Counter-Reformation

The view of Futurism, a product of the Counter-Reformation, was advanced beginning in the 16th century in response to the identification of the Papacy as Antichrist. Francisco Ribera, a Jesuit priest, developed this theory in In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarij, his 1585 treatise on the Apocalypse of John. St. Bellarmine codified this view, giving in full the Catholic theory set forth by the Greek and Latin Fathers, of a personal Antichrist to come just before the end of the world and to be accepted by the Jєωs and enthroned in the temple at Jerusalem — thus endeavoring to dispose of the exposition which saw Antichrist in the pope. Most premillennial dispensationalists now accept Bellarmine's interpretation in modified form.[citation needed] Widespread Protestant identification of the Papacy as the Antichrist persisted in the USA until the early 1900s when the Scofield Reference Bible was published by Cyrus Scofield. This commentary promoted Futurism, causing a decline in the Protestant identification of the Papacy as Antichrist.

This looks rather like just another pedestrian Protestant notion of feigned
authority - from a category of humanity that disdains authority per se,
unless, that is, it is anyone's own, personal authority, which effectively
renders the term meaningless, and therefore constitutes an attack against
the principle of authority.

Ironically, the topic of interest is the personal Antichrist, who, when he
finally does come, will possess the most highly evolved illusion of the very
thing that his facilitators have been arguing against for well-nigh 666 years!
(1351 + 666 = 2017)

There is a record of the 1854 prophesy of World War III by Zachary,
an Armenian Jєω who received a private revelation he believed to be from
God, which so stirred his religious sense that he later converted and was
baptized Catholic.  His description of what he had experienced was
recorded in Day of Anger:  The Hand of God Upon an Empire, by Fr.
Forticelli.  There, Zachary alludes to the Antichrist in the context of his
coming in the immediate wake of the Third Great War.  

Interpreted, this prophesy puts the arrival of the Third War in the very
near future for us today, because all the events preceding it have
recently taken place:  the geopolitical rise of the nations that occupy
the area described being Russia and China, which attack the U.S.A. by
means of missles in that war, subjugating America into bondage.  And if
that isn't bad enough, the next sentence takes it up a notch with, "...
and then the whole world fell under the dominion of the first born of hell."

It makes no connection between this fiend and the Pope.  It is rather
the Pope, united with the bishops of the world who have the power to
forestall, or prevent this annihilation of nations by making the Collegial
Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but, if they
fail to do so, if they fail to make this 5-minute prayer, the consequences
cannot do other than adversely affect or extinguish the very lives of
hundreds of millions of people, including but not limited to Americans, not
so much because of what they have done as what they have failed to do.  

But a Protestant is blind to this power of the Pope and bishops, as he is
contemptuous of their authority, and therefore is not capable of thinking
about the need for the Pope and bishops to make the Collegial Consecration,
and, the Pope and bishops, because of their Modernist infection of
self-destructive false ecuмenism and religious liberty, are afraid to make
the Protestants uncomfortable by even so much as talking about the need
for them to make said Consecration.

This obscure mention in Wiki to St. Robert Bellarmine may not be factually
blameworthy, but like everything that Protestants and their sympathizers
do in these matters, it fails to get to the most important point, but instead
runs around in circles with anecdotes and side-issues.