I was told by a co-worker that Revelations says a Black Pope portends the end of the world.
Does anyone have any information on the validity of this? I know better than to beleive any stupid thing that people tell me, especially considering I am pretty sure the office of Pope was created long after the Bible was written. Therefore I turn to you, Dopers!
I think that this was the wrong forum for this question , but when you say a black pope, you might be thinking of skin pigmentation. But in the timeframe that revelations was probably written , it could have possibly meant something else , Nubians and Moors would have probably been the only people of color in the middle eastern cradle. I think historically that ebons would have been thought of as subhuman relatively later on in history , around the 16th century.
Declan
As you said, you will not find the word “Pope” anywhere in the Bible, and there is no such prophecy in the Book of Revelation.
There have been three African Popes. So that ends that debate. However, parts of the Bible were written sometime after the establishment of the office of the Pope. Fortunately, at least two of the African Popes reigned well after Revelations was written!
This was a new one on me. There’s nothing even close to this in Revelation which doesn’t speak about any popes at all, much less “black” ones. So I did some Googling and I believe that the OP’s co-worker has garbled a Jack Chick conspiracy theory.
Chick apparently has published some sort of ravings about how the head of the Jesuits is really a secret “Black Pope” who is the real power behind the Vatican. The “Black Pope” is Chick’s own lurid title and is intended to designate evil and secrecy and darkness, not skin color.
The link above details Chick’s thesis. I should warn that it’s patently offensive and anti-Catholic in the extreme.
I should also note that for all my searching I can’t find anywhere that Chick attempts to bolster any of this with Scripture, even in his typically grotesquely distorted exegetical manner. This whole “Black Pope” thing seems to be purely a product of his own imagination but even Chick did not intend a racial connotation and I’m not sure he even intends a specific individual. It’s just his own epithet for the head of the Jesuits.
Possibly it’s another ridiculous Jesuit-inspired conspiracy. The head of the Society of Jesus is sometimes referred to as the Black Pope.
The title of the book is The Book of Revelation, singular. It is believed to have been written near the end of the reign of Domitian, who died in A.D. 96. At that time, St. Clement, fourth Bishop of Rome, had already taken the first steps toward establishing papal domination over all the Christian churches. His one known letter, to the church at Corinth to settle a dispute there, has a “don’t tangle with me” tone to it.
The history of the Papacy prior to Clement I is extremely obscure. The assertion that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome wasn’t made until St. Jerome in the 4th Century. There were traditions that Peter was martyred in Rome and of course there was Matthew’s “On this Rock…” thing, but there was no specific tradition that Peter was the first Pope until Clement. Officially, Clement was the 4th Pope/Bishop of Rome and there may indeed have been prior Bishops (Church tradition gives us only a couple of names - Linus and Anacletus respectively) but Clement was the first one who was really able to consolidate any power outside of Rome and as such might fairly be called the first “Pope” in any sense of that position being recognized as a head of the entire church instead of just a local Bishop. That would make the origin of the Papacy as we understand it pretty much exactly contemporary with the writing of Revelation. So while the Papacy, such as it was, existed when the book was written, it was in its infancy and it went unmentioned by the author.
“Clement” in this sentence should be “Jerome.”
Well that’s why I post here. I learn something new everyday. I was 99.999999999% sure that was crap. Thanks!
The one thing that is predictable is that co-workers who make these sort of claims rarely get the details right. It’s not Revelation but Nostradamus and ‘St. Malachy’.
Interpreters of Nostradamus often claim that some of his ‘predictions’ involve the ‘Black Pope’. This seems to rest mainly on Century VI, quatrain 25.
[Other translations, of course, vary]
Not exactly specific, is it? But then Nostradamus never is.
This often gets combined with the ‘prophecies of St. Malachy’ in which the next and penultimate Pope is linked to the phrase, ‘Gloria olivae’, which is thus interpreted as a reference to his skin colour.
So this is a case of taking one piece of nonsense and combining it with another piece of nonsense to get nonsense squared. And even if you do want to take them seriously, they tell us next to nothing of any use about either the identity of the next Pope or the end of the world.
Not that this will stop the credulous claiming with hindsight that they were actually right all along.
I’ve never read any Nostradamus, and don’t care to take the trouble to look any of this up. So if what follows is way off the mark, I apologize in advance.
I had never heard that a black pope would mark the end of the world, but immediately after the death of John Paul I, there were all kinds of nut jobs asserting that Nostradamus had predicted “a pope of a moon” (month?) and that the end of time would come during the reign of that pope’s second successor.
I can’t vouch that Nostradamus really did say any such thing, and I hadn’t heard that Nostradamus predicted this pope would be black.
The pope of a moon was actually a prophesy of the aforelinked St. Malachy. Actually it was “De medietate Lunae” (of the half of the moon). Since that’s only half a month, it is stretched a bit to be the half moon of one month to the half moon of the next.
As said, there is nothing in Revelation even close to it. I believe that credibility of religious theories is in inverse proportion to their reliance on Revelation.
(bolding mine)
The bulk of my Historical Biblical knowledge comes from the History Channel and such, but during a very interesting show about Attila the Hun last week, it was said that there were basically five different popes of roughly equal stature (in what is now Russia, Turkey, Italy Greece, plus another) at that time and when Attila was making his move on the last remnants of the Italian strain of the Roman Empire in the 452 A.D. timeframe, Emperor Valentinian sent Pope Leo I out to negotiate a peace with Attila (payoff the army), and Leo, being a strong personality, assumed dominance based on ‘defeating’ the Scourge of God, and the weak Valentine kinda let him take over. Leo took his fame on the road through artwork and began to outshine the other four popes, thus beginning the Holy Roman Empire and Papal dominance in Italy, rather than the previous balance of power between the five concurrent popes in their respective regions.
Fascinating show, BTW.
Sort of, although, not having seen the show I can’t say for sure.
There were five patriarchs at the time - Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. These were basically the five head bishops at the time, although, the Bishop of Rome was considered to be the most equal of the equals unofficially due to his position as the successor to Peter.
torie writes:
> I was told by a co-worker that Revelations says a Black Pope portends the end
> of the world.
I think that the best thing to do when confronted with assertions like this is to pull out a Bible, turn to Revelation, and ask your coworker, “Really? So show me the passage where it says this.” If he can’t show you anything, there’s no point in continuing to listen to him.
You mean, after the end of the world? 
Could Nostradamus have been simply referring to a Jesuit?
The head of the Jesuits is called the Black Pope…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/01/19/us-religion-jesuits-idUSL1941405320080119
Show me one doomsayer or one doom-saying prophesy that has ever been right.
Fer cripes sakes, we just got through the Aztec calendar thing. People continually insist on buying into this nonsense.
0 for whatever isn’t a a good track record.
I guess these are people that think they can blow their paycheck at the carnival games and think they are going to come out ahead. Pathetic.
I hope I have enough milk in the fridge because I’m looking forward to a fine cup of coffee in the morning. That is, if the world doesn’t end tonight. Then I don’t care.
My friend tells me that an Argentinian Pope portends that we will be forced to tango our way through the mass.