[Excerpt from Chapter One, “The Fall of the Papacy”, section “The Prophecies of Nostradamus”]
Beyond any doubt, the prophecies of Nostradamus assign an enormous significance to the murder of Pope John Paul I as the trigger of a chain of events leading to the Papacy’s final unraveling at the turn of the 21st Century. It is therefore not surprising that the Mafia figure who masterminded this vile assassination should also figure prominently in the Centuries. As we noted earlier, Michele Sindona was fond of using acronyms, often derived from the names of his two sons, as designations for the various corporations he created in order to “move money around”. One such acronym was Mabusi, and it provides the key to the Quatrain which has been interpreted as referring to the “third Antichrist“:
Mabus then soon will die, and there will follow
A horrible toll of people and animals:
... drought, famine, when the comet will run.
[Century II, Quatrain 62]
The last appearance of Comet Halley coincided with the beginning of a great drought and famine in the Horn of Africa. The Comet made its closest approach to the Earth in March, 1986 — the same month in which Michele Sindona was poisoned in his jail cell near Milan, Italy. Sindona had just been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering the contract-killing of a witness against him in his prosecution for bank fraud and embezzlement. To fix the date of Mabus‘ death, Nostradamus uses the astrological position of the planet Saturn:
The great old enemy grieving dies of poison ...
Saturn in Sagittarius turning retrograde.
[Century II, Quatrains 47-48]
In astrological parlance, a planet’s movement is “retrograde” when it appears to go backward through the Zodiac. Saturn passes through Sagittarius every thirty years, the last time being in 1986. The Ringed Planet’s motion turned retrograde on March 18, 1986, the precise date on which Michele Sindona was convicted of murder! In what can only be considered poetic justice, he would die two days later after drinking a cup of coffee laced with potassium cyanide, doubtless served up courtesy of his co-conspirators who wished to assure his silence. But Nostradamus clearly foresaw that the sinister undertakings which Sindona had set in motion within the Vatican would not expire with the death of Mabus. His Quatrains continue to track the path of these dark forces via references to the astrological positions of the “Scythe” — the planet Saturn in the role of “Grim Reaper”.