So due to my previous status as interim pope, a number of readers and friends have contacted me to ask if I intended to become pope again, and if I had any thoughts on the resignation of Pope Benedict. Well, I finally have a few minutes to myself uninterrupted, so I thought I would address these concerns.

First of all, I am now married with children, which I believe precludes me from becoming pope of any sort, interim or otherwise. But even if I were able to become pope, there is no need for an interim pope because the current Pope will apparently reign until the new pope is selected. So the question itself is moot, unless I suppose Benedict dies suddenly.

The larger question is what to make of the resignation of the Pope. Many people have conspiracy theories, mostly revolving around blackmail about what Benedict knew about the child rape scandals that have plagued the church in recent decades. I doubt that these theories have much merit. I suspect that Benedict is old and tired as he says. But his resignation goes deeper than that. His resignation directly involves the Prophecy of St. Malachy.

I have written previously about the prophecy. Let us review:

It’s gotta be tough predicting the future, via psychic means, that is. I mean surely, the further out into the future you try predicting, the more hazy the future must become. No wonder so many prophets use coded language like quatrains to try and describe what they’re seeing. It’s because they’re not really sure what they’re seeing in the first place. It’s no different than trying to gaze over long distances, where two objects standing next to each other may appear to be one.

And so undoubtedly it was with St. Malachy, who famously prophecized about every pope from his own time until the last pope ever. The funny thing is that his list has basically run out. Going sequentially from his time forward, Pope Benedict XVI is the penultimate pope, the so-called Olive Pope.

The previous pope was “De labore Solis”, or “Of the Labour of The Sun”. This correlates to Pope John-Paul II because he was born and died on a solar eclipse. The penultimate pope is described as “De Gloria Olivae” or “glory of the olive”. This has been interpreted in a number of different ways, including that the pope would hail from an olive growing region of the world, or that he would be olive skinned or even black. None of these adequately describe the current pope, though he did place an image of a Moore on his papal crest, a piece of iconography that comes form his home town in Germany.

I went on to posit that Malachy got his final pope confused with that of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who would, according to the prophecy, be overthrown by “Petrus Romanus”, or General David Petraeus. With Petraeus out of government entirely, it seems unlikely that he could conduct such a coup, though I suppose he could raise an army Aaron Burr style, theoretically. No, what I suspect is that Benedict, knowing the prophecy well, knew damned well that he wasn’t the Glory of the Olive, and decided to step aside to let the correct pope take his place.

Benedict’s only real connection to the prophecy is the Moor he placed on his papal crest, a weak connection at best. And his selection as pope was generally a surprise. In a Catholic Church that is now predominantly southern hemispheric, choosing an elderly German because he gave a nice funeral oratory for the previous pope hardly seems like a wise move. In fact, Benedict himself must have been surprised by it, and felt it impulsive. And after 5 years of it, at his advanced age, he could pretend no further. He was never meant to be pope, and so he called it quits.

In short, Rob Sama was never the interim pope, Benedict was.

And so I suspect that the Church will now obtain its true Glory of the Olive, a dark skinned pope from the Southern Hemisphere who will be able to address the issues most important to the majority of its congregants, whether it be Mormon and Evangelical encroachments into Latin America, or Islamic incursions into Africa. The new pope will be younger, more energetic, and attuned to the issues facing the Church in the Southern Hemisphere.

The bigger question, to my mind, is does Benedict get to participate in the new conclave, or does he sit it out?

Tags: Crackpot Theories, David Petraeus, Glory of the Olive, Pope Benedict XVI, Prophecy, St. Malachy

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2013 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Humor & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.