majority of which are secular) give three quarters “at least” of all their accumulating monies on those they set out to benefit. In a slightly less impressive statistic, every nine out of ten will redirect “at least 65%” of all income to helping the needy in the area of their conviction.
You with us so far? This means that only one out of ten listed charities in this country outside the Church would perform abysmally enough to donate less than 65 percent of their budget on the programs they designed to provide others some form of relief.
Charity Navigator goes on to say: “We believe that those spending less than a third of their budget [that’s 33.3 percent in total] on program expenses are simply not living up to their missions. Charities demonstrating such gross inefficiency receive 0 points and a 0-star rating.”
Let’s revisit this breakdown:
The foundation of today’s North American Church claims—by the nature of the commands of our Chief, Jesus Christ—that charity is at the center of all we do. We exist to “be more like Jesus,” who advocated relief work and humanitarian goals more than any other religious figure in world history, and to do this very work He would want us to do in His name. Therefore, both verbally and because of our affiliation, we promise the world to prioritize charity over any other entity or organization.
Only one out of every ten non-church-affiliated charities in our country would dare spend less than 65 percent of their budget to achieve their relief, assistance, or humanitarian goals. Anything less than that would place them in the minority of embarrassingly unsuccessful organizations and would utterly destroy any chance they had at a reputation of reliably handling any donor’s money. But the real dagger in this picture are the charities that have the audacity to give less than 33.3 percent of their budget to their beneficiaries. Tsk-tsk. They get a zero-star Their promises to the world are basically worthless.
North American churches are frequently guilty of giving around, even less than, 5 percent.
Do a little math. That’s more than just mortifying. It’s flat-out disgraceful that some of our wealthiest churches (what the world expects to be “Jesus Christ’s Relief Organizations”) can’t be counted on for much, if anything, when it comes to helping the poor. We show how much we care about the destitute and the sick by rigging confetti cannons and fire-retardant curtains to our stages for the weekly worship-service productions. These authors honestly believe that the Lord will someday require an answer about who would have used that same money to put food on tables overseas.
To read more of this article go to: https://www.skywatchtv.com/2023/06/06/wicked-26/