Rallying Around the Pope

This Pope is certainly a popular figure. Going against his own church’s natural conservatism, he’s recently made statements affirming same sex civil unions, declaring:

"They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or made miserable over it…What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered."

While not contradicting Roman teaching on marriage’s sacramental status, he is allowing same-sex activities through the backdoor. Although this will hardly placate the LGBT extremists whose ultimate enemy is God Himself, it certainly makes the Roman Church appear more up to date. He has been active in Germany, birthplace of the Reformation, persuading his bishops there to find a way of sharing communion services with protestants. There’ll be many who gush over the Pope’s acceptance of them as fellow believers, despite traditional Roman teaching that salvation cannot be found outside of Rome. And it’s not just to interdenominational relations he turns his generous gaze. In May, he supported an interfaith event in which all the world’s religions united to pray to God throughout the pandemic. When the West erupts into protests and demonstrations over equality, Francis phones his congratulations to the first American Catholic bishop to ‘take the knee’.

What’s not to like about this Pontiff?? Well, like all false prophets, he tells people what they want to hear. Have sex with whoever you want. Believe whatever you want. And yes, I too think that racism is bad, I’m on your side. John beholds the coming of the ultimate false prophet in Revelation 13. Whether our current Pope is he, or a forerunner, I do not yet know. Of him, John writes

“He had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon…he exercises all the authority of the first beast…and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast…He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men…he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived.”

This beast will be wonderfully popular. The diverse religions and ideologies he will unite. His religion will be respectable, acceptable, powerful. Writes John Bunyan in the Pilgrim's Progress:

Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, POPE and PAGAN, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, and ashes, &c., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt since, that PAGAN has been dead many a day; and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.

Interestingly, in Part 2, old Giant Pope is replaced by Giant Maul, a more vicious and cunning monster who would again persecute poor pilgrims. 

Image by Annett_Klingner from Pixabay