Peter Bander - The Prophecies of St. Malachy

THE PROPHECIES
of ST. MALACHY

Introduction and Commentary by Peter Bander

Copyright Colin Smythe, Ltd., 1969

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-125419

ISBN: 0-89555-038-5

Originally published in 1969 by Colin Smythe, Ltd., Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England under the title The Prophecies of St. Malachy and St. Columbkille.

Originally published in the United States by Alba House, Division of the Society of St. Paul, Staten Island, New York in 1970 under the title The Prophecies of St. Malachy.

TAN Books
Charlotte, North Carolina
www.TANBooks.com

1973

Mr, Peter Bander

Senior Lecturer in Religious Education, and Head of the Department of Religious Education at one of the constituent colleges of the Cambridge Institute of Education.

Through the good services of Archbishop Cardinale, he has received the cooperation of the Vatican Archives, and the result is the most authoritative and enlightening edition of the prophecies ever to have appeared.

FOREWORD

In publishing THE PROPHECIES OF ST MALACHY Colin Smythe Limited have produced an instructive and entertaining book.

There is a great deal of instant information in Peter Bander's nutshell biographical accounts of the popes who occupied the Roman See since the year 1143 to our present time and indeed of the antipopes as well. The remarkable way in which the visions St Malachy is alleged to have had are shown to apply to the successive individual popes is most amusing. Is it not the case to repeat: "Se non vero, ben trovato"?

Whatever one may think of the genuineness of the prophecies attributed to St Malachy, here is a fascinating study which provides the curious reader with much profit and pleasure.

ARCHBISHOP H. E. CARDINALE

Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium and Luxembourg until recently Apostolic Delegate to Great Britain

PREFACE

If this book does no more than give pause to those scoffers who customarily go about saying that the Prophecies of Malachy are nothing other than scurrilous rubbish, it will have accomplished a great deal if only because there are so many people who tend to think this way. There is another group, of course, who have never heard of these famous foretellings of the popes by which the good Malachy undertook to list in advance the proper succession of Roman pontiffs from Celestine II (1143) to "the end of the world." He didn't just come right out and name them, of course. That would have taken all the sport out of it for one thing and, for another, would have considerably curtailed the free will of the College of Cardinals. Quite sensibly, he chose to reveal the successors under symbolic titles, set down in Latin.

I belong to yet a third group or belonged, I should say who had heard of the Prophecies but had not bothered to think much about their validity one way or the other. I could, as so many of my contemporary indifferentists are wont to say, not have cared less. But count me now among the utterly concerned and utterly converted. Peter Bander's commentary and interpretation of the prophecies have carried the day completely. So far as I'm concerned, there's not the least shadow of a doubt as to their authenticity.

The scoffers, of course, begin with the primary objection that these writings were not even "discovered" for some four-hundred odd years after Malachys' death in the year 1148. They object further that he would surely have told somebody about them, at least his death friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux; they carp and twitter and nit-pick in other disagreeable and tendentious ways as well. But to no avail the elegant and soaring scholarship of Peter Bander disposes of all these objections with authoritative dispatch. He remains too much the professional even to descend to the gut-level argument that I, laboring under no such restraining ethic, would have cited at once: namely, that Malachy was not only Irish, but an Irish saint, and the first Irishman to actually be canonized by formal process of the Church. Would such a man be apt to jeopardize his chances by leaving a notorious piece of scurrilous writing behind him?

There will be those, too, who say that it's easy enough to match up pope and prophetic clue after the fact. Thus we now know that when Malachy wrote Bos Albanus in Portu that he was obviously referring to Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI (1492-1503), because of "the pope's armorial bearings and his Cardinal titles of Albano and Porto." He also behaved like a bull on more than a few occasions so that the prediction "the Alban bull at the port" is not only literally but allegorically accurate. But the wicked Alexander is grossly obvious; it takes a knowledge of the papacy amounting almost to an obsession albeit a most lofty one to realize that Picus Inter Escas (A woodpecker among the food) was going to turn out to be Nicholas IV.

Interest in the prophecies is somewhat cyclical in nature, tending to go up sharply when the reigning pontiff grows extremely old or falls dangerously ill. Before and during actual conclaves it is next to impossible to lay your hands on a copy. Peter Bander's interpretations, filled as they are with the highly condensed soup of scholarship as well as with the lightning flashes of nearly pure inspiration, should soon be recognized as the authoritative version and will doubtless be in sharp demand.

Which makes me admire all the more the modesty of Peter Bander, who, having forged such a masterwork of authenticity can then step humbly aside and say, as he does in his introduction, that the reader need not "extend to them the same reverence you may extend to the Gospels."

Reverence no; but profound respect, certainly. Only once did the author strain my credulity and that so slightly as to be virtually insignificant. He circulates the rumor that during the conclave which was to elect John XXIII, a certain Cardinal from the United States, evidently having taken Malachy's forecast that the next pope would be "pastor and mariner" literally, rented a boat, filled it with sheep and sailed thus conspicuously up and down the Tiber. Pope John, of course, as bishop of Venice, had the maritime claim nailed down.

What disturbs me and should disturb the reader to an equal degree is that after "Flower of Flowers," that is to say after Paul VI, there are only three more prophecies. Whoever he turns out to be, Petrus Romanus will be the last. Time is running out. It's later than we all think. The end of the world is at hand. If Malachy and Peter Bander say it's going to happen, then happen it surely will.

Joel Wells

Editor, The Critic

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

The present book was originally published by Colin Smythe, Limited, of Gerrards Cross, England in 1969 under the title The Prophecies of St. Malachy and St. Columbkille. In 1970 Alba House, a Division of the Society of St. Paul, Staten Island, New York, with the permission of Colin Smythe, Limited, brought out a hardbound edition of The Prophecies of St. Malachy only. That edition having gone out of print toward the end of 1972, and Alba House electing not to reprint, we negotiated with the original publisher to issue the book once more. We also have chosen to reprint only The Prophecies of St. Malachy because they form a unified subject matter; those of St. Columbkille (521-597) cover a longer period of time, concern many unrelated subjects, and are difficult to read and more difficult to understand (even with the help of Mr. Bander's footnotes). Added to this, they distract, in our opinion, from the powerful import of St. Malachy's prophecies.