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The Last Pope: The Decline and Fall of
the Church of Rome
The Prophecies of St. Malachy for the
New Millennium
by John Hogue
Element Books, 2000
(First Published 1998)
402 Pages, US$19.95 (Softcover)
ISBN 1-86204-732-4
“Inferiae.
(Latin.) Among the Greeks and Romans, sacrifices for propitiation of the “Dii
Manes,” or souls of dead heroes; for
the pious ancients could not invent enough gods to satisfy their spiritual
needs, and had to have a number of makeshift deities, or as a sailor might say,
jury-gods, which they made out of the most unpromising materials. It was while
sacrificing a bullock to the spirit of Agamemnon that Laiaides, a priest of
Aulis, was favored with an audience of that illustrious warrior’s shade, who
prophetically recounted to him the birth of Christ and the triumph of
Christianity, giving him also a rapid but tolerably complete review of events
down to the reign of Saint Louis. The narrative ended abruptly at that point,
owing to the inconsiderate crowing of a cock, which compelled the ghosted King
of Men to scamper back to Hades. There is a fine medieval flavor to this story,
and as it has not been traced back further than
Père
Brateille, a pious but obscure writer at the court of Saint Louis, we shall
probably not err on the side of presumption in considering it apocryphal,
though Monsignor Capel’s judgment of the matter might be different, and to that
I bow—wow.”
Ambrose
Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
Introduction & Condemnation
The Papal Prophecies of St. Malachy are worth examining
in a little detail. For one thing, the prophecies have great historical
interest. For another, it’s a good bet that they will get another public airing
during the next papal conclave. We will get to the prophecies in a moment.
First, though, I must make a general disendorsement of this book.
A short passage of time can be cruel to
prophecy in unexpected ways. It was only in early 1998 that John Hogue, best
known for his interpretations of Nostradamus, completed this study of the
famous papal prophecies attributed to St. Malachy. In “The Last Pope,” Hogue
mines Nostradamus and Malachy for dramatic predictions of events occurring well
into the 21st century, but makes rather pedestrian and conditional
forecasts for the next few years. Still, by the summer of 2001, even his most
plausible prophecies had failed. John Paul II did not die around the time of
the great eclipse of the summer of 1999, for one thing. Yasser Arafat, another
predicted goner for the year 2000, is also still with us at this writing. If
you are looking for detailed information about the future, it’s pretty clear
that this book is not a good place to start.
The chief problem with “The Last Pope,”
however, is that it is mostly tendentious filler. Hogue does give the
prophecies, and maybe fifty pages of useful supplementary material. However,
the book as a whole is relentlessly anti-Catholic. The bulk of the text
consists of short outlines of the careers of the popes to whom the prophecies
allegedly refer. Hogue goes to the trouble to actively despise even the most
obscure of them. If he can’t find something bad to say about their policies or
personal lives, he makes allusions to their body lice.
The list of points on which Hogue is
untrustworthy is catholic with a small “c.” No, the 18th century
bull, “Unigenitus,” did not forbid Catholic laymen to read the Bible. No, the
Third Secret of Fatima did not hint at Masons in high places. The text of that
other famous prophecy appeared after “The Last Pope” was published, of course,
but a discrete prophet would have known better than to endorse sensational
rumors.
More generally, the author seems
singularly incurious about his favorite themes. The Inquisition was a class of
ecclesiastical court, staffed by judges who used procedures unremarkable for
the time. A lot of research has been done into what the various Inquisitions
actually did. There were episodes when Inquisitions were used in campaigns of
extraordinary repression, but the same can be said of all judicial systems. An
Inquisition was, for instance, less likely to conduct witch-hunts than were
civil courts. In Latin America, the Inquisition was often the preferred venue
for some types of action, rather as federal courts are in the US. You’ll get
none of that from Hogue. For him, any connection of a pope with a court called
an “Inquisition” is an unanswerable condemnation.
The same might be said of Hogue’s
repeated allusions to the Jewish ghettos in the Papal States and elsewhere.
