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8 The Antichrist Most Definitely Is Not a Person!

Encyclopedia says he “overpowered John XIV (April, 984), thrust him into the dungeons of
Sant’Angelo, where the wretched man died four months later...For more than a year Rome endured
this monster steeped in the blood of his predecessors. But the vengeance was terrible. After his sud-
den death in July, 985, due in all probability to violence, the body of Boniface was exposed to the
insults of the populace, dragged through the streets of the city, and finally, naked and covered with
wounds, flung under the statue of Marcus Aurelius...The following morning compassionate clerics
removed the corpse and gave it a Christian burial” (Vol. 2, p.661 and 662).

Pope John XV (985-996). This pope split the churches finances among his relatives and earned for
himself the reputation of being “covetous of filthy lucre and corrupt in all his acts.”

Pope Benedict VIII (1012-1024). Benedict “bought the office of pope with open bribery.”

Pope Benedict IX (1033-1045). He was made pope as a youth of 12 through a money bargain with
the powerful families that ruled Rome! He “committed murders and adulteries in broad daylight,
robbed pilgrims on the graves of the martyrs, a hideous criminal, the people drove him out of
Rome” (Halley’s Bible Handbook, p.775).

Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). This monster surpassed all of his predecessors in killing. Though
he did not do the killing personally, he promoted the most Satanic episode in human history -- the
Inquisition. Estimates of the number of “heretics” that Innocent (not so innocently) had killed run as
high as one million people! For over 500 years popes used the inquisition to maintain their power
against those who did not agree with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303). Says The Catholic Encyclopedia, “Scarcely any possible crime
was omitted -- infidelity, heresy, simony, gross and unnatural immorality, idolatry, magic, loss of
the Holy Land, death of Celestine V, etc....Protestant historians, generally, and even modern Catho-
lic writers...class him among the wicked popes, as an ambitious, haughty, and unrelenting man, de-
ceitful also and treacherous, his whole pontificate one record of evil” (Vol. 2, p. 668). During his
reign the poet Dante (of Dante’s Inferno fame) visited Rome and described the Vatican as a “sewer
of corruption.” He assigned Boniface (along with Popes Nicolas III and Clement V) to “the lower
parts of hell.”

Though trying to put emphasis on certain “good” traits of Boniface, “Catholic histori-
ans...admit, however, the explosive violence and offensive phraseology of some of his public docu-
ments” (ibid., p. 670). An example of this “offensive phraseology” would be his statement that ‘to
enjoy oneself and to lie carnally with women or with boys is no more a sin than rubbing one’s hands
together” (History of the Church Councils, Bk. 40, art. 697). On other occasions, apparently in
those “explosive” moments, he called Yeshua the Messiah a “hypocrite” and professed to be an
atheist.

Yet -- and this sounds almost unbelievable -- it was this same pope that issued, in 1302, the
well-known Unam Sanctum which officially declared that the Roman Catholic Church is the only
true church outside of which no one can be saved, and says: “We, therefore, assert, define and pro-
nounce that it is necessary to salvation to believe that every human being is subject to the Pontiff of
Rome.” Because there have been many sinful popes, being “subject” to the pope has raised an obvi-

The Berean Voice July-August 2002