In order to bolster their claims that the Papacy is the Antichrist, Protestants are obliged to come up with a whole persecution legend of how the Papacy somehow rose up to persecute the "true Christians" and was in power performing this action the whole time. This is historically problematic to say the least. Numerous details are left out. Numbers from the Inquisitions, Religious Wars, and individual massacres are grotesquely inflated, context is ignored, and they'll even claim certain sects as their own. Let's just state this, it's a fictitious claim to begin with so naturally, numbers have to be inflated. One source claims that the Inquisitions killed an estimated 50,000,000-150,000,000 people! I tried to contact the author of that website in the past, ages ago, asking him what his credentials were. His health seems to be poor and at the time, his wife was also battling a serious illness. It seems she has since reposed as well. He never got back to me. I contacted him recently but have still not heard a response. I don't know if it's because he is simply so caught up in this fictitious narrative that he thinks any one who disagrees with him is a Satanic Beast or simply that he doesn't want to engage in counter-arguments. Regardless, he needs serious prayer so if you can commend him to your prayers, that would be the Christian thing to do.
But again, these numbers are grotesquely exaggerated and there is a huge context missing. Since all historicists maintain that the Papacy is a persecuting power, let's see if they can actually back those claims up. Albert Barnes, in his Biblical Commentary on the Book of Daniel states the following,
"This would be a persecuting power - "making war with the saints," and "wearing out the saints of the Most High." Can anyone doubt that this is true of the Papacy? The Inquisition; the "persecutions of the Waldenses;" the ravages of the Duke of Alva; the fires of Smithfield; the tortures at Goa - indeed, the whole history of the Papacy may be appealed to in proof that this is applicable to that power. If anything could have "worn out the saints of the Most High" - could have cut them off from the earth so that evangelical religion would have become extinct, it would have been the persecutions of the Papal power. In the year 1208, a crusade was proclaimed by Pope Innocent III against the Waldenses and Albigenses, in which a million of men perished. From the beginning of the order of the Jesuits, in the year 1540 to 1580, nine hundred thousand were destroyed. One hundred and fifty thousand perished by the Inquisition in thirty years. In the Low Countries fifty thousand persons were hanged, beheaded, burned, or buried alive, for the crime of heresy, within the space of thirty-eight years from the edict of Charles V, against the Protestants, to the peace of Chateau Cambresis in 1559. Eighteen thousand suffered by the hands of the executioner, in the space of five years and a half, during the administration of the Duke of Alva. Indeed, the slightest acquaintance with the history of the Papacy, will convince anyone that what is here said of "making war with the saints" Daniel 7:21, and "wearing out the saints of the Most High" Daniel 7:25, is strictly applicable to that power, and will accurately describe its history."
If I count correctly, that is a grand total of 2,280,000 Protestants killed by the Papacy. Definitely no where near the number claimed by the previous source cited. Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Book of Revelation also cites Bp. Thomas Newton saying the exact same thing. But here's the full context.
Heretics are a pestilence upon the Church. When one actually studies the context of these "persecutions", one will see that not only have Protestants committed equal crimes against Catholics throughout the years, but also that in many instances, Protestants were the instigators. Who exactly were the Waldensians, the Lollards, and the Albigensians? It's important to start with the Albigensians. The Albigensians, or the Cathar movement, was a sect that "believed the material world was the creation of an evil deity, and that the pope's church was not only corrupt, but also false and evil...[they] also believed in reincarnation and rejected the sacraments, prayers for the dead, and the veneration of images and relics" (47)
Waldensians initially sought approval for their order from the Pope, but somewhere down the line, distanced themselves even more overtly from him and began "to argue that that the ultimate supreme authority was the Bible, not the pope. In addition, much like the Cathars, the Waldenses also questioned the validity of the church's sacraments, prayers for the dead, and the veneration of saints and icons." (Carlos M.N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 48)
The Lollards who followed Wycliffe's sacramentarian movement gained incredible popularity in England but then showed a demonic hostility toward iconography, "On taking an image of St. Catherine [of Alexandria] from a chapel, one Lollard said to another: Aha...my dear chap, now God has sent us fuel to cook our cabbage and appease hunger. This holy image will make a bonfire for us. By axe and fire she will undergo a new martyrdom, and perhaps through cruelty of those new torments she will come at last to the kingdom of heaven." (52)
Anabaptists weren't all peaceful either. One sect, "a group of fanatics under Jan van Batenburg (1495-1538" were known as "swordsmen" and "indulged in sporadic terrorism in the Netherlands for nearly a decade after 1535" (Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 333).
