It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Right, before i get going, i just wanted to show you this playlist .  I think you can guess what it is yet.

Anyway, there i was getting going on my Valentine vids when all of a sudden i realised that the Pope had resigned.  Since this hasn't happened since 1415, i decided to vlog about it, thus:

A Pope has just resigned for the first time in nearly six centuries.  The Prophecy of the Popes, allegedly written by St Malachy, an Irish saint of the 12th century, predicts that the next pope, Petrus Romanus, will be the last.

The Catholic Church itself rejects the Prophecy of the Popes as a forgery and also as a form of divination, and in fact there is no reference available for it before 1595 when it appeared in Lignum Vitae.  However, it has been claimed that the list, which consists of a series of "nicknames" such as "De Labore Solis", "Gloria Olivae" (which seems to refer to Benedict XIV) and "Petrus Romanus", was compiled by the Neo-Platonist Nostradamus.  Whether or not it's valid, it is quite reminiscent of his style, so this could be correct.

Interestingly, Gloria Olivae, supposedly the current Pope, is also the penultimate pope before Petrus Romanus, after which it seems to be implied that Judgement Day will come and Rome will be destroyed.  In fact, this is less far-fetched than it might seem because of the Doomsday Argument, which holds that because of exponentially increasing human population, the chances of being alive just before human extinction are actually higher than at any other time simply because there are more people then, and therefore that the chances of the "end of the world", at least for us, are higher now than ever before.  This is one reason i always go on about the world ending.  A similar argument means that we are actually quite likely to be alive during the resignation of Benedict XIV (or Ratzinger) simply because, again, there are more people than ever before.

The Catholic Church is currently in trouble, and secularisation is also on the rise.  However, it has weathered storms in the past and there's no particular reason to suppose that it will end now.  On the other hand, the extinction of the human race would probably also put paid to the Church.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that i was alive when it happened - makes me wonder if i'll see Betelgeuse go supernova now.  However, this may not be as remarkable as it seems, looked at from one perspective, though it's still improbable looked at in the opposite way.

There have allegedly been popes for a total of (11B9+4)-29 years, which is 11B5-29; 11A6-20; 1186 years.  If i live to be six dozen, which is unusually low for today but high for a man in the past, this period is 118.6/6 lifetimes long, or 11.86+11.86=23.5 lifetimes.  Since this has only happened five times, the probability of me being alive when it happens, assuming we're talking about the Christian era, is therefore 23.5/5, which is one in five.  That's not that improbable as it happens.

However, this whole thing can be turned round thus:  suppose we take the pope's resignation this year as one given and compare it to world population on the other four occasions.  These were roughly as follows (in decimal, population figures rounded up to next date available, high estimates):

Pontian (235):   450 million
Marcellinus (304):  450 million
Benedict IX (1046):  450 million
Gregory VI (1046):  450 million
Celestine (1294):  500 million
 Gregory XII (1415):  500 million
Benedict XIV (2013):  7.2 billion.

It's therefore at least fourteen times more likely that i would be alive during this papal resignation than each of the others, and in fact two and a half times as likely than all of the others put together.

Is this starting to look familiar?

Petrus Romanus is supposedly the next pope (who, incidentally, might not be European - the last non-European pope was in the seventh century).  The prophecies attributed to Malachy (which might actually be from Nostradamus, but that's another story) say the next pope will be the last and in fact, each pope, except maybe for Clement VI and Innocent VI, has stood a greater chance of being the last pope than his predecessor from the viewpoint of Christendom rather than their own.

Now imagine that instead of a papal resignation we're talking about some kind of doomsday scenario, and instead of it occurring on five possible occasions, it could have occurred at any time between the time attributed to Jesus's lifetime and the present day.  The chances of being alive at the end are greater now than ever before for the same reasons.

Therefore, in a sense "Malachy's" final prophecy stands a good chance of being accurate!