Peter Thiel’s Pseudo Catholic Apocalypse: A leaked directory this week exposed Peter Thiel’s secret elite forum. The tech billionaire who lectures on the Antichrist is also the patron who led JD Vance into the Catholic Church.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is not a Catholic and does not claim to be one, but he is clearly obsessed with Catholicism.

On June 20 the Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported a leak that exposed the guest directory of Dialog, the invitation-only forum Thiel founded in 2006 and that critics set beside the Bilderberg Group. The list surfaced in the source code of Dialog’s own website, preserved in an Internet Archive snapshot and first flagged by a hacktivist on Bluesky. It gathered Elon Musk, senators of both parties, Trump cabinet officers, Gulf royals, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, OpenAI’s president, and New York Times columnists.

The leak landed in the same season as Thiel’s other public turn, the one in which he lectures elite audiences on the Antichrist and warns that Armageddon is near. The two roles belong to one project. Thiel borrows the vocabulary of Catholic apocalypse to dignify a politics of power, and he has supplied that politics with a Catholic Vice President of his own making.

He calls himself a Christian of broadly Protestant background. He studied at Stanford under René Girard, the French literary theorist and Catholic convert whose theory of mimetic desire became Thiel’s master key to markets, rivalry, and now the end of the world. Over the past year Thiel has carried a traveling lecture series on the Antichrist from city to city -- four closed-door sessions in San Francisco in the fall of 2025, organized by the ACTS 17 Collective at the Commonwealth Club, then private talks in Paris reported by Le Monde and Politico, and in March 2026 a four-day series in Rome.

The Rome sessions ran invite-only, no recordings, no press. The Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association, tied to the Italian far right, organized them with the independent Cluny Institute and praised Thiel for the “courage and intellectual liberty” to discuss forces it described as bent on destroying what remains of the West.

Italian newspapers first reported the venue as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the Angelicum, where the American-born Leo XIV once studied -- and the pontifical universities hurried to deny any role. In a parliamentary session, Italian lawmakers called Thiel’s ideas scandalous and demanded transparency about the government’s contracts with Palantir, the surveillance firm Thiel chairs. Voices close to Leo XIV called the content heretical.

A Protestant billionaire delivered a private theology of the last days a short walk from St. Peter’s Square, and the Catholic institutions of Rome backed away from the room.

Ross Douthat asked Thiel on a New York Times podcast what the Antichrist meant to him. Thiel answered, “How much time do we have?” His formula comes from Paul. The slogan of the Antichrist, Thiel says, is “peace and safety,” the phrase from First Thessalonians that arrives just before sudden destruction.

He draws the rest from an improbably assembled bookshelf: St. John Henry Newman’s apocalyptic sermons; Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ — a 1900 tale of an Antichrist who presents himself as a humanitarian and a benefactor; German Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s katechon — the restrainer who holds back the end of the world and provides the only bridge between an eschatological paralysis of all human effort and great historical power like that of the early Christian Empire of the Germanic kings.

In Thiel’s telling, the Antichrist of this century wears the costume of a reassuring administrator who promises to end existential risk -- the regulator, the arms-control negotiator, the global-governance official, the precautionary state that slows the machines. Greta Thunberg serves as his recurring example. Thiel hands his audiences a choice between a one-world state under the Antichrist and an Armageddon if that project collapses.

His account of the Antichrist and his commercial interest run in the same direction. If safety is the slogan of the enemy, then the people who would slow artificial intelligence, audit Palantir, or restrain the surveillance frontier are doing the enemy’s work. The chairman of a surveillance company has produced an account of the end times in which restraint is the temptation and acceleration is the faithful act.

Thiel met JD Vance in 2011, when he spoke at Yale Law School and the future Vice President was a striving student from Ohio. Thiel handed him Girard. Vance has credited that encounter for his conversion, which he recounted in a 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Girard was Catholic. Thiel is not. Vance became one. The line ran from the dead French Catholic to his Protestant student to the convert that student would fund into the United States Senate in 2022. Thiel is also credited with handing Vance the work of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who served the Nazi state and defined politics as the division of humanity into friend and enemy.

