In life, you need someone by your side to tell you you’re wrong. In fact, if you’re married to a biological woman, that issue should already be taken care of. Nor am I going to contribute to the media uproar that’s suddenly accusing Donald Trump of being satanic. Mainly because he would be the first satanist in history to reaffirm the consecration of his country as “one nation under God” in the midst of his “America Prays” initiative, to publicly and institutionally thank the Virgin Mary for her role in promoting peace and love, and to invite Americans to pray to the Blessed Virgin for “the end of war and for a new era of peace in Europe and throughout the world.”
I’d offer them a golden rule: almost nothing is offensive if it’s funny enough. The photo wasn’t funny.
That said, I can’t imagine two more stupid moves in the same week: picking a fight with the pope and publishing the infamous photo that was later deleted. As for the latter, if any of Trump’s current advisers are kind enough to read this, I’d offer them a golden rule: almost nothing is offensive if it’s funny enough. The photo wasn’t funny. It was stupid. And, to top it off, it was blasphemous (though we Catholics aren’t as hysterical as Muslims when faced with representations of God). (RELATED: When Politics Becomes a Faith, Faith Is Put to the Test)
There’s a book published in the 1970s called God Is Joyful that I treasure, an anthology of post-Vatican II Spanish humor. It brings together a host of jokes and cartoons from the satirical press published at the height of the controversy following the Second Vatican Council, making fun of the doctrinal chaos of the time. Sometimes the jokes seem irreverent, but they’re so funny that they end up harmless.
In one cartoon, two well-dressed elderly women are talking outside a church: “No, dear, this talk of freedom of conscience is just to reassure modern people. When it comes to Heaven, in the end it’s us, the same old ones, who’ll go.” The cartoon is, of course, by the wonderful humorist Mingote. In another by the same artist, a woman reads the headline “17 Bishops Against the War on Money: ‘Sometimes a Revolution Isn’t So Bad,’” and says to her husband, “Ever since they stopped using Latin, I don’t understand anything anymore.” And in a third, a married couple looks crestfallen at Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio and says, “What if we said a novena and prayed it all turns out to be a printing error?”
Returning to the Trump cartoon, I don’t think it’s necessary to explain that offending Catholics — especially for a president highly popular among many Catholics worldwide — is a bad idea. Some have staged their enormous anger, while others, perhaps the smarter ones, have said it’s time to pray more for the president.
The matter of the fight with the pope, and the Holy Father’s ill-timed, veiled response this Tuesday, is more complex. In recent times, perhaps no pontiff has caused conservative Catholics more grief than the late Francis (may God have him in His glory), and yet many of us have chosen to remain silent and pray, except on political matters where his opinion carries no special weight.
I understand that Trump thinks Pope Leo should get along with him. We all expected it. Where the president is wrong is in getting angry because the Holy Father calls for world peace. John Paul II was the pope who fought hardest against communism, terrorism, and in favor of freedom. And yet he spent his entire pontificate calling for world peace, even in conflicts that a Christian might consider perfectly justified from a moral point of view.
It is true that the Holy Father can be criticized for focusing so much on condemning certain wars and acts of violence while often overlooking others, such as the martyrdom of Christians in Africa, which is now spreading to Western countries and cities, or the murders carried out by the Iranian regime. But otherwise, Pope Leo has done nothing different from what John Paul II did, who opposed the Iraq War, arguing that it did not meet the criteria of a “just war” and trying to mediate to prevent it. This is the same thing many saintly popes have done throughout history. (RELATED: Catholic Cognitive Dissonance)
Perhaps there is a point of agreement in all this: the pope is right to try to achieve peace by every possible means, and Trump is right to force the end of the ayatollahs’ regime, which has been massacring its own people and financing terrorism worldwide.
At this delicate moment in history, when we have the opportunity to reverse many of the perverse things that the postmodern, anti-Christian left has instilled in our societies for years, Christians and those who feel indebted to the Judeo-Christian culture that made the West great should do everything possible to be more united than ever. Almost all the dark forces in the world are working toward the opposite.
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