I would say that there is a way to correllate the various categorizations of religions by Catholicism in the apocalypse, specifically looking at the trumpets.
Clearly, the Seal of God can only properly be given to Catholics, for the only protection from
spiritual “harm”, that is, as concerns the “forehead”, or the intellect of the soul, is having the FULL foundation of truth that can only be had when one recognizes the totality of the sources of Divine Truth that God has given. And in Catholicism, these are:
I. The Trinity and Incarnation
II. The Pope
III. The Rest of Bishops and Oral Tradition
IV. The Written Tradition (Scripture)
V. Reason
For if we examine the history of the Church, the major attacks on Her doctrinal development pretty much attack these sources from top to bottom:
To elaborate, the first great wave of heresies were usually attacking the Trinity or Incarnation to one degree or another, which culminated with Islam.
The next great attack after Islam was the Great Schism, which appropriately attacks the Pope, but retains the general Oral Tradition.
The next great attack, and what was also the begininning of a devastating spiritual loss in humanity (and so LIKE a great “Woe”) was Protestantism, which rejected not only the Pope, but the general Oral Tradition, retaining only Scripture.
The next great attack, again another “Woe”, was the so-called “Enlightenment”, which attacked even the notion of Revelation or grace (and hence Scripture) and drew religion down to merely the natural level, hence causing a supernatural death, and retaining only reason as one’s guide to religious truth.
Finally, in the modern day, with either atheism or relativism, even reason is trampled, and religion is basically completely thrown out.
Toward that end, I’d say the five months of torture in the fiirst great woe are a symbol of the five sacraments that heretics lose when they fall into heresy and attack the Eucharist, and I’d say the False Prophet’s two horns are a diabolical plagairizing of the two sacraments of heresy, Baptism and Marriage (where the seven horns of the Lamb are the total seven sacraments), so that Baptism is twisted from making one a child of God to making one a child of the devil, and that Marriage is twisted from total self-giving love and covenant to the selfish and arrogant pursuit of superficial things, that is, like the Whore, to be contrasted with the Chaste Woman, the Church.
just my two cents.
