To show that it is not just those who hold to premillennialism who come up with whacky interpretations of the book of Revelation, the following comes from a recent work by a Catholic arguing that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, not Francis/Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is the true pontiff and his resignation was null and void (and of course, most Catholics are much more careful about their interpretation of Revelation, so not imputing this crackpottery to them):
The signs of nature . . . divine
messages?
Finally,
it would be necessary to pay attention to the signs of nature that surrounded
both BXVI’s resignation and JMB’s election: the lightening over the Sistine
Chapel at the time of Benedict’s resignation (a sign of God’s wrath?), the
attack of the seagull on one of the pigeons released by Benedict from his
balcony and the presence of a European herring gull Larus Argentatus) on
the chimney of the Sistine Chapel before the 2013 white smoke (note, on the one
hand, that in Lev. 11.13-19 it is pointed out that the seagull is to be
considered “unclean” and it is said of her “to be an abomination”,
and on the other, that Msgr. Bergoglio is an Argentine descendent of European
migrants.
Pure chance, or could we consider,
also here, through these signs a revelation from God in relation to BXVI’s “resignation”?
(Estefanía Acosta, Benedict XVI: Pope “Emeritus”? [trans. Clara Eugenia
Laverde and Estefaníá Acosta; n.p., 2021], 72)
In an endnote to the above, the Epistle
of Barnabas (late-first/early second-century AD text) is marshalled in support
of this interpretation:
It would be convenient at this
point to bring the interpretation of these verses found in chapter 10 of the
Letter of Barnabas, that despite not explicitly citing the seagull, refer to
the Levitical passage which mentions it (Coleção Patrística. Padres
Apostólicos. São Paulo: Paulus. p. 301): “It says <<You shall not
eat an eagle, or a hawk, or a kite, or a crow>>. That is: you will
not link yourself, imitating them, to those men who do not know how to earn
their food with work and sweat, but who, in their injustice, snatch the good of
others. They walk with an innocent air, but spy and see who they are going
to strip out for ambition. They are like those birds, the only ones that do
not feed themselves, but perch idly, looking for an opportunity to feed on the
meat of others. They are true scourges for their cruelty”. [ndt
– emphasis added] (Ibid., 193 n. 94)
