The latest word on the pope prophecy circuit is that there is going to be a solar eclipse during John Paul II’s funeral. Perhaps even creepier than this is that supposedly there was an eclipse also on the day he was born. People are talking about how well this matches St. Malachy’s prophecies, because in it, JP2 is nicknamed in Latin “De Labore Solis” which means the “toil” of the sun - and has also been translated as “eclipse” of the sun.

Besides just the prophecies about the popes itself, the other intriguing part of Malachy’s predictions is that it may have been a forgery. Certain people seem to believe that it was crafted by the Jesuits in the 1600’s, in order to retroactively bring honor to popes past. The theory seems to stem from the fact that though Malachy lived in the 12th century, the prophecies didn’t surface publicly until the 1600’s, and were not mentioned in the biography of Malachy, written by another saint. They also say that the correlations of the popes to their prophesied codenames up till that point was extremely straightforward - as though they’d been written after the fact. After that time period, people had to go to much greater lengths to find correlations.

So the weirdest part is that it’s possible that a probable forgery is now being used as the “real deal” to make guesses about who the next pope will be. His codename is “De Gloria Olivae,” or “The Glory of the Olives.”

If this really is a forgery, it’s kind of a testament to two things. One is the tendency of the human mind to find elaborate connections, no matter how improbable - clinically and derogatively referred to as apophenia. The second is the notion that if a forgery manages to make it into the public realm of consciousness, then it almost becomes irrelevant that it was faked to begin with. Or perhaps the argument could be made that the Jesuits who forged the list, despite their intentions, were accidentally receiving true divine revelations about the future - and the joke was ultimately on them.

In the end, whatever direction you try to go with this prophecy attributed to Malachy, you end up with really interesting results and social phenomena.