Category File
Prophecy
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The Third Secret of FatimaIn 1944, Sister Lúcia dos Santos wrote down the third part of a secret she said the Virgin Mary had entrusted to her at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917, sealing it with instructions that it not be opened before 1960. When 1960 arrived, the Vatican announced the text would probably remain under absolute seal forever, and it stayed unpublished until June 2000, when the Church released a vision of a 'bishop dressed in white' killed by soldiers and interpreted it as the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II. A persistent theory holds that the released text is incomplete and that a second document containing Mary's own explanatory words remains withheld. The Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI have all stated that the publication was complete; proponents including journalist Antonio Socci and the Fatima Center maintain it was not.
- The Prophecy of the PopesThe Prophecy of the Popes is a list of 112 short Latin mottoes, first printed in Arnold Wion's Lignum Vitae in 1595 and attributed to the 12th-century Irish archbishop St. Malachy, purporting to describe every pope from Celestine II to a final "Petrus Romanus" under whom Rome is destroyed. Most historians conclude the list was composed around 1590, noting that its mottoes are precise up to that year and vague afterward, and that no manuscript is attested before publication. The list drew worldwide attention around Benedict XVI's 2013 resignation and again during the 2025 conclave that elected Leo XIV.
- The "Anti-Christ" Napoleon IIIThis theory identified Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, as the Beast or Antichrist of biblical prophecy, often by means of elaborate numerological calculations involving 666. It formed part of a broader nineteenth-century tradition of reading modern rulers through apocalyptic prophecy. In the 1860s, this reached a high level of intensity in English-language prophetic literature that treated Louis Napoleon as a world ruler foretold in Revelation and related texts.
- The "Sealed Prophecies" of Joanna SouthcottThis theory held that the prophetess Joanna Southcott left behind a sealed box of writings that could avert national and even global catastrophe—but only if it were opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England under the right sacred conditions. After Southcott’s death in 1814, followers treated the box as a reserve of divine emergency instruction. Later believers, especially in the Southcottian and Panacea traditions, argued that war, plague, crime, and apocalyptic judgment would intensify until the bishops obeyed the command and opened the true box. The historical record clearly shows that the sealed-box tradition is real, that descendants and followers maintained it, and that repeated efforts were made to persuade bishops to open it. What remains unresolved is whether the authentic box has ever been opened and whether its contents were the prophesied writings at all.