The Reign of the Antipope and the Mystery of Iniquity

The Reign of the Antipope and the Mystery of Iniquity

By Father Leonardo Castellani, S.J.  (1899 - 1981)
From “Cristo vuelve o no vuelve” (first edition, 1954) Editorial Vórtice Pages 27/28

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

The Mystery of Iniquity is the hatred of God and the adoration of man. The two beasts are political power in the religious instinct of man turned against God and dominated by the Pseudo Christ and the Pseudo Prophets. The Obstacle is, in our opinion, the unexpired validity of the Roman Order. The Great Whore is religion, decomposed and surrendered to the temporal powers, and it is also ethnic Rome, where this Mystery of Iniquity took place for the first time, before the dazzled eyes of John, the last of the prophets of Apocalypse.

Adoration of man along with hatred of God has always existed. “The Mystery of Iniquity does already work” ―says St Paul to the Thessalonians― except that he is hindered and you know what the Obstacle is”

The Mystery of Iniquity is the principle of the City of Man, which wars against the City of God from the beginning, it is the root of all heresies and the fire of all persecutions, “it is the incestuous stillness of the creature seated on its specific difference”, it is the continuous rebellion of the sinning intellect against its principle and its end, the multiplied echo of the ages, of Satan´s “non serviam”.

The summit of the Mystery of Iniquity is the hatred of God and the idolatrous adoration of man. The Mystery of Iniquity tends to take material form in the body politic and crush the saints. It was it that condemned Socrates, it that persecuted the prophets, it that crucified Jesus and it that then multiplied the martyrs; and it will be it that will destroy the Church, when, the Obstacle having been removed, becomes incarnated in a man of satanic greatness, a genial and perverse plebeian, perhaps of the Jewish race, of superhuman intellect, of absolute wickedness, to whom Satan will lend his power and his accumulated fury.

The Church, assisted by the Holy Ghost, hinders that manifestation and reduces it, supported on the human order which the Roman Empire organized into a juridical and political body; but a day will come, which will be the end of this age when the Obstacle will disappear. The Holy Ghost will perhaps abandon this social-historical body, called Christendom, taking away His own with Him to the most utter solitude, giving them two eagle wings to fly to the desert. And then the temporal structure of the existing Church will be taken over by the Antichrist, it will fornicate with the earthly kings ―at least an ostensible part of it, as it has already happened in history― and the abomination of the desolation will enter the holy place. “When you see the abominable desolation enter where it ought not to be, it will then be”.

Will it be the reign of an Antipope or false pope? Will it be the material destruction of Rome? Will it be the enthronement of a sacrilegious cult there? We don't know. We know that the Apocalypse, in describing the Great Whore, indicates with all precision “the city of the seven hills” interpretation given by the angel himself who indoctrinates Saint John,