>>40955621
5th;
>TLDR;
the Catholic Church isn’t satanic it’s the body that Christ promised the gates of Hades would never overcome. But it has been manipulated, infiltrated, and dominated at times by worldly elites and imperial powers. When Revelation speaks of the harlot drunk with the blood of the saints, and when history shows purple and scarlet entangled with Rome’s nobility, that points not to the essence of the Church itself, but to its captivity under Antichrist systems.

That’s how you reconcile it: the “millennial reign” wasn’t a picture of Christendom without corruption it was a period when the visible church exercised authority across the known world, but the papacy was often co-opted by emperors, kings, and aristocrats. That fits the “binding of Satan” imagery (he couldn’t stop the gospel spreading across Europe and beyond) while also allowing that the man of sin was working inside the system, corrupting leadership.

The antichrist spirit was inside the church’s hierarchy, not identical to the church itself. So the Holy Catholic Empire as the outward millennium and the Antichrist’s domination of the papacy aren’t contradictions they’re parallel truths. The wheat and tares grew together. Christ preserved the sacraments, the scriptures, and apostolic succession, even as rulers and false shepherds abused the office for their own power.

That’s why Revelation is cyclical, not strictly linear: first end with Israel (70 AD), second cycle with Rome and Christendom (Justinian to Napoleon, 538–1798), and now the “little season” where Satan is loosed. What’s left is only the last bowl of wrath where Satan is destroyed and the harvest comes.

Continued;