What is the Book of Revelation about?

[diggerdomer]

But don’t you think that approach [of treating the passages in the Bible as not teaching just one truth] is contrary to reason as well as to biblical teaching? There could only be one truth, not two and most certainly not many. For example, when the book of Revelation speaks of a “woman” it could only mean one thing. If God used “woman” to symbolize a church, it could not be anything but a church, right?

No, not right, it can have multiple meanings, which could be true. That’s not contrary to reason. See the Catechism para 115-119 for instance. Depending on the “sense” one is using in interpreting a given passage, one could come up with numerous rational, faithful, and true interpretations.

 

[ryanoneil]

I have heard some people including Michael Voris and Scott Hahn that the Book of Revelation is about the Catholic Mass. I am reading a book called The Apocalypse: Letter by Letter and it was written by a Catholic but his interpretation which he gives a good argument for is more in line of an apocalyptic future event than a resemblance to the Catholic mass. Does the Church have any official teaching on the Book of Revelation?

The Catholic Church officially rejects millenarianism (an “earthly” Messianic kingdom where Christ politically rules from Jerusalem for 1,000 years) in Rev 20:4.
CCC 676:

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

The vast majority of the early church has believed that the Saviour came to proclaim the “spiritual” kingdom of God for the deliverance of man from his sins and for his sanctification, starting with Christ’s birth. The Eastern Church bitterly oppossed the inclusion of the Book of Revelation in the cannon, until they were assured by the Western Church that it did not teach millenarianism.