He then cites the Catholic Encyclopedia to show that bishops wear certain purple vestments and cardinals wear certain red vestments. This line of reasoning has unbelievable problems. Instead, he is suddenly, joltingly literal in his interpretation. He caught on well enough that the woman symbolizes a city and that the fornication symbolizes something other than literal sex, but now he wants us to assign the colors a purely literal fulfillment in certain vestments of certain Catholic clergy. Purple and red are not the dominant colors of Catholic clerical vestments.
Hunt ignores the liturgical meaning of the colors purple and red in Catholic symbolism.
It is entirely appropriate for Catholic clerics to wear purple and scarlet, if for no other reason, because they have been liturgical colors of the true religion ever since ancient Israel. In fact, it actually runs a budget deficit most years and has an annual budget only the size of that of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Furthermore, wealth was much more in character with pagan Rome or apostate Jerusalem, both key economic centers, with pagan Rome being the key economic center of its whole empire. This argument is riddled with holes. This has nothing to do with Eucharistic chalices.