The prophecy of the popes attributed to Malachy: the story of a forgery
The so-called prophecy of Saint Malachy: mottoes on the popes published in 1595 by Arnold Wion, the clue of the 1590 conclave and the refutations.
Every time a conclave opens, the so-called prophecy of Saint Malachy returns to circulation, a series of short Latin mottoes supposed to describe, one after another, the popes from the twelfth century to the end of time. Its fame is great, but the history of the text is now well known: it is almost certainly a work composed at the end of the sixteenth century and attributed to an Irish saint who had lived more than four centuries earlier.
The saint and his biographer
Malachy, in Irish Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, was born around 1094 and became archbishop of Armagh, a leading figure in reforming the Irish Church along Roman lines. In 1148, on a journey to Rome, he died at Clairvaux, attended by his friend Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard soon wrote his Life, full of miracles and prophetic episodes, which contributed to his swift canonisation.
This is the first clue against authenticity. In the Life written by Bernard, which nonetheless dwells on the saint's gift of prophecy, there is no mention of any list of popes. No medieval author refers to it, and for more than four hundred years the text leaves no trace in libraries, chronicles or manuscript catalogues.
The publication of 1595
The prophecy first appears in 1595, in Venice, in the Lignum vitae of the Benedictine Arnold Wion, a history of the illustrious men of the order of Saint Benedict. Wion states that he is including it because, as far as he knew, it had not yet been printed. The list comprises 111 mottoes, from Celestine II, elected in 1143, onwards, followed by a final passage about a “Peter the Roman” who will feed the flock amid many tribulations.
Alongside the Latin mottoes Wion placed a commentary, attributed to the Dominican Alfonso Chacón, linking each phrase to a pope. The correspondences with popes up to 1590 are strikingly precise, often based on coats of arms, family names or places of origin. After that date, however, the mottoes become generic and can be applied to the popes only through more or less strained interpretations.
The conclave of 1590 and the refutations
This abrupt change suggested a hypothesis as early as the seventeenth century. The French Jesuit Claude-François Menestrier, who devoted a refutation to the subject at the end of the century, believed the text had been composed for the conclave of 1590 to favour Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli, a native of Orvieto: the corresponding motto, “ex antiquitate urbis”, would fit the Latin name of the city, Urbs vetus.
Simoncelli was not elected, and the motto was later applied to Gregory XIV. Beyond this hypothesis, widely accepted in its broad outlines, historians note that the mottoes on the earliest popes reproduce the errors of the papal chronologies available in the sixteenth century, such as that of Onofrio Panvinio, rather than reflecting direct knowledge of the twelfth century.
The prophecy of the popes is therefore an interesting document not for what it foretells but for what it reveals about Roman culture in the late sixteenth century, in which prophetic lists, heraldic emblems and political calculation were intertwined. Its lasting success shows how readily the brief and enigmatic form of the Latin motto lends itself to being filled with ever new meanings.