The Catholic Church was identified as the church of the devil, great abominable, and mother harlots, by more than a few LDS authorities. And MANY more identified the symbol of the cross as a "Catholic" symbol. It followed from these premises quite naturally that the symbol of the cross therefore was a symbol of the devil. And in addition to this, it became no stretch for Bruce R. McConkie to identify the sign of the cross as the Mark of the Beast.
And the Roman Catholic Church, in a spiritual sense, should indeed be identified as a major aspect of the great and abominable church of Satan
as a system of religion. So is all of Protestantism, every other apostate or unauthorized system of religious belief, and any organization or whatever kind, whether political, religious, or philosophical (following McConkie and others here) that tend to take human beings away from the truth regarding God, the purpose of existence, and the true means of salvation.
But Christ said he brings not peace but a sword, and that he came to divide son against father and daughter agaist mother (Matt 10:34), and in a nutshell, members of families and communities against each other. Or rather, this is the inevitable consequence of the truth being made known. As C.S. Lewis named two of his books,
The Great Divorce and
The Great Controversy, the truth creates division and strife sense some accept it and some do not. Those that will not accept it on many occasions become visceral and aggressive persecuters of those who do, and hence, as we see here in this thread, the "great divorce".
The Church teaches, of course, that all these other religions and philosophies contain numerous instances of truth, but that, as systems of belief, they contain numerous errors as well and lack authority. Hence, Satan uses them as vehicles draw us away from the Lord's authorized church and Kingdom within which the fullness of the Gospel is found. All nonetheless contain truth and, in many, many cases, do much good in the world through the activities of individual members.
The insistent claim that the church somehow 'attacks" other's religion is disingenuous at the very best. There is no "anti" movement in the Church, as we see within Evangelical Protestantism, no LDS ministries dedicated to impugning and defaming the religious beliefs of others, and we do not call other's religions emotionally loaded names such as "cult" and "morg" and "other such.
We disagree and dissent from many of the doctrines of sectarian Christianity, and of course must, as it is the mandate of the Lord upon us to teach the Gospel and warn our neighbors before the "end cometh", but we do not attack, impugn, and defame others or their beliefs as ex-Mormons and anti-Mormons do here and for which many EVs has become a full time profession and intellectual tradition.
Jesus disagreed with, condemned, and, on many occasions, excoriated the beliefs and cultural practices of those whom he came to save; the House of Israel of the era. He always did it, of course, in love, even when he did it with sternness and passion. We do not, as humans, always do this perfectly. There is hyperbole and intemperate language used on occasion that perhaps would have been better refrained from, but our mandate is to "teach, preach and exhort" and call the world to repentance. To do this, we must, as a matter of course, dissent from and point out the errors in the belief systems with which we contend (as well as cooperate with, on many occasions, as organizations), for the minds and hearts of God's children.
As an aside, there has never been a doctrine in the Church, in any form, that the cross is a symbol of the Devil. This is a figment of someone's fevered bigotry, not a LDS teaching. To the extent that it was ever taught by individuals in the church (I'm almost 50, and although my parents taught me that the Roman Catholic Church was
the Church of The Devil (false doctrine by the way. Any belief system that pulls people, or tends to pull them, away from the true Kingdom of God and his true Gospel, is a part of this "church"), I've never heard this extrapolated to the cross until this thread, which indicates to me, as with some other supposed church "doctrines" I've seen bandied about with morally self righteous ferver, that the idea is most likely a highly provincial folk concept that passed through some elements if the the church, in some regions, in the past, and then disappeared).