The Vatican has uttered the most official word so far on Peter Thiel, through Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, Undersecretary to the Dicastery for Culture and Communications and former editor of the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica.
In a long article first published on Substack and eventually by Ucanews, Father Spadaro demolished the pseudo-theological foundations of Peter Thiel’s ideology. First of all, Thiel oversimplifies the notions of Escathon and Kathecon, contained in Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians, says Spadaro, who then exposes Thiel’s notion of the Apocalipse, in which Thiel moves the Antichrist out of theology, into politics. In Thiel, “Gospel is transformed into an instrument of geopolitical analysis.” As other theologians have done, Spadaro points to René Girard as the source for Thiel’s view of society as based on violence; however, whereas Girard indicates Christianity as the solution, Thiel downgrades Christianity to “a tool of interpretation—and, between the lines, of management—of contemporary conflicts.”
For Thiel, technology is not a tool but “elements in a cosmic struggle,” in which whoever slows down development is the Antichrist.
“It is no accident that, in the background, the figure of Carl Schmitt appears. The result is a vision in which freedom is no longer the center but a variable among others. And the Christian tradition, which has painstakingly bound together faith and the dignity of the person, gets reinterpreted as one pole of a tension to be governed.”
