An American Pope

What is distinctive about this reaction is not its hostility — Branham-message preachers have always preached against the Catholic Church — but its speed and uniformity. Brides Convocation's video went up on May 8 itself. Pastor Ben Pruitt at Word of Life Tabernacle in Hardy, Arkansas, scrapped his prepared sermon and preached an entirely new one titled "The New Pope" the same evening. Within seventy-two hours, more than two dozen sermons across at least fifteen different message churches had been preached, recorded, and published — all citing exactly the same paragraph from a single 1954 Branham sermon.

Across a corpus of 64,000+ Branham-message transcripts in 270+ channels, 85% of every recorded use of the phrase "American pope" dates from after May 8, 2025. The phrase was lying dormant for decades, then activated overnight.

Pastor Jesse Smith is one of the most committed Branham defenders in the modern movement — Message Research has an entire article reviewing his 2021 book The 12 New Testament Mysteries Revealed. He is precisely the speaker you would expect to declare Leo XIV the prophesied antichrist on no evidence. Instead, he is the speaker most carefully hedging, and most openly explaining where Branham got the underlying framework.

Uriah Smith's Daniel and the Revelation (revised final edition, 1944) is the relevant book. It is one of the foundational works of Seventh-day Adventist eschatology. It is on record that Branham owned a copy. Its chapter on Revelation 13:11–18 argues that the "second beast" coming up out of the earth represents the United States, and that the image-of-the-beast described later in the chapter is a forced ecumenical confederation of Protestant churches under Catholic leadership. Compare that to Branham's 1954 paragraph above. It is the same argument in the same order. The "prophecy" that current message preachers are calling supernatural foresight is a paragraph of 1944 Adventist Bible commentary, rendered in Branham's preaching cadence.

This is not a hostile critic's reading. Jesse Smith is the one who said it on YouTube. The Christian Gospel Church and the Leaving-the-Message channel have published much fuller treatments arguing the same point. The fact that Smith — preaching from inside the movement, defending the movement — concedes the Adventist source openly is what makes this paragraph land.

Four threads to flag.

"Mother of harlots" identified as the Catholic Church. This is Branham's base reading of Revelation 17. It is a tendentious reading even within Protestant tradition (most modern commentators understand "Babylon" in Revelation as a coded reference to first-century Rome, not the medieval Catholic Church), but Branham presented it as plain Bible.

"The Vatican destroyed by Russia." This is the only one of Branham's anti-Catholic prophecies that he tagged as "Thus saith the Lord" — his strongest claim of direct prophetic authority. It has not occurred. It has been seventy-one years. The Open Door Eagle Hour and Bill Ivy continue to invoke it as imminent.

"The purple curtain." Branham's coined image — Cold War audiences feared the Iron Curtain (USSR) and the Bamboo Curtain (China); Branham redirected the fear to the cardinals' robes. This is what makes American pope a category-defining event for the movement: it isn't just a news story, it's the curtain coming for them.

"Romanism, not communism." Bill Ivy at Living Word Tabernacle Missouri, sixty days into the Trump–Leo era, repeats Branham's framework verbatim: the real enemy is Rome, communism is the puppet. The framework is intact across seven decades and three Cold Wars.

Theo Ovid's sermon, preached one day after the election, reads the regnal name itself as Satanic semiotic warfare: "That Leo is the lion that is impersonating the coming of the Lord as Jesus Christ." The hermeneutic move is that every detail of a Catholic event has to be interpretable — names are never accidents, the press coverage is the unveiling.

Daniel Evans at Tucson Tabernacle takes the same move historically: the previous Pope Leos justified executing heretics (Leo I, 5th century) and excommunicated Martin Luther (Leo X, 1521). The name-choice itself becomes evidence that the new pope is doctrinally continuous with the most violent anti-Protestant figures in the office. This is a reading the Vatican's own communications office would, of course, reject — the regnal name "Leo" carries multiple positive associations within Catholic tradition (Leo the Great defended Rome from Attila; Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum founding Catholic social teaching) — but the message frame requires the worst reading to be the true reading.

The Paul LaFontaine claim deserves a flag of its own. The assertion that Robert Prevost was conceived in December 1954, the same month as Branham's "Acts of the Holy Spirit" sermon, is presented as a supernatural sign. The math is approximately defensible — Prevost was born September 14, 1955, which puts conception roughly in December 1954 — but the spiritual significance is being read backward from the election. This is new folklore, generated in real time. It did not exist before May 8, 2025, and it will be repeated as fact in message sermons for the next decade.

The escalation pattern follows the predictable shape of a movement reading the news through a fixed prophetic grid. Three observations are worth flagging.

The Putin-bombs-the-Vatican prophecy is the load-bearing one, and it has not happened. Branham staked his prophetic authority on it explicitly ("Thus saith the Lord") in 1954. The Open Door Eagle Hour continues to expect it imminently. Bill Ivy continues to teach it as core doctrine. There is no rhetorical mechanism in the corpus for handling its non-occurrence after seventy-one years; it simply gets pushed forward.

Catholic news events get woven into the grid faster than secular history can produce them. The white-horse gift to Leo XIV on October 15 was a real diplomatic gesture (the horse was a Lipizzaner from a Slovenian state breeder — a sister-city gift). Within two days it was the white horse of Revelation 6, ridden by the deceiving Antichrist. The same week, Trump's Gaza peace pact was framed as "when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them" (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Three days after Charles–Leo prayed publicly, that became Henry VIII reversed.

The Hitler comparison preached at Word of Life Tabernacle in December 2025 marks a new ceiling. Ben Pruitt, one of the more cautious voices in the movement, by December is preaching that "the spirit on the pope… is the same spirit that was on Hitler." Six months after the election, what began as cautious doctrinal alignment has hardened into total demonization by name. A live, sitting pope, six months into his pontificate, is now being preached as Hitler-equivalent at a Sunday service in Arkansas.

Three lines of internal pushback deserve attention.

Rapp Crook at Bible Believers Church made the most striking move: in a sermon delivered three days after the election, he acknowledged the news, then explicitly told his congregation NOT to interpret it. "When we try to put pieces together on our own, we just make problems. Don't put your own interpretation to anything. Just go on and live a good Christian life." This is a remarkable pastoral instinct — recognizing that a movement that reads every news cycle as prophetic fulfillment is liable to manufacture problems for itself.

The Endtime Message Tabernacle WA sermon "An American Pope" introduces the escape-hatch mechanism that lets the framework survive whatever Leo XIV actually does: "It could be just another prefigure… from that role that he's in, he can build a platform for the next one." If Leo XIV dies of natural causes in 2040 without being declared antichrist or triggering an ecumenical confederation, the framework is intact: he was a prefigure. The actual antichrist comes later. This is the standard structure of unfalsifiable prophecy.

Pastor Jesse Smith is the most striking case because he is, on most other questions, the movement's most aggressive defender. His Q&A video is structured around openly hedging. He acknowledges Branham's framework, then immediately marks the live question as undecidable: "We don't know if this American pope now, Pope Leo the 14th, will be the official antichrist."

The most honest reading of the corpus is that the broader message movement currently believes Leo XIV is the prophesied figure (or near enough), but the movement's most articulate defenders have already built the rhetorical infrastructure to survive his being wrong. The framework comes first. The data — including the data of an actual American pope, the very event predicted — fits the framework either way.