There have been some truly great men who held the office of pope down through the centuries, and some men who were…well, not great. Some have been venal. Some have been violent. Some were put in office by imperial authority. Some were murdered in their beds. There have been times in history when schism found leaders and left the church with more than one pope, believe it or not.
The word anti-pope
is unfamiliar because there hasn’t been one for 500 years. What’s that? Well, an anti-pope is a claimant of the papacy in opposition to a pope elected according to canon law. To give you an idea of some of the ferment that existed in the past—in the 11th century alone there were 5 anti-popes, and 8 of them in the 12th century. That’s 13 anti-popes in 200 years. (Excommunications, naturally, flew back and forth.)
It’s ironic that since the Protestant Reformation there have been no anti-popes—almost as though we flushed out all the dissidents and went forward. The Reformation, though, was a schism within the Roman Church, as was the split with the English Church under Henry VIII. But in the modern world, we have seen nothing like this. That does not mean we will never see anything like it again. It’s entirely possible that we could encounter the old word anti-pope
on the evening news in the years to come.
I’ve told you all this to help you understand something else that may well come to your attention in the next few weeks. For generations there have been those who referred to the Catholic Church as the great whore of Babylon
[Revelation 17] and who believed that the last pope would be the Antichrist. Each new pope could be the last pope, and may fulfill many of the prophecies of the man of sin
and Antichrist. He will, according to these would-be prophets, be the little horn of the prophecies of Daniel and one of the beasts of Revelation. Heavy stuff. But take any self-proclaimed prophet with a grain of salt.
Where does all this come from? Some comes from an anti-Catholicism arising from conflicts in the dim past, and indeed there have been popes in the long history of the church that deserve condemnation. Catholics probably know that better than anyone. After the Renaissance popes provoked the Protestant Reformation (and they really did) the Catholic Church made some reforms of its own. Still, there are those who want to label the last pope as the man of sin.
So, where did this idea of a man of sin
for the last days come from? Well, we can thank the Apostle Paul for that. In one of his earliest letters, he spoke of the imminent return of Christ. Or at least it sure sounded imminent to his readers, within their lifetime. Well, this generated a flurry of concern, and Paul has to deal with it in his second letter:
Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
This is pretty strong; and as bad as some of the popes have been, none of them ever got close to this. Who, then, would do something like this?