St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine highlights the fact of religious wars ongoing between Protestants and Catholics and notes that,
"St. Augustine, disputing on this citation, says in the time of Antichrist the Devil will be loosed, and hence that persecution will be much more severe than all the ones that preceded it; the Devil can do so much more cruelly loosed than bound....Hippolytus the Martyr and St. Cyril say that the martyrs whom Antichrist will kill are going to be more illustrious than all the previous ones, because the old martyrs fought against the human ministers of the devil, but these will fight against the Devil himself...we have experienced nothing like that from the year 600 or even 1000." (On the Roman Pontiff, Bk. III, ch. VII)
He then challenges the heretics, "what comparison is there of that sort of persecution with that carried out by Nero, Domitian, Decius, Diocletian, and others? Accordingly, for one heretic who is burned, a thousand Christians formerly were burned—and that was exercised in the whole Roman world, not only in one place. Furthermore, at present when the supreme penalty is given a man is merely burned, but in ancient times they exercised the most unbelievable torments." (ibid)
And this is evident when one examines the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria, the Forty Martyrs who had rocks thrown at them, the martyr Barbara who was locked in the tower by her father, the martyr Irene who escaped numerous tortures before finally laying down in a coffin having converted thousands to Christianity, St. George who was brutally tortured multiple times before finally being being beheaded, etc. And further, "the fact is that heretics killed many more Catholics in the last ten or fifteen years in France and Flanders than inquisitors burned heretics in perhaps the last hundred." (ibid)
One could even add that if one takes the date of 538 as the start of supposed "Antichrist" reign, you have to take into account the Holy Emperor Justinian's torments of a demon that caused him to turn on numerous orthodox Christians, the iconoclastic Roman Emperors who persecuted men such as St. John of Damascus, framing him for a crime that had the Muhammadans cut his hand off, the imprisonment of St. Maximus the Confessor whose tongue was cut out, and numerous Patriarchs of Constantinople who were deposed by these Emperors for upholding the orthodox Catholic doctrine. And yet it's the Papacy who is the persecuting power? Clerics don't even have the authority to kill or maim a heretic. Only the legitimate authorities of a State have that right! (St. Alphonsus de Liguori, Moral Theology, Bk. IV, 378)
Now, let's not sanitize history. Catholics have done some wretched things, especially to the Waldensians.
"Those in the Piedmont valleys enjoyed religious peace from 1536-1559, owing to the political dependence of the districts upon France. A contrary policy was pursued by the Dukes of Savoy; but the Waldenses at the very outset successfully resisted, and in 1561 were granted in certain districts the free exercise of their religion. In 1655 violence was again fruitlessly resorted to. Later in the same century (1686, 1699) some of them, under stress of renewed persecution, emigrated to Switzerland and Germany." (New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, "Waldenses")
Catholics are not perfect but indeed are sinners too. That said, the Protestants have done some nasty things to Catholics. And sites that claim this exaggerated number do a grotesque disservice to Christianity in toto by claiming such egregious absurdities as it clearly leads men away from God. 2,300,000 still seems like an exaggeration but when you give about 1,260 years for "beast power" to reign, that is remarkably light. Especially when you consider how much Adolf Hitler massacred in regards to innocent non-combatants in the years of 1939-1945. Or even how much Stalin was able to kill during his great persecutions of political opponents. And one final note, we may not ever know the exact total of numbers but...
"These data and others of the same nature bear out the assertion that the Inquisition marks a substantial advance in the contemporary administration of justice, and therefore in the general civilization of mankind. A more terrible fate awaited the heretic when judged by a secular court. In 1249 Count Raymund VII of Toulouse caused eighty confessed heretics to be burned in his presence without permitting them to recant. It is impossible to imagine any such trials before the Inquisition courts. The large numbers of burnings detailed in various histories are completely unauthenticated, and are either the deliberate invention of pamphleteers, or are based on materials that pertain to the Spanish Inquisition of later times or the German witchcraft trials (Vacandard, op. cit., 237 sqq.)." (New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, "Inquisition")
Overall, the numbers of 50,000,000-150,000,000 given by our first source are a drastically unverified claim and to insist that the Catholic Church is just covering up the true numbers to "hide itself" from being identified as "the Antichrist" is just absurd. It's a blanket statement. Protestants underwent no where near the persecution that was let loose by the Roman Empire on the faithful Christians. That's just an historic fact. Much of their claim is based on a moronic persecution complex built on inflated pride. The Waldensians clearly disturbed public peace in preaching and spreading their errors into the Church much like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons go door-knocking on everyone's house nowadays disturbing them. The State's response toward them was brutal at times, and possibly over-the-top, but no where near the level of persecution. The Albigensians weren't even Christians but were Gnostics who held to "Good-god, bad-god" ideology and other Gnostic theology. The Lollards themselves persecuted and smashed churches much like the Black Lives Matter idiot, Shaun King, commands that his demented followers destroy all images of "White Jesus". At certain points, the Protestant killings of Catholics rivaled, if not even flat-out exceeded the numbers killed by Catholics. So the "beast" is not the Papacy. The Papacy never persecuted Christians. This is just simple nonsense.
Nevertheless, keep the man who wrote the article linked in your prayers. He needs healing. Both from his heresy and from the ailments he faces. God bless his soul!
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