Nowhere are we told that, to a large extent, they were segregated from the
inside, as we see with some Hasidic communities today. When popes made
regulations concerning the ghettos, they were usually regularizing a situation
that would otherwise be left to the arbitrary oppression of local officials and
the violence of the mob. The popes may not have had the ghetto dwellers best
interest at heart, but they were often acting in the interests of civil peace.
It was a complicated situation that lasted a very long time. “The Last Pope”
does not burden us with real history, however. Hogue finds it much more telling
to call the ghettos “concentration camps.”
Hogue ends the book by suggesting that
the Catholic Church will face a persecution in the 21st century that
will destroy it, and that this will be a good thing. That part of the book at least
holds some interest, in a horror-story kind of way. Almost all the rest is a
bile-burger.
====================================================================================
History & Criticism
Now for the fun part.
St. Malachy (1094-1148), born
Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair,
was a notable reformer of the church in Ireland during the generation before
the Anglo-Norman invasion. He visited Rome, and became the friend of the famous
St. Bernard, Abbott of Clairvaux, who wrote a biography of him. Among Malachy’s
other virtues, both tradition and contemporary report attribute the gift of
prophecy to him. However, the prophecies for which he is most famous are
unlikely to be his.
According to Bernard McGinn in his
study of medieval apocalyptic, “Visions of the End,” a fashion arose in the
fourteenth century for prophetic lists of future popes. The lists gave allegorical
names or other designations that were supposed to hint at the nature of their
reigns. The example seems to have been prophetic lists of future Byzantine
emperors, who were expected to play a major role in the events of the Endtime.
This genre was adapted for the uses of Latin Christendom by Fraticelli, radical
Franciscans who were influenced by the eschatological model of history
developed by Joachim of Fiore (1132-1202), a Cistercian monk and founder of a
monastery in Calabria. Abbot Joachim is one of the most ambiguous figures in
intellectual history, chiefly because over-eager interpreters have twisted his
ideas out of shape for 800 years. Hogue continues the ancient tradition in this
book.
There was never any consensus scenario
about the future role of the papacy, but there were common ideas. They were
often mutually exclusive: an Antichrist pope, an Angelic Pope working alone
against the Antichrist, an Angelic Pope working in conjunction with the Emperor
of the Last Days. Sometimes Rome was destroyed. Gog and Magog might roar in
from Nether Asia, if the writer was interested in things like that. None of
this colorful stuff was ever actually part of Catholic theology. Catholic
endtime dogma takes up all of five pages in the Catechism (sections 668-682),
and remains pretty much were St. Augustine left it 1,500 years ago. Rather,
these hypothetical popes were part of the bag of notions that the West had
about the future, not just in the late Middle Ages, but also through the
Reformation and into early modern times. That was when St. Malachy was probably
put into the bag.
As Hogue tells us, the prophecies were
first published in 1595. They appeared in a long work, “Lignum Vitae,” by the
Benedictine historian, Arnold Wion (or Arnold de Wyon). Dom Arnold claimed to
have discovered them in archival research. No one else, contemporary with
either him or St. Malachy, had ever seen fit to commit mention of the
prophecies to paper, or at least to any paper that has survived. Apparently,
however, rumors of the prophecies were current at the time of publication, and
reasonable people might surmise that the prophecies had been created to
influence either the conclave of 1592 (which elected Clement VIII) or in
anticipation of the next one, which occurred 1605 (and which elected Leo XI).
Hogue cites us some of the skeptical
literature about the prophecies, which began to appear soon after their
publication. We might simply leave the matter there, as an exercise in critical
technique, were it not for three points. The first is that the prophecies have
become part of Catholic legend. Like the prophecies of Nostradamus, which
appeared about 40 years before Malachy’s and to which they bear a family
resemblance, they just are not going to go away. The second is that some
elements of the Malachy prophecies do present prima facie evidence of
prescience, at least enough to require comment. The third is that, quite aside
from whatever relationship the prophecies might have to the future, they still
leave us with the question of what their author thought about the future.
