Was “Pope” Paul VI The Antichrist?

THE word “Antichrist” conjures for most people a secular tyrant of unsurpassed persuasive powers, a man who seduces billions to then enslave and destroy them.
However, applying Catholic common sense to the issue leads to different assumptions. The Antichrist’s work must be spiritual first and foremost. He must be the antithesis of Christ Himself, who brought not a physical kingdom, but a spiritual one.
Who has the greatest spiritual power in the world? Surely it is a man who is, or professes to be, the very Vicar of Christ, a pope of the Catholic Church.
While Catholics are forbidden to speculate on the date of the future Antichrist, we are not forbidden, and are encouraged, to “read the signs of the times.” One of the characteristics of the end times, as mentioned by St. Paul, is spiritual blindness. We can expect that if The Antichrist has already come, the vast majority would not see it, as the vast majority were ignorant of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.
The Antichrist was foretold as the perfection of evil, the perfect imperfection St. John the Apostle described. The greatest evil is not murder or genocide, but the Lie that seduces souls and sends them to eternal ruin. The devil, we know, is the Father of Lies. That we live in an age when the powers of deception of both visible and invisible rulers have reached a level of sophistication unknown to previous ages is one sign that we are living in the period following the coming of The Antichrist.
In 1978, in his booklet “Last Days of the Catholic Church,” the writer W.F. Strojie became one of the first to speculate publicly that Giovanni Battista Montini, the man known as “Pope Paul VI,” whose reign lasted from 1963 to 1978, was the one and only Antichrist. Many then and now viewed such a message as one of doom and gloom. But as Strojie maintained, it was a message, when seen in light of Revelation, of consolation.
He wrote:
Recently my attention was drawn in a shop to a book entitled “How to Recognize the Antichrist.” Opened at random it gave information that everyone would be able to recognize Antichrist by his two little horns and funny eyes, and that the Bible is very definite about this, then followed several Scriptural quotations. This book can be bought for $2.45, between nice red covers. Ridiculous? Of course. But where are the Catholics to draw the line in straying from the basically spiritual meanings of Scriptural prophecies? (more…)




