Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, is in Rome, where he is holding a three-day seminar on the issue of “The Antichrist.” According to media reports, his attempt to have the Vatican sponsor the event has failed. The Pontifical University St. Thomas Aquinas denied a room for the venue, and also his request to have a religious service celebrated in Latin has been rejected. On Sunday, March 15, the seminar started at Villa Taverna, the American embassy building. According to media reports, no Italian government or coalition member participated.
On March 10, the daily of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Avvenire, ran a 2,000-word article rejecting Thiel’s views. The Avvenire article, entitled “Thiel, Fear of the Antichrist and the Church’s Response,” counterposed to Thiel’s doctrine, a March 4 paper issued by the International Theological Commission entitled “Quo Vadis, Humanitas.”
The International Theological Commission document builds on St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, in which the verb “anakephalaiōsasthai” is central. It means “to recapitulate. To bring back to the one Head. ... It is the exact opposite of fragmentation, of domination, of surveillance as a surrogate for Providence.” Avvenire explained that, whereas “everything the ITC document says about development, vocation, identity, and the dramatic condition of the human is nothing other than the contemporary expression of this single ontological program,” Thiel’s “obsession with the Antichrist is born out of a partial and forced interpretation of the legacy of René Girard.… Thiel inherits Girard’s diagnosis—mimetic desire, violence spiral, humanity exposed to the danger of becoming a victim of distorsions of the very progress it has generated—but he rejects the cure.”
Then, it summarizes: “For Thiel, there are only two possibilities left: either we steer the acceleration toward the abyss, or we plunge into it. This is why Palantir, at its core, aspires to establish itself as a pseudo-political theology of surveillance and domination. This vision brings the nihilistic era to its conclusion by resolving it within the logic of the ‘lesser of two evils.’ In this perspective, technological utopianism and social and democratic misanthropy converge—inevitably and fatally. For this reason, Thiel’s vision strikes us as desperate and despairing.”
