Agreed. Unless we see a supernatural man take the political stage, I think we are still dealing with something different. The Catholic Faith hasn't been exactly banned in favor of worshiping a particular human being, but a false counter-religion has obstructed it. We still haven't seen a man being worshiped as if he were God, in place of Christ.

I too have a sense that there is coming a world leader, combining in himself military, political, and quasi-religious power. This will be a dupe and inversion of Christ, Who is Priest and King.

Indeed, the Church does not seem to be in her final battle with the antichrist. The facts you assert support the notion. But we are seeing shades and types and signs of things to come. For instance, though we do not see an individual man worshipped as God, and sitting in the temple of God, we do see the cult of unregenerate man now supplanting the True Religion, and an individual representative ofthis demonic cult now sitting in the place of the throne of St. Peter.

Man has become the object of worship, and his false worship is sent into the world via the usurped offices of the Roman Catholic Church.   

What is lacking thus far is the unification of military, political, and religious power. We have suffered a series of false pontiffs - not one individual antichrist figure; and all of them posses within themselves only quasi-religious power. Politically and militarily, they are nothing. This is, to me, a sign that we are not nearing the end of the world. I think we are nearing the end of Vatican II, and possibly the current manifestation of the satanic global empire. But the end of all things is not yet.

The enemy is absolutely bent upon achieving the unification of military, political, and religious power in one individual man, right now. He is striving, and may even think he is imminently going to succeed. But things will go according to God's plans, not his.

In fact, it could go down like this: They get their man ready, they stage whatever mind-blowing catastrophe they think they need to hurl him into a position of universal dominion, and then, BAM, he is taken out by our Lady, a foreshadowing of Christ slaying the AC with the breath of His mouth.

Then is ushered in a new Age of the Church, which will sooner or later include the final descent of mankind into universal apostasy and the revelation of the man of sin.

The latest from the Antichrist:

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2023-09/laudate-deum-to-be-title-of-pope-s-exhortation-on-climate.html

"Let us not forget that the noblest vocation of the human person is politics. Let us train our young people to be politicians, in the broadest sense of the term. Let us not forget that the noblest vocation of the human person is politics. We must train our young people to be politicians, in the broadest sense of the word. Not only to act in a political party, which is a small group, but to have political openness and to know how to dialogue with political groups with maturity, politics is not a disease, in my opinion it is the noblest vocation in a society, because it is the one that carries out development processes."