Evangelicals cozying up to Rome got more evidence that this is a counterfeit church. Pope Francis recently decreed a "new feast day on the liturgical calendar for Mary, 'Mother of the Church.'"

Can it be "just another denomination" when it encourages Roman Catholics to go to the "Virgin Mary" for favors instead of Jesus? And by what authority can she be installed as "Mother of the Church?"

As with the Eucharist, the popes take a simple scripture and invent a huge inverted pyramid of dogma. In this case, Christ's tender care for His mother, assigned on the cross to the beloved Apostle John becomes the shaky scriptural springboard. (See John 19:26-27.) When Jesus simply asked the Apostle, John, to look after His earthly mother after His death, Catholicism sees this as giving Mary goddess-like authority over the church.

The new decree states: "Indeed, the mother standing beneath the cross (Jn. 19:25), accepted her Son's testament of love and welcomed all people in the person of the beloved disciple as sons and daughters to be reborn unto life eternal. She thus became the tender mother of the Church which Christ begot on the cross handing on the Spirit.

"Christ, in turn, in the beloved disciple, chose all disciples as ministers of his love towards His mother, entrusting her to them so that they might welcome her with filial affection.

"Mary is the mother of the members of Christ, because with charity she cooperated in the rebirth of the faithful into the Church, while the latter says that the birth of the Head is also the birth of the body, thus indicating that Mary is at once mother of Christ, the Son of God, and mother of the members of his Mystical Body, which is the Church.

"These considerations derive from the divine motherhood of Mary and from her intimate union in the work of the Redeemer, which culminated at the hour of the cross."

From this quote it is obvious how high-sounding words are used to snare the unwary. In Catholic and Eastern Orthodox circles, Mary is also widely referred to as the "Mother of God."

This designation of an additional feast day for her is only one of a string of elevations of her goddess image over the centuries. In 1854 she was decreed by the popes to have been born without original sin; her "Immaculate Conception." Later, in 1950 Pope Pius XII declared that she was "assumed" bodily into heaven; The Assumption.

This example of stretching of scripture is one of two that the popes have used to weave a fantastic web of lies to construct the counterfeit, prostitute "church" described with astonishment by the Apostle John in the book of the Revelation.

The other is the idolatry of the wafer god, the Eucharist. The supposed scriptural source of this "re-sacrifice of Christ" is Jesus' sermon recorded in John 6. Here He spoke symbolically of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, but is interpreted literally by the popes. Using a baptized pagan ritual from ancient Egypt, the wheat wafer is "consecrated" by an "ordained" priest, converting its "species" into the actual body, blood and divinity of Christ.

Both of these perversions of the Bible narrative are covered at length in the book, Babylon Religion: How a Babylonian Goddess Became the Virgin Mary, researched and written by David W. Daniels and illustrated by Jack Chick.

Few Bible believers are aware of the magnitude of this idolatry by Roman Catholicism. Rome has been hugely successful in convincing Protestants that they are already Christian, blocking any soul-winning efforts.

But Satan is smiling with glee because these precious souls who trust their "church" with their eternal life will flunk the Great White Throne judgment and end up in hell instead of purgatory.