Malachy’s Mottos
The nature of the prophecies is well
known. They consist of 111 mottos
in Latin, plus a concluding epigraph. These items pertain to each of the popes
(and apparently some of the antipopes) in a sequence stretching from Malachy’s
time until Judgment Day. The mottos might refer to a pope’s name, whether his
personal name, his family name, or the name he takes as pope. The motto might
hint at elements of his family crest. It might refer to his birthplace, his
nationality, or to some other geographical location associated with him. On a
higher level of abstraction, it might refer to his character, the events of his
papacy, or to his chief nemesis or outside influence. This is an awfully wide
field in which to look for a successful prophecy; in fact, it is hard to see
how a prophecy could be conclusively judged wrong. The principle of
falsification, we must remember, is a 20th century invention.
Nonetheless, some of the mottos seem to
be pointed and specific enough to give even Karl Popper pause. For instance,
motto 46, “cubus de mixtione,” “the square of mixture,” pretty clearly refers
to the family coat of arms of Boniface IX (1389-1404), which bears a diagonal
checkerboard three columns in width. Motto 21, “Hierusalem Campaniae,” at least
looks like “Jerusalem of Champagne,” and so is a plausible fit for Urban IV
(1261-1264), who was born in the Champagne district of France and would later
become Patriarch of Jerusalem. On the other hand, some are just obscure. Motto
49, “flagellum solis,” “scourge of the sun,” is in the right place to refer to
Alexander V, an antipope during the great schism (though there is some argument
about whether his pontificate may actually have been legitimate). Nothing in
his history clearly merits the motto; his coat of arms features what might be a
sun, though it looks more like a star.
The chief argument that the prophecies
were composed in the late 16th century is that the nature of the successes
claimed for the mottos changes after their publication. We get far fewer
obvious match ups with personal names and coats of arms. We get more claims of
matches with the events of a papacy or of personal character.
Consider two relatively recent popes.
Motto 96, “Peregrinus Apostolicus,” “an apostolic wanderer,” would correspond
to the papacy of Pius VI (1775-1799). In a medallion struck in 1782, he uses
the term himself, referring to a trip he made to Vienna to confer with the
emperor. Later, of course, he would be taken from Rome by French troops in the
wars following the French Revolution. He died in captivity. In this instance,
the motto has an apparent application, though there is also some likelihood
that Pius was familiar with the prophecy and sought to fulfill it in some
fashion. In contrast, possibly the least helpful motto in the whole list is
number 99, “vir religiosus,” “a religious man,” which is in the place that
would correspond to the papacy of Pius VIII (1829-1830). Still, the mottos for
the last two centuries do offer what seem to be a few tantalizing
correspondences.
There is an obvious reason for this. In
the view of the author of the prophecies, the end of the age draws near with
the end of the list. Therefore, the cast of characters from Catholic legend
about the Endtime make their appearance. Meanwhile, in the real world, the
papacies in question overlap with high modernity, which is an unusually
dramatic period. Hogue notes the acceleration of history and its rough fit with
the end of the prophecy list. His argument is not helped, however, by his
invocation of the approach of the Age of Aquarius, if for no other reason than
that the point at which that age begins seems infinitely flexible. (He begins
to see its influence in the Renaissance.)
The tale of mottos corresponding to
papacies beginning in the 20th century runs like this:
Number 103, “ignis ardens,” “burning
fire,” corresponds to the papacy of St. Pius X (1903-1914), who himself had
more than one well-reported apocalyptic vision. Paul Johnson, in his “History
of Christianity,” characterized this Pius as both the last of the great
reactionary popes and the first of the populist ones. Like his contemporary, US
President Theodore Roosevelt, he turned what had long been a rather staid and
formal office into a permanent spectacle. Pius X’s record runs from the
suppression of theological modernism to the beginning of the long project of
reforming the liturgy. For those in need of a surfeit of wonders, Halley’s
Comet put on a spectacular show in 1912, thus providing all the burning fire a
reasonable man could ask for.
Number 104, “religio depopulata,”
“religion depopulated,” is the motto Hogue ascribes to Benedict XV (1914-1922),
who had the bad luck to be the pope during the First World War. For someone
seeking to apply the motto to Benedict’s papacy, the key point might not be the
considerable demographic effects of the war on Europe, or even the fact that a
large slice of Christendom declared itself atheist on his watch. Rather, it
might be that, for the first time since antiquity, the cultural life of
educated Europeans was no longer predominately Christian. Although Pius tried
to arrange a negotiated end to the war almost as soon as it started, Hogue
spends several pages criticizing him for not seeking to end it in some dramatic
fashion. He says the pope should have marched with his the college of cardinals
into Flanders and come between the opposing armies. Some of the strange ideas
in “The Last Pope” are beyond even the power of prophecy to explain.
