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The Last Pope - The Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome

The Last Pope, the Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome:
The Prophecies of St. Malachy for the New Millennium
By John Hogue
Element. xx + 400 pages. £16.99
ISBN 1 86204 202 0

Around 1590, there emerged in Italy a series of prophetic mottoes attributed to Malachy, primate of Ireland, who died in 1148, after visiting Rome in 1140.

The mottoes, supposedly descriptive of Popes, fitted pre-1590 ones well, and sceptical historians, such as Herbert Thurston S.J., in his book The War and The Prophets (1915), believe they were written for use in papal electoral politics of that era. But they are often revived in popular Romanism, especially at papal election time, and there are now only two mottoes to go before the predicted destruction of Rome.

Trying to fit a motto to a pope is a game with many chances of winning - links can be sought in heraldry, place names, character, or any circumstance in the pope's life.

John Hogue, having published several books on the cloudy prophecies of Nostradamus (1503-1566) has turned his attention to the mottoes, as the millennium approaches and the present Bishop of Rome ails. Though baptised as an infant into the Roman Church, he reviews the history of the Popes with a critical eye that will usually please Protestants, though he is by faith an oriental meditator, with a confused 'New Age' perspective on the early church.

Hogue doesn't accept all Thurston's points, but admits that the Malachy connection is unhistorical. However, he still feels that the percentage of hits in the later mottoes is meaningful (p.373), and even struggles to explain how 'Pastor Angelicus' could apply to Pius X11.

Outside Scripture, time falsifies all prophecies and already, for example, the present pope has survived August's total eclipse (p.328). While Hogue's book will be of some value to serious students of the vagaries of Catholic prophets, it will be read chiefly by thousands of misguided seekers. But they, like believers, can instead best understand the signs of the times by a prayerful attention to what Scripture says.

Leslie Price

Leslie Price survived the 1970s when psychics had predicted the destruction of New York, California, Glastonbury, England, etc.