And so the freakshow begins

This morning as I woke up I was listening to "Brother" R. G. Stair, the wingnut "Last Day Prophet of God" from Walterboro, South Carolina who will believe anything as long as someone claims it is a divine revelation.

Today the King of Credulity has picked up on the supposed "prophecies" of one St. Malachy, a 12th-century Irish bishop and mystic. He is best known for "The Prophecy of the Popes," a list of 112 Latin aphorisms purported to be descriptive of the future popes of Rome. In this respect St. Malachy is sort of a Catholic Nostradamus, in that every time a pope dies, people bend themselves over backwards trying to fit the Latin phrase in some way to its supposed respective pontificate. At least one pope has manipulated events so that his own "prophecy" would be fulfilled, and the connection between the "prophecy" and corresponding events are often so tenuous as to be highly questionable. (Like Nostradamus.)

The "prophecy" for pope #110, John Paul II, reads: De labore Solis, and can be translated "Of the eclipse of the sun." Stair notes that a solar eclipse occurred on May 18, 1920, the day Karol Wojtyla was born, and also on April 8, 2005, the day of his funeral. (No unusual solar activity occurred on April 2, the day of his death; hence Stair and others are guilty of specious, selective reasoning.)

Of course, there are only two more popes on the list, and the last is the supposed "Peter the Roman," during whose pontificate the city of Rome is to be destroyed and the Final Judgment begin. Since "Profit" Stair has been predicting the end of the world Real Soon Now for years, it's easy to see why this is so interesting to him. What is more interesting to me is why he affords some Catholic mystic so much credence when he has no love for the Church of Rome.

But who expects consistency from the lunatic fringe? My "prophecy" is that Stair will drop St. Malachy when his accuracy turns out to be approximately equal to Stair's ravings about "Planet X" a couple of years ago. Stair doesn't talk about Planet X that much anymore . . .