The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies what might be called the personal anti-Christ with what it terms "the church's ultimate trial". The two go together.
The Church's ultimate trial
675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.574 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth575 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.576
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,577 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.578
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.579 The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.580 God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
This is not exactly encouraging stuff, but that's how the catechism identifies the ultimate anti-Christ. Since it will involve the
"intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism, then it would stand to reason that the anti-Christ will be a political figure, not religious. We're also in an age where a single earthly political power is a possibility, with satellites and other technology potentially tracking our every transaction and move. If you combine a political figure who has unbridled access to today's formidable technology and who is also aided by the the devil's supernatural gifts, such an unholy alliance would be very difficult to overcome. Imagine Adolf Hitler with today's technology at his disposal.
For what it's worth I think the anti-Christ is around today, a political figure, but I think the "false prophet" has already been and gone (if there is a "false prophet"), someone who divided the church at a cost of millions of lives, with the division still living on today. And I got that opinion from a
Protestant pastor, for whom I developed an enormous amount of respect.
As a weird personal side note, I think God intends to drive us off the planet and out into the universe He's put there. If we consider that we've gone from horse and buggy stuff in the 19th century to the first petrol "car" circa 1870 (gasoline for our US friends), the radio in 1894, the first flimsy aircraft in 1903, the first liquid fueled rocket in 1923 (Dr. Robert Goddard) to the technology we've got today, then if God's the author of history, He's sure pushing the technical wheelbarrow at this point in our history.
The question is "Why?" We also find that as we push our boundaries into space, we're concurrently developing other technology which will be an absolute necessity if we're going to travel and settle in space - in particular IT, artificial intelligence and robotics.
I'll put my faith in quantum teleporting as the means of transport, which scientists are just starting to dabble in. It's also instantaneous, and not limited by the speed of light.
That's my own weird personal aside. If that comes before or after the anti-Christ is a moot point, but that's what I think anyway.