St Malachy O’Morgair
& Martin Lings
The latest textual witness of St Malachy’s famous Prophetia de Summis Pontificibus, from Fra Arnold de Wyon’s 1595 Lignum Vitae, a work on the history of the Benedictine order. Click here to view the original Latin text.
Shedding precious light on this rather quantitative and “laconic list of Popes”, Martin Lings devoted to it an article first published in 1966:
“We realize that St Malachy is speaking not to the men of his own times, but directly to us and through us to all men now alive; for if it is of little interest to be told that there will be a hundred and twelve more Popes, it is quite another matter to be told that there will only be two more, and that is what the prophecy tells us today.”
Or click here for an HTML version of the article at World Wisdom.
Originally published in Tomorrow in 1966, then in Studies in Comparative Religion, 1984, and finally as an appendix to The Eleventh Hour. Republished here by kind permission of World Wisdom Books.