Number 105, “fides intrepida,”
“intrepid faith,” belongs to Pius XI (1922-1939). This is the pope who finally
came to terms with the Italian government (in the form of the Mussolini regime)
about the status of Vatican City. He also signed a concordat with Hitler’s new
government in 1933. Neither of these acts was extraordinary at the time:
Mussolini was a respectable tyrant in those days, while the German concordat
would have provided some space for civil society, had Hitler honored it. As it
was, Pius did not give an inch: he is chiefly remembered for exciting the
Nazi’s ire with his encyclical, “Mit brennender Sorge,” “With Burning Sorrow,”
which criticized the regime.
Number 106, “pastor angelicus,”
“angelic shepherd,” may excite the ire of many people today, since it is
applied to Pius XII (1939-1958). “Angelic” is an eschatological title, one that
the High Middle Ages applied to the chief enemy of Antichrist. There is an
enormous file from the period of the Second World War of this pope’s public
statements condemning racial and religious persecution, atrocities against
civilians and particular acts of the Axis governments. There is an even larger
file of his private efforts to rescue the subjects of Nazi persecution, Jews in
particular, which in Italy met with substantial success. Nonetheless, for
reasons chiefly connected with the liberal campaign to discredit the papacy
because of unhappiness with the policies of John Paul II, Pius XII has been
accused of silence, indifference, antisemitism and pro-Nazi sympathies.
Number 107, “pastor et nauta,”
“shepherd and sailor” is a motto of which its bearer, John XXIII (1958-1963),
was well aware. “Shepherd,” like “religious man,” is something that should be
said of any pope. The “sailor” element was provided by John’s stint as
Patriarch of Venice. John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the dust
from which has not settled to this day. John is almost the only pope that Hogue
can stomach. Hogue accepts the liberal thesis that, had John lived longer, he
would have reformed the Catholic Church out of existence.
Number 108, “flos florum,” “flower of
flowers,” is one of the relatively rare hits in the post-1600 Malachy list for
a pope’s coat of arms: Paul VI (1963-1978) had three fleur-de-lys on his. The
motto has no obvious bearing on his papacy. It might be said of Paul VI that he
extended the hand of friendship to the modern world and had it bitten off.
Number 109, “de medietate lunae,” “from
the half-moon, from the middle of the moon,” is applied to the likable but
short-lived John Paul I (1978). No one knows what this man would actually have
done had he sat on St. Peter’s throne for more than a few weeks. Nonetheless,
liberals have fantasized about glorious alternative histories, in which an
amiable John Paul I would have spent many years defining dogmas out of
existence and turning the actual operation of the church over to people like
themselves. Conspiracy theorists have outdone them, saying that reactionary
clericalists murdered him to prevent these good things from happening, or to
cover up an investigation he was about to launch into Mafia penetration of the
Vatican Bank, or something. One could relate the motto to his name by observing
that he was born Albino Luciani (“white light,” more or less) and that he once
was the priest of a town called “Belluno” (which looks like “good moon”). On
the other hand, “half moon” might be a good title for a cryptic and crepuscular
reign that never really was.
Number 110, “de labore solis,” “from
the labor of the sun,” is the title that the Malachy list assigns to John Paul
II (1978 to at least 2001). Hogue spends a great deal of time condemning this
most important of 20th century popes for his failure to reverse the
Church’s stand on artificial contraception, the ordination of women, Vatican
oversight of Catholic dogma, and other topics simple enough for newspaper
columnists to understand. It is, perhaps, too much to expect any discussion of
the topics on which the pope has spent most of his time, such as the
phenomenology of ethics and ecclesiology. Hogue also speculates on how the
motto applies to this pope; he suggests that JPII was born during an eclipse,
and will also die during one.
For myself, I would suggest that the
motto is an oblique reference to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard
(Matt. 20). Some of the workers are destined, fairly or not, to labor during
the hottest part of the day, but receive no more reward than the rest. The
point is not whether such an interpretation tells us anything about the actual
papacy; it is that the prophecy’s author was signaling the continuation of an
extended terminal crisis.
The Future
Number 111, “gloria olivae,” “the glory
of the olive” brings us into the future, when neither the actual names of popes
nor regnal dates are available. Hogue suggests “John Paul III,” which might be
plausible from a man with a better record. Hogue begins to wax loquacious with
dates of wars and rumors of wars, based chiefly on his reading of Nostradamus.
He suggests that, in a last reactionary spasm, the next pope will declare the
Virgin Mary “Co-Mediatrix” with Jesus. He suggests that the credibility of the
papacy will be undermined by the revelation of a great scandal. You can take
that or leave it, but the really interesting point is what the author of the
list meant by the motto.
Hogue directs our attention to several
mentions of the olive tree in scripture. It can mean the body of believers, Jewish
or Christian. It could be a reference to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus gave
the extended statement on the Endtime called the Olivet Discourse. I would
suggest, though, that the obvious reference is to Rev. 11:4, which speaks of
the Two Witnesses who will preach and otherwise restrain evil in the latter
days. They are “two olive trees and two lamp-stands.” In medieval speculation,
the Witnesses were sometimes identified with the pope and a secular figure,
usually the emperor.
Number 112, the last pope of all, does
not get a motto. Instead, he gets an unambiguous name and a bit of narrative.
St. Malachy, or Dom Wion, or possibly some combination of the two, have this to
say about “Petrus Romanus,” “Peter the Roman”:
“In persecutione extrema Sacrae Romanae
Ecclesiae sedebit Petrus Romanus qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus;
quibus transactis, civitas septicollis dirvetur; et judex tremendus judicabit
populum.”
“During the last persecution of the
Holy Roman Church, there shall sit Peter of Rome, who shall feed the sheep
amidst many tribulations, and when these have passed, the City of the Seven
Hills shall be utterly destroyed, and the awful Judge will judge the
people.”
There is not really much to add to
this, so Hogue adds quite a bit. He speculates that this Peter II will be
trying, unsuccessfully, to provide relief from famine and ecological collapse
caused in large part by the Church’s refusal to countenance artificial birth
control. This attitude will so outrage a desperate world that the Church will
be finally and irrevocably suppressed, for the good of the planet. As Hogue
puts it, “What the Church sees as its final persecution could actually be the
next quantum awakening of human intelligence.”
One of the few insights to be gleaned from
a reading of “The Last Pope” is a sense of the ossification of the mind of
religious liberalism. Religious progressives adopted the Malthusian thesis on
overpopulation in the middle of the 20th century and will not let
go, no matter the state of the evidence.
Today Europe in general and Italy and particular have birth rates well
below replacement level. A canny prophet would have bet on a pro-natalist
backlash in Europe by the 2020s or 2040s, when all this is supposed to be
happening. A wise historian would notice that the popes who were most insistent
on maintaining dogma were also the most popular. If traditional and New Age
religion are to be in a Darwinian struggle for survival in the 21st
century, there cannot be much doubt about which will win.
Finally, what are we to do with the
notion of prescience in general? As a matter of physics, the arguments against
foreseeing the future are the same as those against faster-than-light travel:
both would allow for effects to precede their cause, and so create temporal
paradoxes. However, it is not strictly true that faster-than-light travel is
impossible, since some quantum effects move between two points instantaneously.
Special Relativity is saved, however, by the fact that information cannot
travel faster than light. Quantum effects are random. They can be used to
encrypt information, but are not information themselves. This could be a useful
property: quantum effects could instantaneously provide a completely secure key
to a receiver, but the information to be decrypted could arrive no faster than
light. In other words, you may be able to receive information that is real
information, but that cannot mean anything until ordinary reality catches up
with it.
Prescience could work like this. There
may be real perceptions of future events, but they cannot mean anything until
the future becomes the present. Or, as Cardinal Newman dryly observed about
biblical prophecy, “Events interpret the text.”
Sometimes.
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Copyright ©
2001 by John J. Reilly
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