Peter Thiel’s lecture series on the Antichrist comes to Rome, and Catholic institutions back away
ROME — One of the hottest tickets in the Vatican’s backyard these days is a series of four lectures on the Antichrist given by Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
The invitational conference, held in Rome from Sunday to Wednesday, has proven so controversial that the Catholic universities initially associated have all denied any official involvement.
Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the data mining company that helped drive the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrant deportations. An early donor to Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career, Thiel is also deeply interested in the apocalyptic concept of the Antichrist and has previously written and lectured on this topic.
“Christians have debated these prophecies for millennia. Who was the Antichrist? When would he arrive? What would he preach?” he mused in a November essay in the Catholic magazine First Things.
Catholic institutions distance themselves
Discussion of the Antichrist by a tech billionaire in the Vatican’s backyard has proven divisive.
Initially, the lectures were to take place at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican university in Rome known colloquially as the Angelicum. It is best known today as the place where a young priest named Robert Prévost, now Pope Leo XIV, wrote his doctoral thesis in canon law.
But as word began to circulate in the Italian media about alleged secret lectures on the Antichrist given by Thiel at the pope’s alma mater, the Angelicum distanced itself:
“We would like to clarify that this event is not organized by the University, will not take place at the Angelicum and is not part of any of our institutional initiatives,” the university said in a statement published on its website.
According to an announcement of the event seen by the Associated Press, the lectures were “jointly organized” by an Italian organization, the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, and the Cluny Institute of the Catholic University of America in Washington.
The Gioberti group, which describes itself as a cultural association dedicated to the renewal of Italian political culture, has confirmed its involvement. The association, named after a 19th-century Italian Catholic priest-philosopher, said in a statement that it believed in promoting research and encounters “based on the great tradition of classical and Christian thought. We believe that this heritage is fundamental to confronting the crisis ravaging the contemporary West.”
But the AUC has distanced itself.
“The Catholic University of America is not sponsoring or hosting an event featuring Peter Thiel this month in Rome,” a university spokesperson told AP. “The Cluny Project is an independent initiative incubated at the university. »
The Cluny Institute is a new CUA initiative aimed at bringing together leaders from academia, religion and technology. In 2023, AUC welcomed Thiel to its Washington campus for a lecture on René Girard, the French academic.
A fascination with the Antichrist
Thiel is known to be somewhat obsessed with the Antichrist – the biblical term used to describe someone who opposes or denies Christ – and with Armageddon – the biblical final battle between good and evil. Thiel talks about the concepts in terms of the choices humanity faces in dealing with the existential risks of today’s world.
The Rome lectures appear to follow the outline of a four-part lecture series he gave in San Francisco last September. Some of the invitations circulating in Rome, for example, copy the description of the San Francisco event.
“His remarks will be grounded in science and technology and will comment on the theology, history, literature and politics of the Antichrist. Religious thinkers Peter will draw on include René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt and John Henry Newman,” an invitation reads.
Thiel, who co-founded PayPal in 1998, and other entrepreneurs from that era were part of a group dubbed the “PayPal Mafia,” including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
After PayPal sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel went on to found the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and helped launch Palantir Technologies, which recently signed a deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to streamline the process of identifying and deporting people targeted by the agency.
Ties to the Trump administration
Thiel was a key adviser and donor to U.S. President Donald Trump during his first administration and retained some ties to the White House. Palantir is also a donor to the White House ballroom project, and David Sacks, who worked with Thiel at PayPal, is also chairman of the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors.
Thiel is also known to be close to Vance. He invested millions of dollars in Vance’s primary race for the U.S. Senate, from which Trump nominated him as his running mate and eventually vice president. Some see Thiel as a mentor to Vance, a Catholic convert and the most prominent Catholic in American politics.
Vance’s theological justification for the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, based on an ancient Christian concept of the order of love, received a famous slap in the face from Pope Francis just before his death.
A few months before being elected pope, Prévost shared an article from a Catholic publication from his now-inactive account on »
Vance attended Leo’s installation and later had an audience with him, during which he delivered a letter from Trump inviting Leo to visit him.
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Associated Press writers Shawn Chen in New York, Pia Sarkar in Philadelphia and Barbara Ortutay in Colma, California, contributed.
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