St Malachy: The prophet who predicted all the popes
St Malachy's Prophecy of the Popes has fascinated and divided scholars for centuries. Here's what we know about the man, the manuscript, and the mystery.
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Throughout history, religious figures have claimed to foresee future events. Few such claims have proved as enduring, or as divisive, as the Prophecy of the Popes, a document attributed to the 12th-century Irish archbishop St Malachy. Each time a new pope is elected, the prophecy resurfaces, and the speculation begins again.
Sky HISTORY examines the life of the man behind the prophecy – and asks whether this celebrated document is genuine vision or an elaborate forgery.
Who was St Malachy?
St Malachy was a 12th-century Irish papal legate and archbishop, born in Armagh – now Northern Ireland – in 1094. His real name was Máel Máedoc úa Morgair. He was ordained as a priest in 1119 and consecrated as bishop in County Down in 1123.
His rise through the Church was not without controversy. When Archbishop Celsus of Armagh nominated Malachy as his successor before his death in 1129, it broke with the tradition of hereditary succession that had long governed the role. Resistance was fierce, and it wasn't until 1132 that Malachy finally took up the position.
He went on to become one of Ireland's most significant religious figures – founding monasteries, undertaking important missionary work, and building a close friendship with Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the medieval era's most influential theologians. Malachy died in 1148 while visiting Bernard at Clairvaux Abbey in France. He was canonised as a saint in 1190 by Pope Clement III – the first Irish-born saint to receive official canonisation.
The Prophecy of the Popes
Around 1139, Malachy travelled to Rome on a pilgrimage, during which he is said to have experienced a vision of all future popes in sequence – right through to the end of days. According to tradition, he recorded these visions in a manuscript when he returned to Ireland.
The document then disappeared for nearly four centuries, until it was apparently discovered by Arnold de Wyon, a Benedictine monk and historian, who published it in 1595 and attributed it to Malachy.
The prophecy consists of 112 short Latin phrases, each said to describe a future pope. It begins with Celestine II, elected in 1143, and ends with a figure called ‘Peter the Roman’ – described as the last pope before the final judgement:
'Peter the Roman, who will nourish the sheep in many tribulations; when they are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The end.'
The phrases themselves range from vague to highly cryptic. Some examples appear to align with papal history – the prophecy's phrase for Pope John Paul II, ‘de labore solis’ (meaning ‘from the labour of the sun’), has been linked to the fact that he was born and buried during solar eclipses. But critics point out that such connections require considerable interpretive effort, and that failures to match are simply overlooked. When a phrase doesn't fit, proponents find a way to make it fit; when it does, they treat it as proof.
Why most scholars believe the prophecy is a forgery
The scholarly consensus is largely settled: the Prophecy of the Popes is almost certainly a forgery.
The most significant problem is the four-century gap between Malachy's supposed visions and the document's discovery. A manuscript of this nature – purportedly predicting the entire future of the papacy – would be extraordinary. It is difficult to explain why no chronicler or historian mentioned it in all the centuries between Malachy's death and 1595. One widely held theory is that the document was fabricated and planted specifically to influence the 1590 papal election, which would neatly explain both the timing of its emergence and the suspicious precision of its phrases for popes before that date.
Papal historian Anura Guruge has written plainly on the subject:
'The fact is that Malachy is a Catholic saint, so some Catholics attribute magical or spiritual qualities to [the vision]. What they don't tend to grasp is that more than likely, the entire thing is a forgery.'
The Church itself takes a similarly dismissive view. Father James Weiss, a professor of church history at Boston College, told the Huffington Post: 'Theologically and organisationally, the church pays no attention to this.' His colleague Dr Thomas Groome, chair of the Department of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College, is more colourful in his assessment, describing the prophecies as 'a grand old fun tale that has about as much reliability as the morning horoscope.'
The prophecy is almost certainly not what it claims to be. But as a historical hoax – one that has resurfaced with every papal election for over four centuries – it tells its own story about our enduring fascination with prophecy, power and the end of days.
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