Benedict hosted Hans Küng at Castel Gandolfo for four hours in 2005 and personally praised the global ethic that Thiel’s new First Things essay treats as the Antichrist’s signature. JD Vance’s benefactor left the dinner out.
Peter Thiel has a new suspect.
Having already name-checked Pope Leo XIV, Pope Francis, and the climate activist Greta Thunberg for the dishonor, the Palantir co-founder has settled on a Swiss theologian who has been dead for five years.
The essay ran this week in First Things, the conservative religion journal, under the title “The Pope and the Antichrist.” Thiel wrote it with Sam Wolfe, a researcher at Thiel Capital.
Together they build toward a question that would have been unprintable in respectable Catholic circles a generation ago: “Did Benedict believe Pope Francis to be the Antichrist?”
Thiel calls the theory “tempting” before setting it aside. Benedict XVI, he argues, suspected somebody else — Hans Küng, the Swiss priest who served as one of the youngest theological experts at the Second Vatican Council and spent the last four decades of his life urging the world’s religions to talk to one another.
Küng died in 2021. His offense, in Thiel’s reconstruction, was preaching peace.
What the essay actually argues
The piece deserves to be read closely, because its architecture is stranger than the headlines suggest.
Thiel opens in a register of injured innocence. His invitation-only lectures on the Antichrist in Rome this spring drew paparazzi to a venue he calls “notionally secret,” and one Italian priest wondered publicly whether he should be burned at the stake. He assures readers he “did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope,” though he did hope, “even as a Protestant, to be more Catholic than the average Catholic.”
From there the essay becomes an extended reading of Joseph Ratzinger — and a claim about what Ratzinger secretly believed.
“Benedict believed he was living in the end times,” Thiel writes. The evidence he assembles is real, and it is thinner than the claim requires [ … ]
Continue at source: Peter Thiel Accuses Benedict XVI’s Longtime Friend of Being the Antichrist