Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has brought a four-lecture series on Biblical apocalypse to the heart of Rome. Catholic universities are running from it. Italian politicians are demanding answers. And the invitations are the hottest ticket in town.
A short walk from St. Peter’s Square, in a city where the Catholic Church has shaped civilisation for two millennia, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful and peculiar billionaires is this week delivering a private lecture series on the Antichrist. The invitations are gold. The Catholic universities originally linked to the event have fled. And Rome, as only Rome can, is consuming the whole spectacle with equal parts outrage and fascination.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, arrived in Rome on Sunday to begin a four-day, invitation-only conference running through Wednesday. The subject: the Antichrist. Not as a figure of derision or Halloween costume, but as a serious theological, philosophical and technological concept, explored through the lenses of René Girard, Carl Schmitt, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift and John Henry Newman.
For a man whose data company helps the Trump administration deport migrants, whose early money helped launch JD Vance’s political career, and who has spent years preoccupied with existential risk and apocalyptic theology, the choice of Rome as a venue was not accidental. It was a statement.
The Pope’s University Wants Nothing to Do With It
The controversy ignited before Thiel had even landed. Early reports in the Italian press named the Pontifical St. Thomas Aquinas University, the Dominican institution known informally as the Angelicum, as the venue for the lectures. The Angelicum carries a particular resonance in the current moment: it is the place where a young priest named Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, wrote his canon law doctoral thesis.
The prospect of a tech billionaire delivering secret lectures on the Antichrist at the alma mater of the sitting Pope proved too much for the Angelicum to absorb. The university moved quickly to distance itself, issuing a statement that was notable for its precision: the event was not organised by the university, would not take place on its premises, and formed no part of any institutional initiative.
The Catholic University of America in Washington was next to step back. The university confirmed it was not sponsoring or hosting the event, clarifying that the Cluny Project, cited in invitations as a co-organiser, is an independent initiative that was incubated at the university but operates on its own authority. The university had previously hosted Thiel on its Washington campus in 2023 for a talk on René Girard, the French philosopher and literary critic who shaped much of Thiel’s intellectual worldview. That event, apparently, was fine. Lectures on the Antichrist in Rome were a different matter.
According to documents seen by the Associated Press, the event ended up being jointly organised by the Cluny Institute and the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, an Italian organisation based in Rome. The exact venue has not been confirmed publicly.
What Is Thiel Actually Saying?
Thiel’s interest in the Antichrist is not a recent affectation. He has written and spoken about the concept for years, approaching it not as a supernatural prediction but as a framework for understanding the dangers of technology, modernity and human hubris. In a November essay for the Catholic magazine First Things, he mused openly about the centuries of Christian debate over who the Antichrist was, when he would arrive, and what he would preach.
The Rome lectures follow a template Thiel first used in San Francisco last September, where he gave the same four-part series to a similarly exclusive audience. According to invitation text circulating in Rome, the lectures are anchored in science and technology and draw on theology, history, literature and politics. The thinkers Thiel references span centuries and disciplines, from the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt to the literary satire of Jonathan Swift to the religious thought of Cardinal John Henry Newman.
The framing, to those familiar with Thiel’s thinking, is consistent with his broader worldview: a deeply unconventional Catholic who believes that technology is accelerating humanity toward a decisive reckoning, and that the intellectual traditions of Western Christianity offer the best tools for understanding what that reckoning might look like.
Rome Reacts: Parliament, Politics and Paranoia
In Italian political circles, the visit triggered immediate scrutiny. The centre-left opposition filed a formal parliamentary question over reports that Thiel might seek a meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni or other members of the government during his stay. The question reflects a broader unease in Italy about the influence of American tech power on European politics, an unease sharpened by Palantir’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations and Thiel’s well-documented financial ties to the American right.
Meloni’s office has not confirmed or denied any meeting. Thiel’s team has not responded to requests for comment. The lectures themselves remain closed to the press, with attendees reportedly bound by confidentiality. In a city where every palazzo holds secrets, the deliberate opacity has only deepened the intrigue.
The reaction on Rome’s streets has been harder to characterise. Among the city’s intellectuals and clergy, there is a mixture of genuine curiosity and studied disdain. One Vatican observer, speaking anonymously, described the whole affair as characteristic of a certain strand of American Catholic conservatism that has developed a taste for European settings and apocalyptic ideas. Another simply noted that Rome had survived Visigoths, Renaissance popes and Mussolini. It could survive a PayPal co-founder.
Silicon Valley Meets the Eternal City
There is something fitting, if unsettling, about the collision happening this week in Rome. Thiel has spent years arguing that the biggest questions facing humanity are not primarily economic or political, but civilisational and spiritual. His investment in Palantir, a company that takes its name from the all-seeing stones of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, reflects a worldview in which technology is not neutral but morally weighted, capable of serving either apocalyptic destruction or civilisational survival.
Rome, for its part, is a city that has hosted every kind of power that the Western world has produced. Emperors and popes, fascists and liberators, tourists and pilgrims. Adding a libertarian tech billionaire delivering private lectures on Biblical prophecy barely registers on the historical scale of Roman strangeness.
And yet the visit matters, precisely because of its timing and its cast. A world at war in the Middle East, a Pope whose university wanted nothing to do with the event, a prime minister whose office is being asked whether she met with the man organising lectures on the end of days. The scenery could not have been scripted more deliberately if it had tried.
The lectures run through Wednesday. Whatever Thiel says inside those closed rooms, Rome will still be standing on Thursday. It always is.
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