‘No one knows the day’
(FILES) Pope Francis waves to the crowd during the weekly general audience on 20 March 2024 at St Peter's Square in The Vatican. Pope Francis "spent a calm night, is resting", the Vatican said in the morning update on 28 February 2025. Pope Francis's condition was continuing to improve, as the 88-year-old pontiff marked two weeks in hospital with pneumonia in both lungs.
Filippo Monteforte / AFP
“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” — Matthew 24:36
With the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, speculation is swirling around an ancient prophecy that the world will end in two years.
The buzz stems from a renewed interest in “The Prophecy of the Popes,” a 12th-century text attributed to Irish bishop Saint Malachy.
The prophecy, discovered in 1590, claims to predict the succession of popes and ends ominously with the destruction of Rome and the final judgment.
Some interpreters have suggested that Pope Francis would be the final pontiff before the apocalypse. The supposed clue? A cryptic line dating the world’s end in 2027, 442 years after Pope Sixtus V.
Yet biblical teaching is unequivocal: predicting the end of days is not only futile but contrary to Christ’s own words.
“No one knows” — not the prophets, not the mystics, not even the scholars armed with numerology and 900-year-old manuscripts.
The fascination with doomsday may reveal more about fears than faith in a world marked by uncertainty.