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.
