"Virtually all attention these days is focused on the coming Antichrist —but he is only half the story. Many are amazed to discover in Revelation 17 that there is also another mysterious character at the heart of prophecy —a woman who rides the beast."
—Dave Hunt

The Bible says the whore of Revelation 17 is a city and gives remarkable clues to her identity. The following is one of a series of excerpts from A Woman Rides The Beast, by Dave Hunt. Here Hunt digs behind these clues which point to only one possibility: Rome and the Vatican. In this book, Hunt's thorough research is a must for anyone who would witness effectively to Roman Catholics.

Pagan Rome made sport of throwing to the lions, burning and otherwise killing thousands of Christians and not a few Jews. Yet "Christian" Rome slaughtered many times that number of both Christians and Jews. Beside those victims of the Inquisition, there were Huguenots, Albigenses, Waldenses, and other Christians who were massacred, tortured, and burned at the stake by the hundreds of thousands simply because they refused to align themselves with the Roman Catholic Church and its corruption and heretical dogmas and practices. Out of conscience they tried to follow the teachings of Christ and the apostles independent of Rome, and for that crime they were maligned, hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and slain.

Why would Rome ever apologize for or even admit this holocaust? No one calls her to account today. Protestants have now forgotten the hundreds of thousands of people burned at the stake for embracing the simple gospel of Christ and refusing to bow to papal authority. Amazingly, Protestants are now embracing Rome as Christian while she insists that the "separated brethren" be reconciled to her on her unchangeable terms!

Many evangelical leaders are intent upon working with Roman Catholics to evangelize the world by the year 2000. They don't want to hear any "negative" reminders of the millions of people tortured and slain by the Church to which they now pay homage, or the fact that Rome has a false gospel of sacramental works.

"Christian" Rome slaughtered Jews by the thousands —far more than pagan Rome ever did. The land of Israel was seen as belonging to the Roman Catholic Church, not to the Jews. In 1096 Pope Urban II inspired the first crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims. With the cross on their shields and armor, the Crusaders massacred Jews across Europe on their way to the Holy Land. Almost their first act upon taking Jerusalem "for Holy Mother Church" was to herd all of the Jews into the synagogue and set it ablaze. These facts of history cannot be swept under the carpet of ecumenical togetherness as though they never happened.

Nor can the Vatican escape considerable responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, which was thoroughly known to Pius XII in spite of his complete silence throughout the war on that most important of subjects. The involvement of Catholicism in the Holocaust will be examined later. Had the pope protested, as representatives of Jewish organizations and the Allied Powers begged him to do, he would have condemned his own church. The facts are inescapable:

In 1936, Bishop Berning of Osnabruch had talked with the Fuhrer for over an hour. Hitler assured his lordship there was no fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued, looked on Jews as parasites and shut them in ghettos?

"I am only doing," he boasted, "what the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively." Being a Catholic himself, he told Berning, he "admired and wanted to promote Christianity."

There is, of course, another reason why the Roman Catholic Church has neither apologized for nor repented of these crimes. How could she? The execution of heretics (including Jews) was decreed by "infallible" popes. The Catholic Church herself claims to be infallible, and thus her doctrines could not be wrong.