Why is Peter Thiel in Rome organizing conferences on the Antichrist?

(LifeSiteNews) — Openly homosexual tech billionaire Peter Thiel is holding his four-part lecture series on the Biblical Antichrist in Rome this week.

While the event has thus far been shrouded in secrecy – it is invitation-only, closed to journalists, and even its exact location is undisclosed – the lectures appear to be modeled after Thiel’s four-part lecture series on the Antichrist given in San Francisco this past September. 

America magazine reported, for example, that some of the invitations to the event being dispersed in Rome “copy the description” of the San Francisco event, which said that Thiel’s “remarks will be anchored on science and technology.”

More specifically, his lectures were to “comment on the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist,” the event webpage stated. “Religious thinkers upon whom Peter will draw include René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt, and John Henry Newman.”

The Rome lectures were reportedly originally slated to take place at the Pontifical St. Thomas Aquinas University, also known as the Angelicum, where Pope Leo XIV once wrote his canon law doctoral thesis. However, the university has since denied this, as well as any involvement in the lecture series.

According to an event announcement seen by the Associated Press, the lectures are “jointly organized” by the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, which aims to renew Italian political culture, and The Cluny Institute, a tech-focused initiative supported by the Catholic University of America (CUA). 

CUA has also denied sponsoring or hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lecture series, a university spokesperson told AP. 

Rome is a very significant host location for Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, given its concentration of high-ranking Vatican prelates; it is also a curious location given Thiel’s anti-Christian lifestyle. While the tech mogul styles himself as a Christian, according to his original lecture description, he openly embraces sodomy, a sin that “cries out to Heaven for vengeance.” Thiel also hopes to be revived after death through future medical technology, which seems to belie a belief in an afterlife. He has said he is registered to be cryonically preserved, which means he would be frozen upon his legal death.

The powerful investor has opened up in interviews over the past year about his unconventional views on the Antichrist. In a June New York Times interview with Ross Douthat, Thiel dismissed the idea that the Antichrist would be “some evil tech genius,” proposing that, instead, he would be fanning fears over world crisis.

“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate,” Thiel told Douthat, suggesting that the Antichrist would promote regulation of technology.

“It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that,” Thiel opined.

He went on to declare it is not technological development that draws broad public support but scientific, technological “stagnation.”

He believes that in today’s world it is “far more likely to be Greta Thunberg” than a “Dr. Strangelove” who takes over the world. 

Douthat challenged him on this take, beginning by pointing out to Thiel that due at least in part to his involvement in Palantir he is “heavily invested in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare,” as Douthat said in a video clip posted by journalist Jim Stewartson.

“It just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would be maybe using the tools that you are building,” Douthat noted.

“Wouldn’t that be the irony of history that the man publicly warning about Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?” Douthat said.

Theoretically, both the creators of AI and other advanced technologies and the government regulators of these technologies could facilitate the oppression of humans under a “beast” system of the Antichrist. 

This beast system has been widely speculated to be an AI system with centralized access to intimate information about ourselves as well as the power to manipulate or control our behavior. 

Palantir, co-founded by Thiel, has already rolled out the system infrastructure that would enable such manipulation, while government regulators have the power to use these technologies to target citizens, or withhold technology that provides access to basic necessities like money or food.

Catholic theologians and mystics agree that the Antichrist will be a single man who will present himself as the true Messiah and suppress the true, Catholic religion and the Mass while promoting a false one-world religious system.