Thiel misunderstands Ratzinger. The project of “pure Church” failed. A Pope at the service of a US President would harm the US and the Church. But perhaps the Church can help the US and world find a new balance when the old one is gone.
In an article published in First Things, Peter Thiel continues his campaign to warn against the Antichrist and herald the end times. Drawing on his recent lectures in Rome, Thiel calls upon a Catholic pope to support his vision. This figure best fits the overall strategy of American Catholicism integrated into the Trump administration’s political system: Benedict XVI/Ratzinger.
In this article, we see Ratzinger’s dual “use”: to support Thiel’s fascination with the Antichrist and to organize the Catholic presence within the broader process of Christianizing the United States. These “uses” reinforce each other, establishing an ideological framework that pushes Christianity toward becoming the state religion of the American nation.
Why a pope, and why Ratzinger? American nationalist Christianity, which has no central authority in matters of faith but has found its charismatic leader in Trump, faces the significant challenge of having an American at the global helm of the Catholic Church. To fully integrate the American Catholics who politically identify with Trump as the religious leader of the new Christian awakening, a pope must be found who would endorse this project. Among the most recent Roman pontiffs, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is certainly the one best suited for this mission.
The advantage is that eschatological themes—and the question of the Antichrist—have accompanied Ratzinger throughout all phases of his life: his brief career as a theology professor, his long exercise of censorial power within the Catholic Church, and his abruptly interrupted (by himself) papacy. Thiel believes he can identify an eschatological framework in each of these phases that supports the dual “role” of Ratzinger, which forms the basis of his article. In this regard, Thiel is correct to a certain extent, and therefore, his interpretation of Benedict XVI’s fate cannot be dismissed too quickly (neither by the late pope’s European supporters nor by Catholics opposed to Silicon Valley Christianity).
Ratzinger and the Antichrist: Politics of the Church
Thiel skillfully employs the eschatological themes present in Ratzinger’s work, positioning them as the last bastion against the Catholic Church’s drift—a drift opposed by the American Catholicism aligned with Trump’s political and religious leadership. Pope Francis is portrayed as the chief architect of this drift. In Ratzinger’s thought, as reframed by Thiel, Francis is identified as the likely Antichrist of our time. Of course, Thiel proceeds with due caution because, while Ratzinger invoked the figure of the Antichrist, he never associated it directly with his successor. However, he certainly created spaces to think and speak openly about it.
In short, Thiel uses Ratzinger in a way that Ratzinger ultimately permitted by scattering interpretive clues pointing in this direction, thanks in part to the entourage that governed his post-papacy. The approach taken by the Protestant Thiel is therefore in line with Ratzinger’s vision of the role of Catholicism. Not the apocalyptic Ratzinger, mind you, but the sovereign pontiff.
In Ratzinger, the figure of the Antichrist serves an ecclesiastical-political function rather than an eschatological one. In this regard, the explicit portrayal of Hans Küng as the Antichrist par excellence captures the meaning of this figure in Ratzinger’s/Benedict XVI’s thought. Ratzinger is not anxious about the “end times” of the world, but he is anxious about the end of a historical era of the Catholic Church. Modernity reveals its demonic side the moment it gains followers within the Catholic Church, not because it represents the world’s secular destiny.
For Ratzinger, this “perversion” of the Catholic Church signifies the world’s downfall. However, his focus is solely on the ecclesial institution, not on the fate of the human beings inhabiting our world that, according to Thiel, has now reached the threshold of ultimate eschatology.
Ratzinger’s Antichrist is a lesser Antichrist, weakened and deprived of eschatological urgency because he is among Catholics who do not share his views or his political project of making the Catholic Church the cornerstone of a new Western Christianity. For Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Catholicism is synonymous with the West, and their fates are inextricably linked. Thus, Ratzinger’s Antichrist is a regional figure from whom the global significance of the beginning of the end times has been removed.
However, Thiel does not mention this because it would undermine the instrumental role of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in his narrative. To restore the Antichrist’s global dimension, Thiel heralds the “totalitarian peace” that would be its surest sign, coupled with the refrain of global security. Here, the crux of the matter emerges: the new American pope’s relentless proclamation of an “unarmed and disarming peace” — a peace to be built as the urgent task of the present moment. However, Thiel fails to recognize the fundamental problem with his vision: the proliferation of Antichrists, who are becoming too numerous to fulfill the role Thiel assigns to this end-times figure.
Thiel’s error is linking the signs to the figure of the Antichrist. In this respect, he remains entirely faithful to the binary logic of AI, his mindset. However, the Antichrist is not a matter of accumulating information about the end times. Rather, it is interpreting barely perceptible clues buried beneath this avalanche of information. The signs are scattered throughout history to be understood, not quantitatively piled on top of each other as the foundation for a prediction indicating where and who the Antichrist is. Without human intelligence’s exercise of understanding, the inevitable outcome is the multiplication of Antichrists and the weakening of the eschatological meaning of the end times.
