With the announcement of a new Pope comes a flurry of time-worn questions and comments, and a favourite concerning any emerging powerful figure is sure to be this one – could he be the Antichrist? Leo XIV, with his serene and seemingly innocuous smile, is not likely to invite such sinister speculations. But let him say a word that pushes people’s political buttons and it’s almost certain to come up.
The popular imagination is not unfamiliar with the idea that at some time in the future a powerful and evil figure called the Antichrist will arise to terrorise the world. But what is the history of this belief?
The source of the term, of course, is the Bible, though some would be surprised to find that the word antichrist does not appear in the Book of Revelation. All four mentions of it are in the epistles of John, although they are linked to other concepts in Revelation and in the Epistles. Book 2 Thessalonians describes the “man of sin” and “son of perdition”, who sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Strange indeed that people have suggested atheistic figures like Hitler or Pol Pot as possible fulfilments of such prophecies.
One reason for the confusion could be the ambiguity in the prefix anti-. In Latin, and in many English words, it means against. We naturally assume that antichrist means against Christ and we picture an evil figure who opposes Christ or Christianity or Christians. Of course, many cruel persecutors over the centuries would fit this description.
But antichrist is a Greek word, and in Greek the prefix anti- means opposite or in the place of. It could refer, for instance, to someone who claims to be the head of the church, a title which belongs to Christ. The biblical references suggest a figure that would arise within the Christian church. The early church fathers expected this to happen and actually speculated that it would come about when the Roman Empire collapsed.
By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the abuses of the papacy and the outrageous claims of the popes had become such that the reformers had no hesitation in labelling the pope – not just one particular pope, but the papacy in general – as the Antichrist. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) flatly declared the pope of Rome to be “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God”, and the London Baptist Confession (1689) restates the thought in the same words.
But back in the 16th century, when the Reformation was advancing and crowds of people were leaving Catholicism and forming Protestant churches, the papacy sprang into action, launching the Counter-Reformation in 1545. Two Jesuit priests made a bold move to counter the accusation being hurled at the pope from every side. One of them, Luis de Alcázar, wrote a book arguing that almost all of the prophecies in Revelation had been fulfilled in the first century and that the Antichrist was a single individual who had lived in the distant past. The other, Francisco Rivera, wrote a book arguing that the Antichrist would be a single individual who would appear in the distant future, with most of the prophecies of Revelation to be fulfilled just before Christ’s second coming.
Today, the first view is all but forgotten, fancied only by a few intellectuals and obscurantists. But the second one was revived in the 19th century and has been popularised to the point of becoming a fringe part of the public discourse. Meanwhile, the notion that the papacy has been and continues to be the Antichrist – a belief held to by virtually every Protestant church for 300 years – has been quietly forgotten. And the claims of the popes have become more and more bold: “We hold upon this earth the place of the God Almighty” (Leo XIII), “The Pope… is Jesus Christ Himself, under the veil of the flesh” (Pius X).
So… is Pope Leo XIV the Antichrist?
