Among the theorists of the new America of the Trump presidency there are also “the Christian nationalists,” says Anne Applebaum, a historian and scholar of autocracies. And she gives a name: “Patrick Deneen, professor at Notre Dame, in his book Regime Change maintains that America should be a religious and not a secular state.”
Deneen is a guiding light for JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice president, as well as for Marco Rubio, the current foreign minister, both fervent and public Catholics: the latter with a cross marked on his forehead on Ash Wednesday, the day of the beginning of Lent; the former having ashes applied to him on the airport runway, after a visit to the Texas border with Mexico (see photo).
It is unthinkable that something similar should happen in Europe, which nonetheless was the seedbed of Christian and liberal civilization. For the Catholic politicians Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi, the founders of the modern European community, beatification processes are underway, but for all its vigor their faith was likewise publicly sober, with a clear distinction between God and Caesar, and for this very reason they too would fall under the axe that Vance wielded at the conference in Munich last February 14, when he humiliated the Old Continent for having “retreated from its fundamental values” to the point of “criminalizing prayer.”
Vance sent shock waves all over the world with his aggressive behavior, in tandem with Trump, against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28 in the Oval Office of the White House.
But few know that just two hours before that attack, Vance had given a speech to a very representative Catholic audience. A speech in which he moved his hearers by telling of the baptism of his 7‑year-old son; he quoted at length the words spoken by Pope Francis at the height of the Covid epidemic in a deserted and rain-beaten St. Peter’s Square; he prayed for his health.
But above all, in that speech of his, Vance aimed to “Catholicize” Trump’s moves. It’s fine to achieve “prosperity,” he said, but “Catholicism – Christianity at its root, I think – teaches our public officials to care about the deep things, the important things, the protection of the unborn, the flourishing of our children, and the health and the sanctity of our marriages.” And this is what would set the current American president apart. Just like in his foreign policy, which with Trump “is most in accord with Christian social teaching and with the Catholic faith, more than any president of my lifetime.”
While in fact, in Vance’s judgment, the past overseas military interventions of the United States “have led to the eradication of historical Christian communities” – and here he alluded to the war in Iraq, in which he himself fought with subsequent “shame,” but unleashed also in the name of the “exportation of democracy” theorized by the then voguish Catholic movement of Michael Novak, Richard J. Neuhaus, George Weigel – now everything has changed for the better, because when Trump speaks of the need for peace in Russia and Ukraine, his is “a policy oriented towards saving lives, and carrying out one of Christ’s most important commandments, but I think we also must recognize it as an effort to protect the religious liberty of Christians.”
Listening to Vance, in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center not far from the White House, were the fifteen hundred guests at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, an annual event born in the time of John Paul II. There was much warm applause, no telling how consciously consistent with the verbal aggression a few hours later by Vance himself against Zelensky, whom he accused of making a “propaganda tour” on the suffering of the Ukrainian people, as also with the intensification of Russian bombing of civilian targets in a Ukraine deprived overnight by Trump of electronic tools against air attack.
There is a curious similarity between this venture, political and religious at once, of which the Catholic Vance is the mastermind, and the axis cemented in Russia between Vladimir Putin and Moscow patriarch Kirill, under the banner of a “holy war” against the degenerate European civilization.
Few take note of this similarity, drawn instead to a predictable inventory of the points of friction between Trump and Pope Francis.
The main point of friction concerns immigration policy. Francis has never made a secret of his repudiation of Trump’s “mass deportation program.” The pope is so sensitive about this that his first public statement after the change in the White House was a letter to the bishops of the United States in which he strongly condemns the expulsion of immigrants, taking exception in particular to the moral arguments put forward in support of this policy by the Catholic Vance.
Who, however, in his speech at the Catholic Prayer Breakfast, took care not to criticize the pope on this point, who meanwhile has installed in Washington the most ardent of Trump’s opponents among the American cardinals, Robert W. McElroy, in reprisal for Trump’s nomination of the new United States ambassador to the Holy See in the person of Brian Burch, the spirited president of CatholicVote and a friend of Vance.
More than the divergences, in fact, Trump and the Catholics around him care about the convergences with Francis’s politics. Which concern Ukraine above all: with the pope’s repeated accusations against NATO of having “barked” for years at Russia’s borders, provoking its reaction of self-defense; with his injunction to Ukraine itself to “raise the white flag” and surrender; with a general affinity for the political and religious “Russian world,” encouraged by the parallel diplomacy of the Community of Sant’Egidio, much dearer to the pope than the secretariat of state.
