Almost 900 years ago, an Irish archbishop predicted that there would be only one pope after Benedict XVI. Pope Francis is currently the papal throne, succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, the first pope in 600 years to renounce the papal title.
The Irish Archbishop Saint Malachy, according to legend, once received a revelation from above, speaking about the fate of the world and containing the names of all Roman popes.
It is worth noting that Saint Malachy, according to legends, performed various miracles during his lifetime, and the descriptions of all future popes given to them quite accurately coincided with reality up to the present time.
The current Pope Francis is the 112th Pope. For the 112th chapter of the Catholic Church, the prophecy of Saint Malachy contains frightening lines.
The prophecy says that after the 112th Pope, the city of seven hills will be destroyed and the terrible Judge will judge his people.
In these lines, the prediction of the apocalypse is quite clearly read. And this prediction refers to the near future.
It is worth noting that a number of researchers say that the prophecy of Malachy is a late text, written at the end of the 16th century. First of all, they point out as an argument the fact that the text was not previously known, and its description contains detailed descriptions of the popes exactly before the year of the publication of the text, and the predictions about further chapters of the Roman Church in it are more vague.
However, skeptical researchers have no other more accurate and specific evidence that the prophecy is false.
It is curious that the Vatican itself had a very positive attitude to the text earlier; when choosing a new pope, some representatives of the clergy looked for the correspondence of the selected chapter with the description from the text of the prophecy and, finding such, happily reported about it.
Recently, however, a number of Vatican historians have rather sharply started talking about the fact that the prophecy is fake, later and was not written by Saint Malachy, whose authority to this day in the Catholic environment is quite high.
Is this connected with new open scientific data or is it just that the Vatican is trying to soothe the people, realizing that according to the prophecy of Malachy, the Apocalypse should come literally in the coming years (or in the next couple of decades, which is a very short period on a historical scale)?
However, some people who relate to the prophecy with a certain confidence are still more optimistic – there is a theory that the lines about judgment do not apply to the whole world, but only to the institution of the papacy, and that the current Pope will be the last according to the prophecy not because that the end times will happen, but due to the fact that the Catholic Church is waiting for a global reform.
