Originally published at The Crux
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ROME — One of the hottest tickets in the Vatican’s backyard these days is for a four-lecture series on the Antichrist being given by Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
The invitation-only conference in Rome, from Sunday to Wednesday, has proven so controversial that the Catholic universities initially associated with it have all denied official involvement.
Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the data-mining company that has been assisting the Trump administration’s migrant deportation crackdown. An early donor to the political career of Vice President JD Vance, Thiel is also deeply interested in the apocalyptic concept of the Antichrist and has written and lectured on it before.
“Christians 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 take their distance
Discussion of the Antichrist by a tech billionaire in the Vatican’s backyard has proven divisive.
Initially, the lectures were reportedly going to be held the Pontifical St. Thomas Aquinas University, the Dominican university in Rome known colloquially as the Angelicum. It is best known these days as the place where a young priest named Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo
