Nicely laid out with scriptural references that Catholicism can't refute.
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... those believers throughout those centuries along with genuine and discerning believers today understand this is a false system. It has a false priesthood. It has a false source of revelation, tradition in the magisterium. It has illegitimate power granted to it by this magisterium, this papal curia. It engages in idolatry by the worship of saints and the veneration of angels. It conducts an horrific exultation of Mary above Christ and even God. It conducts a twisted sacrament of the Mass by which Jesus is sacrificed again and again.
It offers false forgiveness through the confessional. It calls for the uselessness of infant baptism and other sacraments. Motivated by money, it has invented Purgatory. And by the way, Purgatory is what makes the whole system work. Take out Purgatory and it’s a hard sell to be a Catholic. People hang in there because of the deception of Purgatory. Purgatory is the safety net. When you die you don’t go to hell, you go there and get things sorted out and finally get to heaven if you’ve been a good Catholic. Take away that safety net, that’s a hard sell because in the Catholic system you can never know you’re saved. You can never know you’re going to heaven. You just keep trying and trying. As the priest said on a television program the other night, we are all engaged in a long journey toward perfection. Well, if you’re engaged in a long journey toward perfection it’s pretty discouraging.
People in that system guilt-ridden, fear-ridden, no knowledge of whether or not they’re going to get into the kingdom. The threat of a mortal sin which throws you back out again, and the only thing that makes it work is Purgatory. If there’s no Purgatory, if there’s no safety net to catch me, then give me some opportunity to get into heaven. It’s a second chance. It’s another chance after death. I can’t buy into this. So they had to invent Purgatory. It’s just too much without it.
The harm of indulgences, selling forgiveness for money, the false gospel of works – you participate in your salvation by your good works – the abomination of idols and relics, prayers for the dead, the perversion of forced celibacy, and so it goes. But at the top of the pile of all of this is the amazing, amazing Papacy. The Pope is the one at the top of the Roman Catholic Church who has, in a word, usurped the headship of Christ over his church. The reformers have always understood this. With unashamed boldness, they understood this and they declared this and they faced death for it. Martin Luther, 1483-1546, Luther proved by the revelations of Daniel and John, by the epistles of Paul, Peter and Jude, says the historian D’Aubigné, that the reign of antichrist predicted and described in the Bible was none other than the papacy and all the people said, “Amen.” “A holy terror seized their souls. It was the antichrist whom they beheld seated on the pontifical throne. This new idea which derived greater strength from the prophetic descriptions launched forth by Luther in the midst of his contemporaries inflicted the most terrible blow on Rome.”
Based on his study of scripture, Martin Luther finally declared, “We here are of the conviction that the papacy is the seat of the seed of the true and real antichrist. I owe the Pope no other obedience than that I owe to antichrist.” Luther said, “I am persuaded that if at this time St. Peter in person should preach all the articles of Holy Scripture and only deny the Pope’s authority, power and primacy and say that the Pope is not the head of all Christendom, they would cause him to be hanged.” Yet if Christ himself were again on earth and should preach, without all doubt the Pope would crucify him again.
John Calvin, 1509-1564, “Some persons think us too severe and censorious when we call the Roman Pontiff antichrist, but those who are of this opinion do not consider that they bring the same charge of presumption against Paul himself after whom we speak and whose language we adopt. I shall briefly show that Paul’s words in 2 Thessalonians 2 are not capable to any other interpretation than that which applies them to the papacy.” They saw in the antichrist the papacy, the Pope. Why? Because they had some special insight that, in fact, the final antichrist was actually to be a Pope? No. Because the Pope personified everything that the scripture described the antichrist to be.
John Knox, 1505-1572, the great Scottish Presbyterian sought to counteract the tyranny which the Pope himself had for so many ages exercised over the church. He himself said the Papacy is the very antichrist, the Pope being the son of perdition of whom Paul speaks. Thomas Cranmer, one of the great martyrs in England, died in 1556, said, “Whereof it follows Rome to be the seat of antichrist and the Pope to be the very antichrist himself, I could prove the same by many scriptures.” The Westminster Confession was written in 1647. The Westminster Confession, the confession of the reformers says, “There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalts himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God.”
And again I say it isn’t that he is the final antichrist, but he is in his time and in this age the very embodiment of antichrist. And there are, says John, many antichrists in the world before the final one. Cotton Mather, again an American Puritan who died in 1728, “The oracles of God foretold the rising of an Antichrist in the Christian Church: and in the Pope of Rome, all the characteristics of that Antichrist are so marvelously answered that if any who read the Scriptures do not see it, there is a marvelous blindness upon them.” And Spurgeon, “It is the bound and duty of every Christian to pray against this Antichrist, and as to what Antichrist is, no sane man ought to raise a question. If it be not the popery in the Church of Rome there is nothing in the world that can be called by that name.” Again, I say John said there are many antichrists. Here is the supreme embodiment of it to these great leaders, these great reformed leaders through the ages.
Spurgeon went on to say, “Popery is contrary to Christ’s gospel and is the antichrist and we ought to pray against it. It should be the daily prayer of every believer that the antichrist might be hurled like a millstone into the flood and for Christ, because it wounds Christ, because it robs Christ of his glory, because it puts sacramental efficacy in the place of his atonement and lifts a piece of bread into the place of the Savior and a few drops of water into the place of the Holy Spirit. And puts a mere fallible man like ourselves up as the Vicar of Christ on Earth. IF we pray against it, because it is against him, we shall love the persons though we hate their errors. We shall love their souls though we loathe and detest their dogmas. And so the breath of our prayers will be sweetened because we turn our faces toward Christ when we pray.”
It was 1553-1558, a terrible five years in England, the reign of Bloody Mary and all that began seven years after Luther’s death. Mary came into England and restored the Pope’s authority in England and immediately all Bibles were removed from the churches. All Bible printing ceased and was forbidden. It became a capital crime. Eight hundred English ministers fled to Geneva. Three hundred Protestants were burned at the stake. The first martyr to Mary was John Rogers, a London minister who translated the wonderful Tyndale-Matthews Bible – I’ve held one of those first editions in my own hand. Ridley and Latimer, the two famous martyrs burned at the stake at Oxford. And William Tyndale, blessed William Tyndale; chaste for years and finally martyred for the crime of translating the Bible into English. All this under the leadership of, and for the satisfaction, of the Roman system and the Pope.
Luther, in the small called articles wrote this, “All things which the Pope, from a power so false, mischievous, blasphemous and arrogant has done and undertaken, have been and still are purely diabolical affairs and transactions for the ruin of the entire Holy Christian Church and for the destruction of the first and chief article concerning the redemption made through Jesus Christ.” Luther didn’t mince words. He said further, “The Pope is the very antichrist who is exalted himself above and opposed himself against Christ because he will not permit Christians to be saved.” Further Luther said, “It is nothing else than the devil himself, because above and against God he urges and disseminates his papal falsehoods concerning Masses, Purgatory, monastic life, one’s own works, fictitious divine worship, which is the very papacy, and condemns, murders and tortures all Christians who don’t exalt and honor these abominations of the Pope above all things. Therefore just as little as we can worship the devil himself as Lord and God we can endure his apostle the Pope. For to lie and to kill and destroy a body and soul eternally, that is wherein his papal government really consists.”
Back to Spurgeon, “Of all the dreams that have ever deluded men, and probably of all blasphemies that ever were uttered, there has never been one which is more absurd and which is more fruitful in all manner of mischief than the idea that the bishop of Rome can be the head of the church of Jesus Christ.” No, these popes die and how could the church live if its head were dead? The true head ever lives and the church ever lives in him. And Spurgeon said, “A man” – this is very interesting – “A man who deludes other people by degrees comes to delude himself. The deluder first makes dupes out of others and then becomes a dupe to himself. I should not wonder but what the Pope really believes that he is infallible and that he ought to be saluted as “His Holiness.” It must have taken him a good time to arrive at that eminence of self deception. But he’s got to, I daresay, by now and everyone who kisses his toe confirms him in this insane idea. When everybody else believes a flattering falsehood concerning you, you come, at last, to believe it yourself or at least to think it may be so.
