Editor’s Note: I am exceedingly skeptical of any so-called “prophecies” that are not in the Bible. This feels more like fodder than something of concern, but since we appear to be in the midst of a crucial time for both the church and the world, I cannot completely dismiss such things as what is written below because we are not privy to the details of how everything will unfold. Whether you give credence to “the Prophecy of the Popes” or not, it will play some role in world events if the “prophecy” does appear to come true. With that said, here’s Snyder…
(End of the American Dream)—The death of Pope Francis has created a firestorm of speculation about the next pope. There is no clear frontrunner, and all sorts of names are being thrown around. Many liberal Catholics are hoping for another liberal pope that will be able to continue the legacy of Francis, while many conservative Catholics are desperate for a conservative pope that will move the Vatican in a very different direction.
Meanwhile, a controversial document that was discovered in the Vatican archives in the sixteenth century known as “the Prophecy of the Popes” is getting a ton of attention on social media. Many are suggesting that the pope that will soon be elected will actually be the last pope before the return of Christ.
I will try to take this one step at a time.
On Monday, it was being reported that Pope Francis died “of a cerebral stroke and irreversible heart failure”…
Pope Francis died of a cerebral stroke and irreversible heart failure, the Vatican’s top doctor said Monday. Francis was 88.
The stroke led to a coma and “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse,” Dr. Andrea Arcangeli, the head of the Vatican’s health department, said in a statement reported by multiple news outlets.
Francis died Monday at 7:35 a.m. at the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse at the Vatican where he lived.
Francis is being remembered as a “reformer” that often said very controversial things.
For example, just a few months ago Francis publicly declared that all religions “are paths to God” during a visit to Singapore…
“All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine,” Francis said during a September trip to Singapore. “But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children.”
Francis broke with traditional Catholic teaching in many other areas as well.
Now a new pope will be elected, and according to ABC News that process usually begins “between 15 to 20 days after the pope’s death”…
It’s also during the interregnum that all cardinals under the age of 80 who are eligible to participate are summoned to Rome to prepare for the secret conclave inside the Sistine Chapel to choose the next pontiff, a gathering that typically commences between 15 to 20 days after the pope’s death. The cardinals spend the interregnum housed in private rooms in the Domus Marthae Sanctae — essentially a residence hotel in the Vatican with dining facilities that usually houses visiting clergy and laity. Per tradition, the cardinals are cut off from the outside world, including televisions, phones, computers and newspapers.
The College of Cardinals will cast as many as four ballots in a single day for the next pope, with a two-thirds majority required to elect a pontiff. After each vote, the ballots are burned and smoke is released from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney as a signal to the throngs holding vigil in St. Peter’s Square. Black smoke — fumata nera in Italian — indicates an inconclusive vote, while white smoke — fumata bianca — will signify that a new pope has been elected. If three days pass with no pope elected, voting can be suspended for a day to allow the cardinals time for reflection before the next round of ballots are cast.
This upcoming conclave is going to be fascinating to watch, because at this stage nobody knows who is going to win.
Right now, more money is being bet on Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin than anyone else. He is currently the Vatican’s Secretary of State, and he is considered to be very “influential”…
The Vatican’s influential top diplomat and a popular moderate, he has recently been installed as the bookmakers favourite. Like his boss, the 70-year-old has espoused a liberal worldview and recently said he was hoping for “an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people”, and also urged Europe to “rediscover itself” in order to be able to face the “major challenges” of the era, in a recent interview.
Parolin is one of three leading contenders named “Peter”, and he would be the first Italian pope since 1978. The other leading contender is Cardinal Luis Tagle…
Tagle, 67, has been dubbed the “Asian Pope Francis”, because his views largely align with the late Pontiff.
He has criticised the Church’s “severe” stance on gay people, divorcees and single mothers.
Tagle is the seventh cardinal ever from the Philippines and, if picked, would become the first Asian Pope.
One expert claims that Tagle was once “Pope Francis’s favourite to succeed him”, but it appears that his age may work against him…
Edward Pentin, a Vatican expert and the author of The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates, said: “Five or six years ago, he was Pope Francis’s favourite to succeed him. He’s head of the important new super-dicastery for evangelisation. He’s quite a strong contender. And he’s still relatively young,”
His age may count against him, however – cardinals are wary of appointing a relatively young man because his papacy could last decades, thwarting their own ambitions and squeezing their chances of one day being elected.
Another candidate to watch closely is Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu.
He is considered to be very conservative, and he would be the very first black pope…
Besungu, 65, is a Congolese cardinal who has publicly clashed with Francis in the past.
He rejected a decree from Francis that the church should give its blessing to homosexual couples, arguing it “cannot be carried out in Africa without [Christians] exposing themselves to scandals”.
He effectively declared the doctrine, called Fiducia supplicans, null and void on the African continent.
There are many that are speculating that one of the three candidates named “Peter” will win because that would fit “the Prophecy of the Popes”.
“The Prophecy of the Popes” was supposedly written by St. Malachy in the twelfth century, and it was supposedly “discovered” in the Vatican archives in the sixteenth century by a Benedictine monk named Arnold Wion…
The “Prophecy of the Popes” (Latin: Prophetia Sancti Malachiae Archiepiscopi, de Summis Pontificibus) was discovered in 1590 by Benedictine monk Arnold Wion and is kept in the Vatican Secret Archives. This work describes 112 cryptic mottos in Latin, each relating to succeeding popes, starting with Celestine II.
This list supposedly describes all of the popes that will reign until the return of Christ.
The final pope in the list is given the title “Peter the Roman”, and “the Prophecy of the Popes” says some very alarming things about the time when he will lead the Vatican…
“In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people. The End.”
A number of scholars were completely convinced that Pope Francis was “Peter the Roman”.
But Francis was not named Peter, and he was not Italian.
However, Cardinal Pietro Parolin fits both of those criteria.
“Pietro” is the Italian version of the name “Peter”, and he would be the first Italian pope since 1978.
Of course all of the speculation that we are witnessing about this on social media may be for nothing, because as Ricky Scaparo has pointed out, the authenticity of “the Prophecy of the Popes” is “highly questionable”…
The authenticity of the prophecy is highly questionable. The document first appeared in 1595, over 400 years after Malachy’s death, in a text by Benedictine monk Arnold Wion.
Scholars widely regard it as a forgery, possibly created to influence papal elections during the late 16th century. The mottos are vague and open to interpretation, making them easy to retrofit to various popes after the fact.
There is no way that we can prove that this document was originally authored by St. Malachy.
So ultimately we don’t have any way of proving if it is authentic or not.
But if a candidate named “Peter” is eventually elected, a lot of people out there are going to go nuts over this.
Personally, I will be very interested to see how all of this plays out.
What we do know is that we really are living in the end times, and so it is entirely possible that the next pope could be the last pope.
No matter how much time we have left, all of us should be living with a sense of urgency, and all of us should be trying to make an impact on this world while we still can.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.