Girard exposed the scapegoat so that communities might stop sacrificing their victims, the crucified Christ being the innocent the civilization wronged. Critics who read Girard closely, among them the Jesuit commentators in Ireland who have tracked Vance’s turn, argue that he absorbed the mechanism and now works it -- defending the administration’s indictments, its deportations, and its lists of enemies. Thiel calls himself a Girardian while building a politics organized around the enemy: the woke, the climate activist, the globalist, the regulator. By that reading, both men took the anatomy of the scapegoat as an instruction manual.

He handles the other sources the same way. The katechon restrains the Antichrist and delays the end; Thiel reassigns it, treating the global order of safety and control as the danger and calling disruption the faithful answer. Paul’s “peace and safety” warns of false comfort on the edge of judgment; Thiel turns the phrase into the slogan of tyranny, which lets him brand AI safety, climate caution, and arms control as the devil’s work. He conscripts the texts rather than submitting to them.

The living Pope has answered the program directly. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, Leo XIV condemned “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” and he has denounced the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States. In April 2026, Vance -- the Catholic Thiel made -- told the Pope to be careful when he speaks about theology. The Church that received Vance now rebukes the agenda Thiel funds.

The fusion of maximal technology, friend-enemy politics, and Christian end-times language repeats a Weimar formula. The historian Jeffrey Herf called the pairing reactionary modernism, the embrace of the machine joined to a rejection of Enlightenment reason and liberal democracy, with Carl Schmitt among its theorists. Thiel revives it and routes Schmitt to the second-highest office in the country.

The faction is specific. Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and the Founders Fund orbit carry the technology side; Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and the postliberal Catholics around Vance carry the religious one. The leaked Dialog list runs wider than that circle and older than Thiel’s turn to Trump. It holds Democrats who hurried to disown it -- Wes Moore, Cory Booker, and Jared Polis among them -- and writers with no stake in any of it. The argument is about Thiel’s faction, not Silicon Valley and not the American right.

He takes the categories -- Antichrist, katechon, the two cities of Augustine -- and the two-thousand-year vocabulary of cosmic struggle, and he leaves behind the magisterium that interprets them, the preferential option for the poor, and the Pope who is alive and disagreeing with him.

The forum the leak exposed is the material body of that vision. Dialog meets off the record under a confidentiality its members prize; Auren Hoffman chairs it, Raffi Grinberg directs it, and the group is building a permanent campus in the Washington suburbs. Wired’s account of the August retreat near Dublin listed sessions called “Navigating WWIII,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Build-a-Cult.” Records released by the House oversight committee show Hoffman invited Jeffrey Epstein to the 2014 gathering, alongside Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. Janine Wedel, who studies power elites at George Mason University, calls these closed forums “a problem for democracy,” the rooms where agendas get set past any vote the rest of us could cast.

The source Thiel cites describes a figure he seems unable to recognize. In Vladimir Soloviev’s tale, the Antichrist arrives as a benefactor and a peacemaker, a superman who ends scarcity, unites the world under a single government, wins the gratitude of nations, and convenes the churches to ask them to bow to him in exchange for everything they have wanted. That likeness fits the technologist who promises to cure death and administer the human future more closely than it fits an official asking for a safety review. Thiel drew a careful portrait of the Antichrist and addressed it to the wrong man.

Catholic social teaching levels a sharper charge than excess piety. The first commandment forbids the worship of substitutes, and a man who borrows God’s vocabulary to consecrate his own power has raised a god he can manage.

The borrowing does political work. Thiel funds the 2026 Republican campaigns, chairs a surveillance company that sells to governments, and has placed his protégé a step from the presidency. His apocalyptic story dignifies that power and brands the people Leo XIV defends, the migrant and the poor, as frightened masses who would trade their freedom for the Antichrist’s safety.

When he brought the performance to Rome, the Catholic institutions there heard him out and refused him the bow that Soloviev’s Antichrist demands of churches. The Church — and, we hope, most Catholics, can tell the difference between Thiel’s mashed-together distorted pseudo-religion for the real thing.

This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/.../peter-thiels...

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