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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 2, 2008 11:12:37 GMT
I personally regard the prophecies regarding future popes attributed to St Malachy as suspect, to say the least. Do we have any alternative views out there?
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Post by monkeyman on Jul 3, 2008 22:41:22 GMT
They are nonsense Alaisdir..but so many Catholics believe in them. Like any bit of nonsense one could dream up its not hard to make some sort of sense from them in retrospect. So which one are we on now..."Glory of the Olive"? I doubt this refers to a Bavarian who has ascended the Throne of St Peter...just a feeling...though my impression of him is as a Great Pope.
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Post by falconer on Jul 7, 2008 18:24:44 GMT
They are nonsense Alaisdir..but so many Catholics believe in them. Like any bit of nonsense one could dream up its not hard to make some sort of sense from them in retrospect. So which one are we on now..."Glory of the Olive"? I doubt this refers to a Bavarian who has ascended the Throne of St Peter...just a feeling...though my impression of him is as a Great Pope. I've just asked a friend of mine from Opus Dei and he's explained the prophecy is correct. If you look at Glory of the Olive and count the letters, including spaces you get 18. The 18th letter of the alphabet is R! Not only that but Bavaria is the number one importer of virgin olive oil which Frau Ratzinger used to cook little Joseph's food to make him grow up small and healthy! But there's more.....J is the 10th letter of the alphabet. If you count ten from the G in Glory you get to the t in the. That leaves "he" which is short for Herr! Herr Ratzinger is the term for a male in Deutschland! Glory of the Olive means someone who is not from Italy since if they were from Italy they would be sick of olives and would not see any Glory in them at all. You'll only hear visitors in Ireland talking about the "glory" of the potato so that's more proof. Also if you count ten letters and spaces backwards from the "e" in olive you get to "f". F used to be used in place of the modern "s" which in this case stands in for the "z" in Ratzinger because its a "z" with curves only backwards (look on the back of a Guinneff. bottle.) It all makes perfect sense......
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jul 7, 2008 18:48:21 GMT
Falconer, I have to say that you have hit just the right note of derision as far as these "prophecies" are concerned. I can only admire the time and effort you must have put into that post. What dismays me is that you would no doubt take just the same tone when discussing a lot of other things to which Catholics (or at least most members here) would give a great deal more credence.
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Post by falconer on Jul 7, 2008 19:53:31 GMT
Falconer, I have to say that you have hit just the right note of derision as far as these "prophecies" are concerned. I can only admire the time and effort you must have put into that post. What dismays me is that you would no doubt take just the same tone when discussing a lot of other things to which Catholics (or at least most members here) would give a great deal more credence. Hold on thar: you can't sanction the above on the basis that you do not share the beliefs of the prophecy proponents but exempt yourself when it comes to someone who does not share yours! It would be a very boring world if everybody had the same opinion.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jul 7, 2008 21:49:24 GMT
It would be a very boring world if everybody had the same opinion. Or the Kingdom of God on Earth, as we would call it.
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Post by falconer on Jul 8, 2008 20:54:32 GMT
Or the Kingdom of God on Earth, as we would call it. If this is the earthly version and if it is a reflection of the non-earthly one does that mean their ice caps are melting too? Or is this one being messed up as an experiment? What's George Bush for? Is he there only to serve as a warning to others?
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Post by monkeyman on Jul 8, 2008 21:49:40 GMT
They are nonsense Alaisdir..but so many Catholics believe in them. Like any bit of nonsense one could dream up its not hard to make some sort of sense from them in retrospect. So which one are we on now..."Glory of the Olive"? I doubt this refers to a Bavarian who has ascended the Throne of St Peter...just a feeling...though my impression of him is as a Great Pope. I've just asked a friend of mine from Opus Dei and he's explained the prophecy is correct. If you look at Glory of the Olive and count the letters, including spaces you get 18. The 18th letter of the alphabet is R! Not only that but Bavaria is the number one importer of virgin olive oil which Frau Ratzinger used to cook little Joseph's food to make him grow up small and healthy! But there's more.....J is the 10th letter of the alphabet. If you count ten from the G in Glory you get to the t in the. That leaves "he" which is short for Herr! Herr Ratzinger is the term for a male in Deutschland! Glory of the Olive means someone who is not from Italy since if they were from Italy they would be sick of olives and would not see any Glory in them at all. You'll only hear visitors in Ireland talking about the "glory" of the potato so that's more proof. Also if you count ten letters and spaces backwards from the "e" in olive you get to "f". F used to be used in place of the modern "s" which in this case stands in for the "z" in Ratzinger because its a "z" with curves only backwards (look on the back of a Guinneff. bottle.) It all makes perfect sense...... Yeah good luck with that Falconer P.S. Would be highly surprised if any Opus Dei member worth his mettle gives that creedance but the times they are a changin'...
