If you are not prepared for this Sunday’s first reading (Gen 15:5-12, 17-18), you will probably have a difficult time making sense of it. Your homilist might not discuss it so I hope this brief explanation will be helpful. It is not a lengthy reading so we will go all the way through it splitting it into two parts but hopefully not slaughtering it.

The reading begins straightforward enough:

The Lord God took Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.” Abram put his faith in the LORD, who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.

He then said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land as a possession.” “O Lord GOD,” he asked, “how am I to know that I shall possess it?”

God promised Abram (later to be renamed Abraham) countless descendants and possession of the land. Abram then asks God for assurance of this. The rest of the reading tells us just how God assures him.

He answered him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Abram brought him all these, split them in two, and placed each half opposite the other; but the birds he did not cut up. Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram stayed with them. As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.

When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, which passed between those pieces. It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”

Unless you’re unfamiliar with ancient Near East covenant ceremonies, God’s act of assurance probably seems quite bizarre. But Abram would have been familiar with such ceremonies so it made perfect sense to him.

When two parties entered into a covenant, splitting slaughtered animals in two and walking between them was a symbol of one’s commitment to the covenant promise. It was the equivalent of saying, “Let what has happened to these animals happen to me if I do not keep my word”.

That being the case, God first had Abram slaughter animals and split them in two. Then, appearing as “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch”, God passed between them.

Of course, being slaughtered and split in two could never really happen to God but that’s irrelevant. God was communicating to Abram in terms he could understand. It was an act of “divine condescension”.

In time, God did indeed fulfill his covenant promises as Abram went on to have countless descendants many of whom would eventually possess the Promised Land.

Pope Benedict’s renouncement of the papal office this week has spurred a rash of questions about the purported prophecies of St. Malachy. “Will Benedict’s successor be the last pope?” “Are we headed into a period of great tribulation?” “Will the world end soon?”

The last time we fielded so many such questions at Catholic Answers was about eight years ago shortly after the death of Blessed John Paul II. This makes sense because the prophecies in question concern the identities of popes from the twelfth century to the end of time. This time around it is a little different though because there is only one more pope identified after Benedict XVI: “Petrus Romanus” (Latin for “Peter the Roman”).

St. Malachy was an Irish bishop who lived in the twelfth century. He died in 1148 and his close friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote his biography shortly afterward. St. Malachy was canonized in 1190 by Pope Clement III. Throughout this entire period there was never any mention of St. Malachy’s prophecies concerning the identities of future popes. In fact, not until the year 1590–four hundred years after St. Malachy’s canonization–did his prophecies surface.

Interestingly, 1590 was the same year Pope Sixtus V died and his successor was elected. At the time, every pope who had reigned during the prior four hundred forty seven years had been correctly identified by St. Malachy. Sixtus V’s successor, Urban VII, ended that. There was another candidate for the papacy that year who did fit St. Malachy’s prophetic identification but he was not elected. Since that time, interpreters have had to perform contorted acrobatics with St. Malachy’s cryptic prophetic phrases in order to somehow vaguely relate them to the identities of the successive popes. In many cases it just cannot be done. In other cases, doing so is a stretch, at best.

For example, the Latin phrase identifying our current pope is “Gloria olivioe” (“Glory of olives”). To make this fit Pope Benedict, many interpreters follow a train of thought something like this: Joseph Ratzinger chose the name Benedict; St. Benedict founded the Benedictines; formally affiliated with the Benedictines since 1960 is the Order of Our Lady of Mt. Olivet (the Olivetans); thus Pope Benedict XVI is the “Glory of the olives”. It’s something akin to Kevin Bacon’s “six degrees of separation”.

Considering all these facts, most historians have concluded that the purported prophecies were a sixteenth century forgery that failed to sway the electorate of 1590. Nevertheless, the prophecies were published in 1595 and they have continued to be an item of curiosity and speculation ever since, especially whenever a new pope is elected.

In regard to people who still choose to believe in the authenticity of the prophecies today, it is important to note that the prophecies do not actually predict the timing of tribulation or of the end of the world. The Catholic Encyclopedia, published over 100 years ago, explains:

It has been noticed concerning Petrus Romanus, who according to St. Malachy’s list is to be the last pope, that the prophecy does not say that no popes shall intervene between him and his predecessor designated Gloria olivioe. It merely says that he is to be the last, so that we may suppose as many popes as we please before “Peter the Roman”.

St. Malachy, pray for us.