The Pope as an Antichrist Figure
The ‘Pope is the Antichrist’ seems to have been a conspiracy made for the modern age. The Anti-Christian sympathisers took this conspiracy as truth, but connect it to another conspiracy as a whole, the New World Order Conspiracy. This states that there are a certain number of high level people involved in the top organizations in the world, who are controlling everything from the top, in order to serve their own agenda. The Pope is connected with this group, because of the ‘need’ to convert everyone to one religion- Catholicism.
Unrest between the factions of Christianity did occur earlier, between Protestantism and the original Catholicism agenda. According to sources, there are instances for reading between the lines of the Bible that the Pope is not in fact Christian. This begins with Lutheranism and Smalcald Articles by Luther in 1537. This is one of the first instances of calling out the Pope for being un-Christian. At this point in history, it was true that the Pope was corrupted, and becoming more ‘King’ than ‘Prince’ of the Church. According to Luther, faith in Christ is enough for any Christian, which wasn’t supported by the superiors of the church at the time, with the collection of indulgences and the extreme hierarchy of the Church leaders. He quotes 2 Thessalonians, 2.9, “The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, and lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing”.
This animosity towards the Catholic Church continues into the 20th century America, with a greater level of mass media than the 16th century. Newspaper comics, such as the ‘Romanism octopus’ helped maintain the anti-Catholic sentiments. America, on average against Roman Catholicism, had the introduction of televangelists feeding Christian mantra to the wider population in the later half of the 20th century. And most recently, the internet and the modern televangelists, such as Robert Jefress, appointed by Trump, who blames the Catholic church of being a pagan-like cult.
The religious argument is that the Pope has continued in the corrupt ways, including making his agenda so close to Catholic doctrine, that any man in the role of Pope can blend in as the Anti-Christ, and the strength grows with each Pope. This is part of the reason that this conspiracy is also connected to that of the New World Order. However, this main conspiracy is conflicted because of the relationships between Catholicism, and other Christian faiths. The errant data is hard to follow because of the religious implications. Most of the doctrine is reliant on translations and interpretations of the word of God. These variations are what cause this disrupt in Christianity and the animosity towards the Catholic leader.