“The Pharisees, being continually called to learned rabbi, father, the holy scribe, the devout and pious doctor, the sanctified teacher, believed the flattering compliments. They used grand phrases in those days and doctors of divinity were very common, almost as common as they are now. And the crowd of doctors and rabbis helped to keep each other in countenance by repeating one another’s fine names until they believed they meant something. Dear Friends,” says Spurgeon, “It’s very difficult to receive honor and expect it, and yet to keep your eyesight, for men’s eyes gradually grow dull through the smoke of the incense which is burned before them. And when their eyes become dim with self conceit, their own great selves conceal the cross and make them unable to believe the truth.”
Spurgeon said, “Christ did not redeem his church with his blood so the Pope would come in and steal away the glory. He never came from heaven to earth. He never poured out his very heart that he might purchase his people. That a poor sinner, a mere man, should be set upon high to be admired by all the nations and to call himself God’s representative on earth, Christ has always been the head of his church.” Spurgeon knew what the reformers knew, what any true student of scripture knows. The Pope stood at the top of an illegitimate system, particularly and specifically at the top of an illegitimate priesthood. And Spurgeon wrote this, “When a fellow comes forward in all sorts of curious garments and says he’s a priest, the poorest child of God may say, “Stand away and don’t interfere with my office. I am a priest. I know not what you may be. You surely must be a priest of Baal.” For the only mention of the word vestments in scripture is in connection with the Temple of Baal.
“The priesthood belongs to all the saints. They sometimes call you laity, but the Holy Ghost says of all the saints, “you are God’s klros.” You are God’s clergy. Every child of God is a clergyman or a clergywoman. There are no priestly distinctions known in scripture. “Away with them,” said Spurgeon, “away with them forever.” The prayer book says, “Then shall the priest say.” What a pity that word was ever left there. The very word priest has the smell of the sulfur of Rome about it, that so long as it remains, the Church of England will give forth an ill saver. Call yourself a priest, sir. I wonder, men are not ashamed to take the title. When I collect what priests have done in all ages, what priests connected with the Church of Rome have done, I repeat what I have often said. I would sooner a man pointed at me in the street and called me a devil than call me a priest, for bad as the devil has been, he has hardly been able to match the crimes and cruelties and villainies that have been transacted under the cover of a special priesthood.
From that may we be delivered, but the priesthood of God’s saints, the priesthood of holiness which offers prayer and praise to God, this we have because thou hast made us priests. That is what the saints are. The Roman Empire then is, in the view of these men of God through the ages, a front line for Satan. And for Spurgeon Rome is a deadly enemy, first of all, as well as a mission field. Spurgeon said we must have no truce and make no treaty with Rome. He said this, “War. War to the knife with her. Peace there cannot be. She cannot have peace with us, we cannot have peace with her. She hates the true church and we can only say that the hatred is reciprocated. We would not lay a hand upon her priests. We would not touch a hair of their heads. Let them be free, but their doctrine we would destroy from the face of the earth as the doctrine of devils.
“So let it parish, O God, and let that evil thing become as the fat of lambs, into smoke let it consume. Yay, into smoke let it consume.” You can just hear him preaching that in the tabernacle in London. He went on to say, “We must fight the Lord’s battles against this giant error, whichever shape it takes, and so must we do with every error that pollutes the church. Slay it utterly. Let none escape. Fight the Lord’s battles even though it be an error that is in the evangelical church, yet we must smite it.” We stand on those shoulders. What is our response to this current issue, a truce with Rome? Are we going to betray the martyrs? Are we going to betray the history of our faith?
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https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-291/the-pope-and-the-papacy