While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27, 2014 as a brief getting-to-know-you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.
In that vision of unfolding history, Obama is cast as the “Antichrist” and Pope Francis the “False Prophet.” This is the kind of thing you are not likely to hear discussed in polite company, except maybe in a dismissive fashion or to be held up to scorn and ridicule. Yet millions of people around the world believe in just such a scenario. Within hours of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announcing his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, becoming the first pope to resign in almost 600 years (the last having been Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism) some folks were talking excitedly about “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman) who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophey of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139.
The fact Pope Francis was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the name Peter appears nowhere in his former or current appellations, hasn’t much fazed Petrus Romanus true believers, who happily point out the first Pope to take the name Francis did so after St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian whose original name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, but nicknamed Francesco (“the Frenchman”) by his father. Pietro in Italian translates to Peter in English. Is this “Francesco di Pietro (Peter) di Bernardone, literally, ‘Peter the Roman,'” as Tom Horn and Cris Putnam, co-authors of the 2012 book Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, have argued?
While their research was prodigious, in a sense, the result falls pretty far short of anything approaching coherent scholarship in any true academic sense. The strategy much of the time seems to be to dig up what you can and if you throw enough of these scattered historical documents against the wall of the “Romanists” something will stick. You don’t have to be anti-Catholic, pro-Catholic, neutral or even much of a scholar to know the historical record has lots of less than flattering documents when it comes to the Catholic Church, many of them quite authentic. Marshaling such disparate sources into a coherent and convincing argument to support something approaching a thesis is something else again.
Horn and Putnam are also stuck with the problem of time. Inconveniently for them, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI resigned in February 2013 – just after their book was published – rather than slightly earlier in 2012 – before Petrus Romanus was printed – which would have fit on their timeline a bit better. The longer out in time Pope Francis’ pontificate runs, as it approaches the beginning of its third year, the farther removed it is from their graphic images of Rome burning. While Horn and Putnam are careful not to fall into the trap personally of being “date setters,” which can cause one’s reputation to evaporate quite literally in a second if you’re wrong, they’re not above conveniently quoting other writers to make those kind of points at times, such as the ersatz Ronald L. Conte Jr., a self-described “Roman Catholic lay theologian and Bible translator” who publishes something called Catholic Planet. Conte, as Horn and Putnam noted in 2012, predicted that by “July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.” Conte also predicted, again parroted by Horn and Putnam, that after Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, the next pope would be Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he would take the name Pius XIII. Wrong and wrong again.
As prognosticators on the papacy, Horn and Putnam are no better than Conte. Their 2012 Top 10 list in Petrus Romanus to succeed Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI included Arinze; followed by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was dumped as secretary of state by Pope Francis in October 2013, seven months after he took office. Rounding out their list in descending order for “Final Pope” were Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson; Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola; Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi; Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri; Italian cardinal Ennio Antonelli; French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn; and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet. While they did have an Argentinian cardinal on their list, unfortunately for Horn and Putnam it wasn’t Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint on July 6, 1199 by Pope Clement III, and was the former archbishop of the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and Diocese of Connor, and while in Rome in 1139 reportedly experienced what is considered by the Catholic Church to be an unapproved private revelation – if the incident even happened – in the form of an apparition of the 112 popes following Pope Celestine II, who died March 8, 1144. Malachy was said to have recorded his Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes (and antipopes) as a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope. “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit, Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”
Malachy’s manuscript was supposedly deposited in what is now known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum before he returned to Ireland as the papal legate. And there the manuscript is said to have sat, forgotten and gathering dust until re-discovered more than 400 years later by Arnold Wion, a Benedictine monk, who published them in 1595 as Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life). Or not. Given the very accurate description of popes up to 1590 and lack of accuracy after that year, “modern scholars have unanimously noted, in the 37 subsequent mottoes, a radical departure from the unfailing precision and appropriateness of the previous 74, and they are agreed that the Prophecy of Malachy is a counterfeit,” wrote John J. Driscoll in the Roman Catholic theological scholarship journal American Ecclesiastical Review in June 1944.
Historians generally conclude that the alleged prophecies are a fabrication written shortly before they were published, perhaps in a failed bid to see Italian Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli elected Pope during the second conclave of Oct. 8, 1590 to Dec. 5, 1590 where Pope Gregory XIV was eventually elected as the successor of Pope Urban VII.
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