Enemy? Your not my enemy.
Good to hear. Can we address the actual posts instead of second guessing the direction. And confusing the discussion? I've been down this route before, but never actually made it to the end. The Catholic apologists on various forums hate, no despise, this topic. Bible prophecy the way it was intended to be understood is their worst enemy. Which is why the Jesuits invented two opposing hermeneutics to obfuscate the truth. So.
You know I'm Adventist, so you'll likely know the final line. But I suspect, of course you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you've never been shown the step by step route that takes us there. I've got plenty of time. But you'll excuse me if I don't get involved in these little distracting irrelevant side issues and straw men that pop up incessantly on these discussions. Let me continue with an interesting quote from an eminent Catholic historian,
Cardinal Manning.
“Now the abandonment of Rome was the liberation of the pontiffs. (Which is why I chose to use the word '
released', although it is quite fair to use
revealed, either are quite appropriate. ) Whatsoever claims to obedience the emperors may have made, and whatsoever compliance the Pontiff may have yielded, the whole previous relation, anomalous, and annulled again and again by the vices and outrages of the emperors, was finally dissolved by a higher power. The providence of God permitted a succession of irruptions, Gothic, Lombard, and Hungarian, to desolate Italy, and to efface from it every remnant of the empire.
The pontiffs found themselves alone, the sole fountains of order, peace, law, and safety. And from the hour of this providential liberation, when, by a divine intervention, the chains fell off from the hands of the successor of St. Peter, as once before from his own, no sovereign has ever reigned in Rome except the Vicar of Jesus Christ.”
(Henry Edward Manning, The Temporal Power of The Vicar of Jesus Christ, Preface, pp. xxviii, xxix. London: Burns and Lambert, 1862).
The question of course which must be asked is, were the early church leaders correct, and was Cardinal Manning correct? Did the Pagan Roman empire dissolve into ten Kings... Did 3 of them succumb to another as the prophecy foretold, and who was that 'another'?