Leo XIV and the End of the "Prophecy of the Popes"

​With the election of Pope Leo XIV yesterday, the Catholic Church not only entered into a new pontificate, but his reign also should mark the end of a longstanding hoax. The popular “Prophecy of the Popes” attributed to St. Malachy (1094-1148) listed what the document claimed to be all of the popes who would reign from 1139 until the end of the world. Books and documentaries have proliferated about the so-called prophecy, including a 2018 documentary starring former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter. However, with the death of Pope Francis last month and the election of Pope Leo, the number of reigning popes has now exceeded the number of popes prophesied to have served before the end of the world.

​As I explained in 2018, the “prophecy” wasn’t really a prediction of the future by a medieval saint but a Renaissance-era hoax:

St. Malachy lived in Ireland in the twelfth century, but for more than four hundred years after his death, no one heard tell of any supposed prophecies of the future of the Roman Catholic Church. But in 1595, the Benedictine monk Arnold Wion (or Wyon) published a book called Lignum Vitae in which he included a long list of mottos describing past and future popes which he attributed to the long-dead Malachy. Wyon, however, did not tell his readers where the prophecies came from, where he found the text, or how old the manuscript he used was, nor if he copied it verbatim. (The show gets this wrong because they didn’t read the original.) The story given out for where the text came from was that Malachy had had a prophetic vision while in Rome during a visit in 1139 and that he bequeathed the list to Pope Innocent II, who promptly hid it in the Vatican’s archives until it was rediscovered in 1590 and published five years later.
 
[…] As it happens, that story was first told by Abbé Cucherat, a believer in the prophecy, in 1871, with no source. It seems to be his own work of speculative history based on the saint’s actual life and Cucherat’s wishful thinking about what might have happened assuming that Malachy’s vision occurred in Rome—a politically important point given that Cucherat was writing at a time when the papacy was in eclipse, losing its temporal power and territory to the new Kingdom of Italy, which had made the pope a “prisoner of the Vatican.” 

​Based on an existing 1587 document referencing the prophecies and internal evidence that they stop accurately describing popes in 1585, since it correctly lists the coat of arms for Sixtus V, the obvious conclusion is that the prophecies were written down in 1585 or 1586, not in 1139.
 
Now, however, we have reached the end of the line. Following the plain reading of the document, assigning each successive prophecy to each pope in line from 1139 onward, Francis corresponds to “Malachy’s” last pope, Petrus Romanus, when the “final persecution” of the Church will occur and “the city of the seven hills will be destroyed, and the terrible Judge shall judge his people.” Unfortunately for whoever wrote these prophecies, Francis died but Rome still stands and God has most certainly not come down for the Final Judgment.
 
Believers have already started making excuses, of course. There has been some chatter that there is no way to know whether pseudo-Malachy listed all of the popes or only highlights, while others have suggested that there are an unknown number of unnamed popes between the second to last and the last on the list. Some have tried to massage the list by adding or subtracting various antipopes or disputed papal claims.
 
But the long and short of it is that a popular end of the world prophecy seems to have run its course with the world still spinning.
 
Looking back on the 2018 documentary, which I reviewed at the time, and the predictions it made about Francis’s pontificate as “the last pope” is an exercise in seeing what gets memory-holed once a TV show goes off the air.  As I wrote at the time, the documentary “told its viewers that Muslim terrorists planned to invade Rome and kill the pope, Hell is going to open up beneath our feet, the Third World War will be starting soon, and the pope is too liberal, so God will strike down the Church for insufficient moral purity.”
 
The documentary also implied that Donald Trump would be the Last World Emperor, the mythical Christian figure who would reestablish the Roman Empire and delay the rise of the Antichrist. After Trump’s assertion that he “rules the world” and also wished to serve as Pope, a claim seen as inadvertently reflecting Antichrist mythology, you can insert your own Antichrist joke here.