In 1981, a bullet narrowly missed the heart of a certain Karol Józef Wojtyła when an aggrieved Turk shot him in the Vatican City. Wojtyła, whose professional title was “Pope John Paul II”, later forgave his would-be assassin, who managed to penetrate the Bishop of Rome with two bullet holes, leading to significant blood loss but without killing him.
This being the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fátima, she was later invoked as the Pope’s protector that day, and he said himself that a “motherly hand” had guided the bullets to miss his vital organs. I am not the first to wonder why Our Lady of Fátima could not have guided the bullets to miss him altogether.
We have seen a similarly religious response from a similarly religious political milieu following the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Saturday. Given how close he came to martyrdom in Pennsylvania — turning his head slightly at the exact moment of impact, which was therefore taken by his earlobe rather than his occipital lobe — it has been suggested by a number of political commentators that God had a hand in saving the former president at the last moment. One wonders, as one does of the Secret Service that day, what took him so long.
Megyn Kelly this week provided a useful case study. Reminding her viewers that Trump was shot at 6:11pm, she read a passage from the New Testament: “Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” The citation? Ephesians 6:11. “I’m almost emotional reading it,” she said. “It’s just that what happened to him and our country this weekend is extremely grave and extremely important, and we are all so lucky it wasn’t worse than it was.”
It would take a utilitarian theology of incomprehensible proportions, however, to convince the family of Corey Comperatore, who did catch a bullet that day, that our providential father was controlling its trajectory. How lucky his daughters should feel that the Lord — or perhaps Our Lady of Fátima again? — protected Trump by redirecting those bullets into their dad.
Such is the unthinking theological sloppiness of those who think that God was guiding those bullets, those who insist that Trump is God’s chosen president. This is the same Trump who when asked to name a single Bible verse that he liked, said: “The Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics.” At least he won’t struggle to pick a favourite now.
Read it all in Unherd