The fact is that the brutal public humiliation inflicted by Trump and Vance on Zelensky on February 28 did not raise from the Vatican authorities – albeit amid the forced silence of the gravely ill pope – the slightest word not so much of protest, but at least of balance and correction.
Indeed, in the following days the opposite happened. The “Rearm Europe” plan of 800 billion for the vital military strengthening of a Europe no longer defended from the other side of the Atlantic, and so even more under the threat of Russian aggression, with Ukraine suffering the very high price, saw issue from the Vatican nothing but words of repudiation, albeit signed not by Francis or the secretariat of state but by the second in command of the dicastery for communication, Andrea Tornielli, author of an editorial that appeared on March 6 in the pontifical media to warn Europe to spend that money against poverty and hunger in the world, and not “to swell the arsenals and so the pockets of the manufacturers of death.”
Accompanying this editorial was a substantial anthology of words that Pope Francis has spoken in this regard, year after year.
With a sepulchral silence, instead, on the true origins of the martyrdom of the Ukrainian people, on their right to defend themselves with more than just bare hands, and on the real conditions that alone can make “just” the peace for that nation.
When Francis had been in the hospital for a few days, the major archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, was in America, first in Philadelphia and Washington, in the United States, and then in Toronto, Canada, where he gave talks in support of peace in his country, but, precisely, of a “just” peace, which is such – he said – only when it coincides with “an unshakeable and unbending commitment to defending the truth.”
The immense suffering of the Ukrainian people, in fact – Shevchuk said – is the product of colossal falsifications of past and present history, of that ideology of the “russkij mir,” the “Russian world,” which requires the annihilation of Ukraine within the empire of Moscow.
Contrariwise, right from the start Ukraine has been peaceful. “Just three years after independence, in December 1994, Ukraine disarmed its nuclear arsenal, which at that time was larger than that of the United Kingdom, France and China combined,” handing it over to Russia in exchange for the inviolability of its borders. “A courageous step such as this would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.” And instead, Ukraine has suffered the betrayal of that agreement, with the invasion carried out by Russia years later.
An invasion to which the Ukrainian people have responded with indomitable courage and “moral integrity,” but also with the need for “the support of those Western nations we have sought to emulate in creating a society that promotes law, justice, and human dignity.”
After the international security conference held in Munich on February 14, at which Vance attacked Europe, Vatican foreign minister Paul R. Gallagher, in an interview with the magazine of the New York Jesuits, “America,” also insisted on respect for the truth in the war in Ukraine, where “we have to be very clear about whose tanks went across whose border.… the decision to invade was Russia’s alone.”
As for achieving peace, Gallagher said, “our point of departure is the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” notwithstanding that it rests with the Ukrainians to decide what they are willing to give up, in a negotiation of which they absolutely must be part.
Also just as clear was the statement “in support of Ukraine and its people” published on March 4 by the presidency of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union:
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law. The use of force to alter national borders and the atrocious acts committed against the civilian population are not only unjustifiable, but demand a consequent pursuit of justice and accountability. […] In order to be sustainable and just, a future peace accord must fully respect international law and be underpinned by effective security guarantees to prevent the conflict from re-erupting, […] with the rights of all communities, including the Russian-speaking minority, upheld and protected. […] Ukraine’s struggle for peace and the defence of its territorial integrity is not only a fight for its own future. Its outcome will also be decisive for the fate of the entire European continent and of a free and democratic world.”
But until now, nothing of this clarity has been discernible in Pope Francis’s words and actions on the aggression against Ukraine and what followed from it. Nothing remotely comparable to the vibrant letter to Trump signed by Lech Walesa, the unforgettable leader of Solidarnosc and former president of Poland, and by other Polish former political prisoners of the Soviet Union era, following the cruel “spectacle” staged at the White House on February 28.
This insignificance of the successor of Peter is to Trump’s liking. And to Putin’s with him, in a bilateral pact against the Ukrainian people and a free Europe that, as one no less measured than Gianfranco Brunelli, director and political analyst of the authoritative Catholic magazine “Il Regno,” writes, “very much resembles the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” between Moscow and Berlin, at the beginning of the Second World War.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
————
Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
