Peter Thiel’s Antichrist tour steps onto the Pope’s turf

By Howard Chua-Eoan

BACK IN SEPTEMBER, I wrote with some amusement about on the Antichrist — the demonic figure in Christian tradition whose appearance would lead to the end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus. At that time, the tech titan (funder of Facebook and founder of PayPal Holdings, Inc. and Palantir Technologies, Inc.) was delivering�� his talk in San Francisco to a paying audience of 200 or so Silicon Valley futurists, wannabe intellectuals, conservative fanboys, and the industry’s increasing number of Christians. Attendees had to accept non-disclosure rules, which meant there’d be no public details about how Thiel connects the tech world to conceptions of the Antichrist.

This time, he’s taken his message to Rome and the doorstep of the Vatican. This gathering is even more exclusive because attendance is by invitation only. But now I’m finding it less amusing and more alarming. The date of its first lecture — the Ides of March — was ominously apt.

Thiel has a strange perspective. Gleaning from the few clues available, it appears deeply paranoid that the Antichrist could arise with a globe-spanning organization or empire that shuts down individual freedoms in the name of wiping out fear and insecurity. And yet the billionaire himself seems to advocate for some kind of invasive technological superstructure that would restrain the evil of the End Times.

The Holy See — the formidably ancient authority on the Antichrist — has distanced itself from this brazen usurpation of its prerogatives. Pope Leo XIV’s alma mater, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, denied speculation it was the venue for the event or approved of it in the first place.

Theology, of course, is one reason for the antipathy. In a 1988 book, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — cautioned that, while Christians must remain watchful for the Antichrist, the experience is more likely to take place within the soul of each believer, in a personal battle between good and evil. But another reason is worldly: American-born Pope Leo is on the opposite side of the German-born US billionaire in their country’s rancorous battle over immigration. I see the Rome lecture series as Thiel’s latest chess move in that contest.

Palantir, where Thiel is chairman of the board, has for years benefited from multi-million-dollar contracts with the US government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the meantime, the rights of immigrants — especially in the face of the often-brutal tactics of ICE — have been the one issue that has helped unify America’s often-fractious bishops under Pope Leo, who will mark his first year as pontiff on May 8. The US hierarchy came together for the first time in a dozen years to denounce the “climate of fear” and “dehumanizing rhetoric” surrounding immigration, as my colleague Mary Ellen Klas over the weekend.

The American bishops are saying what the Pope cannot diplomatically utter. His stance, however, is on the record. In January 2025, US Vice-President JD Vance (a Thiel disciple and Catholic convert) said on Fox News that Christians “love your family first, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and after that prioritize the rest of the world.”�� In response, Cardinal Robert Prevost — the future pope — reposted an article on X whose headline read: “.”

Nevertheless, the Catholic church in the US is vulnerable. While the hierarchy has united over immigration, ordinary American Catholics have not. Hispanic Catholics in the US are than White Catholics, who are to support President Donald Trump. It’s the kind of polarization that Thiel may make mischief with by aligning his money and ideas with right-wing Catholic voters and their values.

Why would they heed his counsel? Thiel is not Catholic; he’s more of a mix-and-match, eclectic Christian. But in Rome, he is showing his Catholic tastes by associating with conservative elements of the faith in a country with a complex relationship with the papacy. His host, the , is named for a 19th century Italian priest who advocated in 1843 for . That’s not how it played out: Modern Italy was united as a constitutional monarchy in 1861. But history works in mysterious ways. Today, the Pope is more than just Italian. He is the absolute ruler of an enormously influential multinational institution with the nominal fealty of 1.4 billion people. It’s the kind of empire that Thiel might even consider suspect in his vision of apocalypse.

That vision is itself built on the teachings of two modern-day Catholic intellectuals: the Frenchman René Girard and the German Carl Schmitt. At the risk of caricature, here’s a very brief description of their tenets.

Girard explained human desire as motivated by what he called mimesis (Greek for to mimic) — the imitative pursuit of things just because your neighbor possesses or wants them, a kind of grass-is-greener philosophy. For Girard, Christianity was the escape route from that destructive cycle of competitive coveting. He became a committed Catholic in the 1950s after a dramatic recovery from a cancer diagnosis.

Schmitt was an apologist for Adolf Hitler — until he fell out of favor with the Nazis in the mid 1930s. Thiel has admitted that the philosopher’s Nazi entanglement was messy, but Schmitt’s post-war writings about the coming of the Antichrist are at the center of the billionaire’s techno-eschatology. A key concept is the katechon, a Greek word from the New Testament that refers to a person or thing that restrains the much-feared Antichrist. Figuring out who this savior-like figure might be is part of Thiel’s game.

All this is a rabbit hole you probably don’t want to fall into while reading this column. But if that’s a course you’d like to pursue, by Laura Bullard in Wired will get you grounded (https://tinyurl.com/2ae5wuaz).

She spoke to Wolfgang Palaver, a German philosopher of the Girard school (and another Catholic) who remains friendly with Thiel despite disagreeing with him. At one forum a few years ago, Thiel declared that Girard — who died in 2015 — would not have any practical advice for keeping the Antichrist at bay. To which Palaver yelled out that Thiel was wrong and Girard would have told people to go to church.

The trouble is, Thiel looks to be trying to do just that by stepping into the Pope’s backyard.

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