Moreover, one forgets that the Gospel’s meaning of the Antichrist is to confuse minds, rendering them incapable of seeing where Christ is. “For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will be. And if those days were not cut short, no one would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short. Then, if anyone says to you, ‘Look, the Christ is here,’ or ‘He is there,’ do not believe it; for false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, to deceive, if possible, even the elect. Behold, I have told you this in advance. So if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out there; or ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For just as lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:21–27)
The transition from a Christian nation to Christianity as State Religion
Using the apocalyptic Ratzinger ultimately undermines the theological significance of Thiel’s Antichrist because this figure operates within church politics throughout Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s life. But it is precisely in this theological weakness that the political strength of Thiel’s interpretation of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI lies: namely, in finding a Catholic pope who is like-minded and supportive of Trump’s messianic leadership—with its strong emphasis on the Christian identity of the United States.
To carry out this project, Trump needs a Catholicism detached from worldly matters—a Catholic Church focused on itself and more concerned with the aesthetics of liturgy than with social doctrine. The theme of “de-worlding” the Catholic Church (in German: “Entweltlichung”), which Ratzinger outlined in a lengthy speech given in Freiburg on the last day of his papal visit to Germany (September 2011), responds precisely to this fundamental requirement for the institutional Christianization of the United States. De-worlding the Church does not merely mean severing all ties between the political dimension of the state and the religious practices of Catholicism; it also means declaring the Church’s detachment from all those worldly issues that engage states and politics. On these matters, following the logic of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the Church must strictly abstain in order to preserve its purity intact. This purity is threatened by the ambiguity of worldly matters and politics, from which the Catholic Church must immunize itself through a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, clearly distancing itself from all worldly ties to what are called the rex mistae; and on the other hand, publicly recognizing only that form of political Catholicism which declares itself in favor of transforming these into state laws consistent with the Catholic Church’s individual moral doctrine.
Ratzinger/Benedict XVI had staked everything on this project for a new postmodern Western Christianity. Ratzinger himself declared the project a failure in its global scope with his resignation as Pope of the Catholic Church. The project also failed because the historical conditions for global Western hegemony had ceased to exist. Trump’s doctrine for a world order emerges from the ruins of this failure—one that oscillates between imperial fragmentation and nostalgia for, or need of, a different form of American global primacy, even if it means perpetual instability and total geopolitical chaos that regenerates from its own partial failures.
Trump’s doctrine demands that the Catholic Church—the only true global actor remaining on the world stage—remain detached from any claim to shaping the shared destiny of peoples and nations. The political use of the figure of the Antichrist within the ecclesial institution, combined with the Catholic Church’s de-worlding process initiated by Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, provides a foundation for a regional revival of postmodern Christianity under Trump’s leadership in the United States. This is the kind of Catholicism the president needs to create a Christian identity for the American nation. In this identity, the confessional boundaries of the Churches are practically meaningless, and they find their post-confessional point of convergence in the project of a new national primacy of Christianity.
The Catholic segment that feels represented by the Trump administration must ask itself what it aspires to. Furthermore, it must consider whether it is aware of the potential outcomes of its political participation in the current president’s socio-religious agenda. The line between reaffirming the Christian foundation of the United States’ identity and establishing de facto Christianity as the American state religion is extremely tenuous and dangerously blurring.
The Fate of U.S. Catholicism and the Catholic Church
But the implementation at the local and regional levels of the new postmodern Western Christianity envisioned by Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, on the one hand, and external support for any political system willing to enshrine individual Catholic morality into law—which today seems to find in the Trump administration a brazen champion with few (moral) scruples— on the other, could prove to be an explosive combination for contemporary global life. This is not only because they would open the door to a new era of “religious wars” at a time when political systems—into which the power of religion is inserted as a factor of global destabilization—are in close proximity (after all, from a systemic perspective, Putin’s Russia, the Iran of the ayatollahs, Trump’s United States, and Netanyahu’s Israel are extremely similar to one another precisely where their hostility is most evident).
But also because, by regionalizing the West’s new postmodern Christianity with the support of a large segment of conservative and traditionalist Catholicism, it would open the door to a radical redefinition of Catholicism itself—depriving it of that yearning for humanistic universality found in Jesus’ practices of unconditional care, as attested to in the Gospels. The Christian ordo amoris knows no hierarchies of proximity and distance, of care and dispensation, but seeks to reach everyone wherever they are and whoever they are.
The lure of a Christianity that finds itself de facto as a state religion can hold a captivating allure even for the Catholic Church; but to succumb to it would mean its ultimate worldly compromise—and the Russian Orthodox Church, in its ironclad alliance with Putin’s regime, represents much more than a warning: it is the inevitable fate of the Catholic dream of a new postmodern Christianity in the West.
