Revelation 2:6 'Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
Nicoaitans = those who would set up a hierarchy of leaders who lord over the lay people.
God commended them for hating churches like the Catholic Church.
Revelation 2:6 ... the deeds of the Nicolaites ...
The Nicolaites weren’t Catholic.
In ancient antiquity there was no such sect as the “Nicolaitan”. Outside of the Apocalypse, biblical and secular history has no reference to such a group. They are a mystical “type” found in the Apocalypse alone and they are a reference to the people who follow Balaam; Apocalypse 2:14 and 15
Balaam is the anti Christ - Destroyer of the People (of God). The Nicolaites and the Balaamites were one and the same and not a true group but were everyone who broke the covenant and worshipped false gods, and didn’t follow the commandments.
The Nicolaitans/Balaamites are not sects that bore those names in early times; they are the followers of the sin of Balaam in the Old Testament; the sins of fornication and the flesh. Numbers 25: 1-3
Actual Nicolaitans did come later (2nd century) They were antinomian gnostics not Catholics. (Clement of Aledandria and Tertullian) These later “Nicolaitans” took their name from the Apocalypse, not the other way around. They were libertines who felt free to sin because they were ‘saved”.