Is there no clearer indication of the beast system than the current Bishop of Rome? Someone who offers a "blessing" to same sex couples, then says "But it's not for them as a couple but as individuals" then privately says "There's too much f*ggotry in the Jesuit order" then publicly apologizes for his own statement? At one point are people to heed the call "Come out of her my people lest ye partake of her plagues?"
Sure. But none of this is a surprise to us. Scripture prophesied from the very beginning that the church would be apostate, 2 Thess. 2:3. When I read this passage, it "seems" to indicate the church would have solidarity and unity until the very end, and then an apostasy would occur all at once. It appears from history that Paul actually meant that the church would be continually apostasizing, and there is also coming a Great Apostasy at the very end. This actually makes sense when you look at the history of Israel, which was continually idolatrous, right from day one, and was finally led off to the Babylonian captivity.
Absolutely, the mere existence of the papacy is antichrist on its face. This can be seen from Matt. 23:9, "And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven." Protestants avoid calling
anyone father, based on this verse, but I think that is a matter of conscience. The contrast being drawn here is not between a priest and the heavenly Father, rather, it is between a
one-and-only "father" on earth, aka "The Father", aka "The Pope". So, it is the college of cardinals (and the rest of the Roman clergy) who are in error in giving the appellation to one, unique man, THE Father, on earth. Jesus told us we already
have a Father, and he is in heaven. He is a spirit, John 4:24, not a human. I'm not going to fight you (generic) if you refer to your priest as father (spiritually), but to call one man, globally, THE Father, is blatant disobedience to the Lord's own command in Matthew 23:9. And no, the college of cardinals is not merely referring to the Pope as "father" (spiritually) in the way that a layman refers to their priest as father; rather, they are
explicitly designating this one man as THE Father of the whole worldwide church, and they are emphatic that, from this title, he derives his imagined "authority" over the church. The entire construct is manifestly repugnant to the text of Scripture which is why Rome fought so hard to keep the Bible in Latin where only a very small minority of the population could read it, and that very small minority could be controlled from Rome by threats, bribes and, if necessary, murder. After the Bible became widely published in the vulgar tongues of Europe, the Reformation ensued immediately because any villager with the ability to sound out words off the page could directly see from the text that the papacy is apostate and antichrist.
As for the "f*ggotry" quote, this is just a lame attempt to divert attention away from the blessing of gay-marriages. The Vatican is trying to spin around the Catholic conservatives with propaganda... "Well, I guess if the Pope talks like that behind closed doors, then he must not really be in favor of blessing gay marriages" even though that's exactly what he's in favor of, as proved by the letter permitting the blessing of gay marriages! It's really juvenile stuff, and quite transparent.
