Believers who accept the prophecy read it pope by pope, matching each Latin motto to the pontiff it is said to describe. Pius IX, whose thirty two year reign ran through the loss of the Papal States, is matched to Crux de Cruce, a cross from a cross, read as the cross of the House of Savoy that dispossessed him. John Paul II, born during a solar eclipse in 1920 and dying near a partial solar eclipse in 2005, is matched to De Labore Solis, of the labour of the sun. Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, is read against Gloria Olivae, the glory of the olive, tied to the Olivetans, a reform branch of the Benedictines whose emblem is an olive branch. Francis was widely read against the list's final, unnamed entry, long described by commentators as naming a pope called Petrus Romanus who would shepherd the church through its last trial.
The Roman Catholic Church has never adopted the prophecy as teaching, and it holds no status in canon law or liturgy; it survives entirely as popular devotion and speculation, almost all of it outside any institutional church setting. Historians who have traced the practice of applying it, starting with O'Brien's exhaustive pope by pope commentary, note the mottoes are elastic enough that a plausible reading can usually be constructed after the fact, once the pope is already known and his career visible in hindsight, a far weaker kind of confirmation than a prediction made in advance.
Francis's own succession is itself evidence against the popular reading. Robert Prevost was elected Leo XIV in May 2025 after Francis's death, and a further pontiff followed the pope many had cast as the list's last entry, exactly the continuation its promoters had treated as impossible.