Thiel Brings His Antichrist Lectures to the Vatican’s Door, and Catholic Institutions Strike Back

Rome — One of the hottest tickets in the Vatican 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, held in Rome from Sunday to Wednesday, was so controversial that the Catholic universities associated with it initially refused official involvement.

Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, a data-mining company helping the Trump administration crackdown on immigrant deportations. An early donor to Vice President JD Vance’s political career, Thiel is deeply interested in the apocalyptic concept of the Antichrist and has written and lectured on it before.

“Christians have debated these prophecies for thousands of years. Who is the Antichrist? When will he come? What will he preach?” He opined in a November essay in the Catholic magazine First Things.

Talk of the Antichrist from a tech billionaire in the Vatican’s backyard has proven divisive.

Initially, the lectures were reported to be held at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican University in Rome colloquially known as the Angelicum. These days it is best known as the place where a young priest named Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, wrote his canon law doctoral thesis.

But when word began to circulate in the Italian media about alleged secret lectures on the Antichrist 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, does not take place at Angelicum and is not part of any of our institutional initiatives,” the university said in a statement on its website.

The lectures were “jointly organized” by an Italian organization, the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, and the Clooney Institute at the Catholic University of America in Washington, according to an announcement of the event seen by The Associated Press.

The Gioberti group, which describes itself as a cultural association dedicated to the renewal of Italian political culture, confirmed it was involved. The association, named for the 19th-century Italian Catholic priest-philosopher, “believes in promoting research and encounters based on the great tradition of classical and Christian thought. We believe this heritage is fundamental to solving the crisis engulfing the contemporary West,” it said in a statement.

But CUA got away.

“The Catholic University of America is not sponsoring or hosting an event featuring Peter Thiel in Rome this month,” a university spokeswoman told the AP. “The Cluny Project is an independent initiative incubated at the university.”

The Cluny Institute is a new initiative of CUA that brings together leaders from the worlds of academia, religion and technology. In 2023, CUA hosted Thiel to speak on its Washington campus about French academic René Girard.

Thiel is known to be somewhat obsessed with the Antichrist – used to describe someone who opposes or denies Christ – and Armageddon – the biblical final battle between good and evil. Thiel talks about concepts in terms of the choices humanity faces in dealing with the existential dangers of the world today.

The Rome lectures seem to follow the blueprint for a four-part lecture series he gave in San Francisco last September. Some of the invitations circulated in Rome, for example, copy the description of the San Francisco event.

“His remarks are anchored on science and technology and comment on the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist. The religious thinkers Peter draws on are René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt, and John Henry Newman,” says an invitation.

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal in 1998, and other entrepreneurs from that era were part of a group known as the “PayPal Mafia,” including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stapelman, and YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

After selling PayPal to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel later founded the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and helped start Palantir Technologies, which recently struck a deal with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Thiel was a key adviser and donor to US President Donald Trump in his first administration and retains some ties to the White House. Palantir is one of the donors to the White House Ballroom project, and David Sachs, who worked with Thiel at PayPal, also chairs the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors.

Thiel is known to be close to Vance. He poured millions of dollars into Vance’s successful primary run for the US Senate, from where Trump named him running mate and eventually vice president. Some see Thiel as a mentor to Vance, a Catholic convert and the most high-profile Catholic in US politics.

Vance’s theological justification for the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants based on the ancient Christian concept of the order of love earned him a famous slapdown from Pope Francis before he died.

A few months before he was elected pope, Prevost shared an article from his dormant account on X with the Catholic publication, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Vance attended Leo’s installation and later had an audience with him, during which he delivered a letter from Trump to meet Leo.

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Associated Press writers Shan Chen in New York, Pia Sarkar in Philadelphia and Barbara Ortutay in Colma, California contributed.

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