Positive Liberty

Wow. For the last few days my server stats reached all-time highs.

The reason? I seem to be one of the few bloggers talking about Saint Malachy’s alleged papal prophecies, a topic I have covered here, here, and here. As a historian, it’s nice to feel useful.

It is said that Malachy, an 12th-century Irish saint, wrote a short description of all the popes from his own day up to the Apocalypse (here is most of it in English and Latin). Intriguingly, even the Catholic Church has issued favorable statements about Malachy’s prophecy, despite its apparent prediction that the world will end during the reign of the pope following Benedict XVI.

But Malachy almost certainly did not write the prophecies that bear his name; scholarly opinion has it that they originated in the late sixteenth century. It’s important to keep this in mind as we continue: Would God really choose to speak through a forgery that essentially lies to the reader?

Worse, the last two lines–forecasting an imminent Apocalypse–seem to have been added in the nineteenth century, a forgery upon a forgery. Thus the tagline “Gloria olivae,” that of “Petrus Romanus,” his successor, and the prediction of the Apocalypse, had nothing to do with the original prophecy. Would God really choose to speak by appending one forged document to another?

Now, the nineteenth century was an awfully convenient time to tack on a few lines about the end of the world. In 1820, when it now seems that the new material was composed, there were but sixteen popes forecast until the end of the world, a useful number indeed: It was near enough to enchant the faithful, but far enough that no one then living would be called to account for a failure.

So it is with all well-written prophecies, for the art of prophecy means never having to say you’re sorry. It means carefully hedging your bets and speaking so cryptically that, with a large flock of eager faithful trailing afterward, a confirmation of some sort can never be far behind.

The direct hits in a prophecy, or at least those aspects of it that seem to ring the truest, get exaggerated all out of proportion. Those elements that have no particular relevance are ignored, or perhaps put off until the future, in which time they will… eventually… be fulfilled. But in the fullness of time, don’t all things eventually happen, kind of?

This combination of selective reading and constant deferral of unfulfilled prophecies offers the appropriately vague prophetic statement an oracular quality that does much to fool the gullible. While Malachy’s prophecies can’t be deferred indefinitely, for we are led to believe that they are an ordered sequence, what they lack in temporal flexibility they more than recoup in vagueness.

For example, some are now claiming that Joseph Ratzinger’s papal name–Benedict XVI–is a fulfillment of pseudo-Malachy’s prophecy. Recall that its prediction for the current pope is merely the laconic “Gloria olivae.” The credulous are now pointing out that the Benedictine Order has sometimes been known as the Olivetians, and thus the connection is made.

I hate to rain on everyone’s pre-apocalyptic parade, but… You guys are nuts. And you’re making your faith look ridiculous. Stop it. Now. (Or don’t stop it. You know perfectly well that a skeptic like me only needs a big bucket of popcorn to make the whole affair more entertaining than a night at the movies. So carry on as long as you like, please…)

But as I was saying, Ratzinger was never a Benedictine. Nor was the original pope Benedict a Benedictine. Nor were any of the Benedicts Benedictines (and most of the early Benedicts aren’t anything to rejoice over, either). Finally, Saint Benedict, the founder of the order, never was a pope.

“Benedict” is a name, a very old and rather common name through much of the Church’s history. Seeing a coincidence here is rather like finding mystical import in the fact that our first president’s name was George — and, hey wow, so it is with our current president.

The whole “Benedict/Benedictine” thing may seem an arresting coincidence, but if pseudo-Malachy continues to guess correctly, the next pope will of course be Peter the Roman, whose reign will witness the Last Judgment. Pseudo-Malachy says so explicitly, at least in his 1820 incarnation.

We gather that the Last Judgment will be rather hard to overlook, that coincidences or mistaken identities will be unlikely, and that attempts at deception will be exceedingly difficult, what with corpses rising from their graves, Jesus Christ returning in glory, and each of us departing for an eternity in Heaven or Hell.

You can’t fudge stuff like that, which means that pseudo-Malachy’s next prediction is at long last subject to falsification, the scientific process whereby bunkum is eliminated. Prophecies fare poorly in the hard realm of empiricism, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Catholic Church–which tolerates pseudo-Malachy only so long as he keeps the faithful believing–has conveniently disavowed the coming Apocalypse:

It has been noticed concerning Petrus Romanus, who according to St. Malachy’s list is to be the last pope, that the prophecy does not say that no popes will intervene between him and his predecessor designated Gloria olivae. It merely says that he is to be the last, so that we may suppose as many popes as we please before “Peter the Roman.”

It’s a nice, cautious step, but it also means we must exempt pseudo-Malachy from any empirical test–indefinitely. It’s also an interpretive approach that is nowhere justified by the text of the prophecy.

Nonetheless, this is in keeping with a longstanding tradition in the Catholic Church, which forbids official pronouncements on the date of the Apocalypse. By doing so, they avoid the repeated embarrassment suffered by the Jehovah’s Witnesses during the twentieth century; their faith saw no fewer than eight predicted dates for the Apocalypse both come and go in the space of a few decades. Incredibly, their membership has increased despite these disconfirmations. Or perhaps because of them.

For further reading on prophecies, I recommend this page from the University of Virginia’s New Religious Movements Project. But enough of the future for me; I’m returning to the past. I’ve got a dissertation to write, and I do hope it will be done before the Apocalypse.