Of course, doubters would point out that ‘Peter the Roman’ does not sound like Pope Leo XIV. The pontiff’s full birthname, Robert Francis Prevost, does not even include the name Peter. So it’s safe to assume Saint Malachy was off the mark on that one.
The text also gets his nationality wrong, as Pope Leo XIV holds both American and Peruvian citizenship, not Italian, as a moniker such as ‘the Roman’ would suggest.
Meanwhile, others have speculated that the late Pope Francis was the fateful ‘Peter the Roman’, although this hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked for identical grounds over the years.
In 2013, Josh Canning, director of Toronto’s Chaplaincy at the Newman Centre, told Global News, “I don’t know how you can connect Peter the Roman with Pope Francis.”
So if we wake up tomorrow to comets raining down from the sky and nuclear missiles flying left and right, I’ll gladly lift my hands up and admit I was wrong.
But, for the time being, I believe Pope Leo XIV is preoccupied with concerns other than a prophesy penned by a man named Saint Malachy.
