A reader left a good comment on my post about Benedict XVI fulfilling the Gloria Olivae portion of St. Malachy’s Papal Prophecy. I’d brought up the fact that some scholars believe this prophecy is actually forged, but that this doesn’t make much difference to people. The commenter wrote in response:

Even if the St. Malachy prophecy is a hoax from 1600’s, don’t you find it odd that current popes fit the descriptions of the hoax? Are you suggesting Popes are elected and/or take names which fulfill a forged prophecy?

Of course I find it “odd” or I wouldn’t have spent so much time researching and writing about it. I’m of the opinion at this point though, that whether or not it was forged, it’s still pretty damned interesting. I follow the creed laid out by Jacques Vallee with regard to the investigation of weird phenomena: that your responsibility is first and foremost to look at how real people are affected by this, rather than worry about whether it is objectively provable. What I mean by that is whether or not it’s a hoax doesn’t matter to me. It’s still been followed for hundreds of years - perhaps now more than ever. Just because something is a fiction doesn’t preclude it from having factual effects on people’s lives.

I’m not a scholar and thus am in no position to prove or disprove the authenticity of Malachy’s prophecy. What I can do though is look at different sides of it, and consider the implications. Perhaps the most interesting scenario of all is if it really is fake, but that people since then have been trying to make it real. A reader named ‘crasspastor‘ in another comment wrote:

Keep in mind too, that nobody ever said the book of Revelation and other biblical prophecies couldn’t be self fulfilling.

Consider for a moment that this is true. That what originally started as a form of Apocalyptic protest literature, was later seized upon by people in power to establish their own legitimacy. By playing upon the fear and superstition of works like the Book of Revelations, people in power are actually intentionally trying to push our centuries-long programmed buttons.

The other more rational possibility to consider is that none of the “reasoning” behind the fulfillment of prophecies usually makes a lot of sense. Let’s use the connective line between Malachy and Benedict XVI as an example. The only thing “Malachy” ever said was “De Gloria Olivae” - the Glory of the Olives. This in itself is essentially meaningless. It’s the equivalent of me going into a trance and saying “Shoe Underwear Rocket” and having this be a prediction about what stock will be popular in 20 years on the market.

Now, if I was a trusted source, people would spend 20 years scouring over companies which might meet this pronouncement. The question is, how did Malachy become a trusted source? This is where the forgery comes into play. Supposedly Malachy gave this prophecy in the 12th century directly to the Pope himself. But nobody mentioned this in Malachy’s biography written some years after his life. In fact, this list of popes didn’t come out until over 400 years later. By this time, Malachy’s list had retroactively prophesied popes who had already come and gone. But the initial retroactive set of his predictions were not at all as vague as the ones after that. They were in fact quite clear and obvious correlations to the names and deeds of the popes who’d come in the intervening 400 years. Thus, Malachy’s prophecies became a “trusted source.” To use my analogy above, all I would have to do is to put together a list of all my stock market “prophecies” - basing it solely on the matter of historical record. If I could fake like I predicted these way before it happened, it would make my “Shoe Underwear Rocket” gambit seem much more plausible because I’d been “right” so far.

What happened after Malachy’s prophecy was released in the 1600’s is that it supported the Jesuit favorite for the papacy. Don’t have who that was in front of me, but the info’s out there. Presumably, once that worked out, people kept the prophecy on the back burner, looking for correlations to all the popes who came after that. The weird part, of course, is how many of them seem to be “proven” right by history. Like John Paul II being “De Labore Solis” and his birth and funeral coinciding with eclipses of the sun. This begs the question of whether or not there’s something really to them. Or, are we just really damned good at finding correlations when we want to, but really awesome at overlooking obvious ones when we don’t want to (ie, George Bush stolen elections; government foreknowledge of 9/11, etc).

UPDATE!

Comments by the reader below reminded me of a point I neglected to write about above. The connection between Malachy and Benedict XVI is even more tenuous than described above. Besides the possible forgery, let’s look at the other connection. The Benedictine monks have been saying (for an undisclosed period of time) that “De Gloria Olivae” would come from their order. The reason being that they or a faction of them are sometimes called Olivetans, by somebody somewhere. Now that Natzinger has chosen the name Benedict, everybody’s (okay, well, not everybody) going nuts because this somehow “fulfills the prophecy.” But does it really? Benedict himself is not actually OF the Benedictine order, nor has any other plausible connection to olives been put forth yet. Even if he WAS of the Benedictine order, what does that prove? Does it prove the Malachy’s “Shoe Underwear Rocket” prophecy is correct, or does it prove they had a secret hand in the election of the pope, or does it prove none of these things at all?

Personally, I don’t see anything as being “merely” coincidental. Just look back at the article I wrote recently on the Kabbalah and synchronicity. I think what we DO need to realize though is that prophecy does not function according to “logical” standards. To say Malachy therefore Benedictines therefore Ratzinger is not a logically consistent or provable statement. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t have worth though, because it does. It’s an example of the non-rational connective networking style of thinking. I think it’s actually much more powerful than rationalism at times for unearthing archetypal and unconscious material - but it’s not logical. And it’s not a replacement to logical thinking. They complement each other. Now that we have logic, let’s use it, and let’s combine both styles together conscientiously and with fun and freedom as our purpose.