Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who recently delivered a series of lectures on the Antichrist in Rome just a stone’s throw from the Vatican, explained that the main reason he has been speaking out publicly about the Antichrist is “because nobody else is talking about it,” adding that, for most of Christian history, would have seemed a clear sign of his impending arrival (2 Pet. 3:3–4).
In a lengthy essay titled “The Pope and the Antichrist” penned for First Things, Thiel claims that Pope Benedict XVI believed he was living in the end times.
Thiel prefaced his First Things piece, co-written with colleague Sam Wolfe, by saying “It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is,” adding, “Benedict already did that.”
The tech titan’s fascination with Pope Benedict’s views on the Antichrist and the end times is surprising given that he’s a Protestant who has acquired great wealth — he co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, and now heads Palantir — and who is also is a homosexual “married” to a male. Despite not being Catholic, Thiel has clearly immersed himself in Catholic Church teaching and history far beyond average faithful Catholics.
Thiel expressed regret that Benedict remained silent about the Antichrist throughout his papacy and waited until after his resignation to express what he believed.
Thiel noted that it wasn’t until the Pope emeritus had grown old that he “began to speak with the clarity he had hitherto withheld from all but his closest readers.” He said in a 2018 interview that “Modern society is formulating an anti-Christian creed and opposing it is punished with social excommunication. It is only natural to fear this spiritual power of Antichrist and it really needs help from the prayers of a whole diocese and the world church to resist it.” Three years earlier, out of the blue, Slovak politician Vladimír Palko had received a letter from Benedict praising his book Die Löwen Kommen (“The Lions Are Coming”). The letter included these words: “We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.”
“The Christian knows that nothing lasts forever, for this world has a beginning and an end. The apocalypse, the revelation of all secrets and the end of all interpretations, arrives eventually,” Thiel noted at the conclusion of his engrossing essay. “There is a time and a place for esotericism, whose antonym is revelation. But not in matters concerning the fate of the world — and our souls. For when the time is short and the hour late, who can hope for salvation in philosophical reticence?”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism. (CCC 675-676)
“Unlike other tech billionaires, at least publicly, (Thiel) seems to understand that the deepest conflicts of our age are not merely technological or political but also spiritual,” noted Catholic theologian and philosopher Scott Ventureyra, who responded to Thiel’s essay in Crisis Magazine by asking the question, “Why Is Peter Thiel so Preoccupied With the Antichrist?”
“Where does Thiel personally fit into this apocalyptic and Antichristic narrative?” Ventureyra wondered. “I believe there are a few possibilities worth considering. First, he may be warning us against the Antichristic temptation of our age: the utopic vision of saving humanity through increasing surveillance, AI, emergency politics, the transhumanist project, and a one-world-governance. Second, we must also consider that he may be helping pave the way in which such a world can emerge.”
“Thiel has forced us to consider whether the Antichrist is one that promises to use the wonders of technology in a way that will not only physically and financially enslave us but, most frighteningly, spiritually enslave us in a way that bears upon the destiny of our very souls,” Ventureyra concluded.