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 9, 2008 11:36:56 GMT
It's very simple really...if the next pope is indeed 'Petrus Romanus', then we're all in trouble.
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Post by Harris on Nov 3, 2008 16:54:18 GMT
I don’t think any of the prophecies are credible.
I have always regarded them as interesting stories, but nothing more.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Apr 22, 2009 11:51:44 GMT
I don’t think any of the prophecies are credible. I have always regarded them as interesting stories, but nothing more. Agreed. They are a little bit like conspiracy theories in the secular world - often fascinating, but a total side-track.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 24, 2009 11:57:45 GMT
John Reilly has a nice critique of the prophecies in connection with a dotty New Age book which was using the prophecies to argue that the Papacy was about to become extinct and that was a Good Thing. (This sort of New Age interest in alleged Catholic signs and wonders which are then reinterpreted in pantheist or occultist terms is by no means unique; I believe quite a few New Agers take an interest in Medugorje). Reilly includes a brief history of the prophecies, noting the suspicious details that St. Bernard of Clairvaux makes no mention of them in his Life of St. Malachy (whom he knew personally and admired) and that the prophecies become much less specific for Popes after their first known publication at the end of the sixteenth century. www.johnreilly.info/tlp.htm Similarly, there is a collection of prophecies attributed to St. Columcille which attracted much attention for their predictions of such nineteenth-century phenomena as railways and steamships. This accuracy becomes less remarkable when it is realised that they were forged in the mid-nineteenth century by a Gaelic scribe from Co. Louth called Nicholas O'Kearney, who threw in some hopeful predictions about the imminent defeat of the British Empire in war and the destruction of London by an invading army, etc. I think a pamphlet about O'Kearney's career was published in Dundalk by a local history society 10-15 years ago, but I cannot recall the author's name.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on May 27, 2009 10:02:31 GMT
Nicholas O'Kearney? I seem to recall a 'blood and guts' poem by him on the Leaving Cert Irish syllabus way back when, which was in the voice of a woman from Drogheda lamenting the slaughter of her infant child by a Cromwellian soldier following Drogheda's 9/11 in 1649 (no kidding - Drogheda fell to Cromwell on 11 September and this was Ireland's second city at the time).
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2009 10:45:17 GMT
Yes, that's the same Nicholas O'Kearney. I remember that poem as well; I think he claimed it was authentically seventeenth-century, but the prolonged evocation of the speaker's feelings, rather than a bare and brutal descrition assumed to speak for itself, is very Victorian.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 28, 2009 7:51:35 GMT
This business regarding Nicholas O'Kearney reminds me of something else, a little off the point here but pertinent to the general discussion on Irish Catholicism. O'Kearney was scholarly, but didn't take into account that Irish, like English, is a changing language. It may not change at the same pace, but it changes none the less. To take an example, there are points in the Constitution where the Irish language seems stronger or weaker than the English (and the former takes precedence in the event of a dispute). But the point is not the sense of these words in 2009, but what they meant legally in 1937.
There was a current that all things Irish reached back to the dawn of time and remained unadulterated since then. Many people believed this. I think that Nicholas O'Kearney was one of many who cashed into this and that if the truth be told, the author of the prophecies of St Malachy was similar (I believe these date from the 16th or 17th centuries).
In one sense, I wish some of the right wing tendency among Catholic traditionalists referred to elsewhere would seriously take up Celtic Studies to the extent of studying Old Irish or Old Welsh. They would get a very different perspective on ancient society. But, I don't think they would let the truth get in the way of a good story. I also wonder how many mediaeval admiring trad Catholics have studied the middle ages in depth from primary rather than secondary sources - I think they would change their minds. I should state that I am not coming from a point of view that rejects the ancient or the mediaeval - I don't; I think we can learn a lot from both periods. But, by God, I would never look at either through rose-coloured glasses, in particular the so-called 'Age of Faith' in the 13th century that many trads enjoy waxing lyrical about.
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