Archbishop Paul Coakley, the current president of the United States Coalition of Catholic Bishops, met with Donald Trump and JD Vance earlier this week.
Archbishop Coakley is my archbishop. He’s an accessible, likable, gracious and very intelligent man. He’s also, at least in my estimation, a little bit naive about certain kinds of evil.
The extreme right wing in this country has been working to co-opt the Catholic Church for a long time. They’ve already got the entire Evangelical arm of American Christianity performing like Trump’s trained monkeys anytime they need them.
Trump’s whore Evangelical clergy are frank and open idolators who have kicked the Gospels and Jesus Christ to the curb in favor of Trump.There is nothing Trump can do that they will not find some way to twist Scripture around to deify it.
Trump has managed to make the entire Republican Party into his amoral stooges, the Supreme Court into his footstool, most of the corporate press into his cowering choir, and America’s richer-than-god-but-always-wanting-more-money billionaire class into his avaricious accomplices.
There are a number of mainline Protestant denominations who are refusing to bow their knee to the orange Baal. Their clergy has demonstrated astounding personal courage in the face of ICE brutality and violence. They’re the real deal.
But the Catholic Church, with its organizational structure, size and international clout, is the one that could really make a difference. The Catholic Church, if it would stand for Christ in a fearless way, could bring this demon down. And I think the demon knows it.
The thing that frightens me as a Catholic is that the Church has a long, uninterrupted, consistent history of bending over for fascist tyrants. The Church stood up to communism. But, from Mussolini, Franco and Hitler in the 1930s, to Pinochet, and the various slaughtering monsters in South and Central America in the 1970s and 80s, the Church has always tried to do deals with Nazis.
It can’t seem to learn that you don’t do deals with the devil. The devil doesn’t change. The devil changes you.
I think the bishops of our church are conflicted. They can’t seem to decide if they are CEOs of a big corporate enterprise whose bottom line they need to protect, or priests who speak for Christ.
They try to protect the Church’s material interests when they should be living representatives of Christ to beleaguered people. They end up with the blood of innocent people on their hands because of their cooperation with terrible evil.
We’ve got a smattering of bishops and priests in this country who are just as much Trump’s creatures as their Evangelical brethren. But neither Trump nor the right wing billionaire boy’s club has been able to completely buy and co-opt the teaching voice of the Catholic Church the way they have destroyed the Gospel message in the teaching voice of Evangelicalism.
Trump also hasn’t laid a finger on the Pope. Pope Francis publicly said that Trump was “no Christian.” Pope Leo has been quite firm that the Church cannot remain silent about the cruelties Trump is committing.
JD Vance floated a right wing interpretation of Catholic teaching that I’ve heard coming from the mouths of Evangelicals, saying basically — and I am paraphrasing a lot — that it is Catholic teaching that Christians should only take care of their own immediate families and friends and ignore the suffering of everyone else.
In other words, he was trying to do to Catholicism what the right wing has done to Evangelicalism and convince them to deny the Lordship of Jesus Christ by setting aside His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. Vance was corrected directly and publicly by Pope Francis himself. The Holy Father said that Vance’s claims of what the Church teaches were false.
Based on watching 10 years of his behavior, I do not believe that Trump would have agreed to meet with Archbishop Coakley if he had not thought that he could co-opt him.
Trump likes clergy who tell their followers that Trump is God’s anointed, and who dismiss his constant stream of lies, threats and verbal abuse with airy statements like “oh, he just says things.” He prefers clergy who think bribes are good, extortion is great, rape is fine, pedophilia is just rich boys being boys, and murder, when his regime commits it, is always in “self defense.”
He never meets with clergy who actually stand up to him. Never. What he does is use his lie machine to attack them.
Bishop Marian Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington asked Trump from the pulpit to “have mercy” on the people he governs. It was a gracious and soft spoken request. Trump used his whore media to attack her, and his Republican stooges in Congress to author legislation attacking her.
That’s how Trump treats clergy he can’t control.
I’m not saying that Trump can control Archbishop Coakley the way he does his whore clergy. But I am saying that I believe that Trump wants to do that, and that he wouldn’t have met with Archbishop Coakley if he didn’t think it was possible that he might be able to manipulate him and use him.
I do not believe that Trump and Vance are normal people. I was in politics for a long time, and there’s a quality about them that I recognized almost at first glance.
When people like these look at other people, they don’t see a human being. When they look at people, they see them as either prey or danger to themselves. The only assessment they make is, can they use you, or should they destroy you.
They can be charming when it works for them. They’re practiced at reading people and manipulating them. They lie as easily as they breathe. Nothing they do bothers them. They feel no guilt. They can be anything they need to be. Unless you recognize them for what they are, they can make you believe almost anything.
No matter what superficial impression they gave, I believe that when Archbishop Coakley walked into Trump’s office, both Trump and Vance saw him as prey.
Archbishop Coakley is a lovely man, and a good one. He has a deep devotion to Blessed Stanley Rother, who was martyred in Guatemala by the same kind of murderous totalitarian government that Trump is trying to create here in America.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, the priest who is so devoted to Blessed Stanley Rother that he built a Shrine for him, has come full circle.
He has met the same evil that martyred Blessed Stanley. It wasn’t in a tropical jungle. It was, rather, in what’s left of the White House. I don’t know how sensitive Archbishop Coakley is to that sort of thing, but if he has the antennae for it, I’m sure he felt the oppressiveness of the evil that resides there the moment he approached the building.
This regime is black, homicidal evil.
I’m going to pray for my Archbishop every day from now on.
God has given him the awful opportunity to stand for Christ at a perilous inflection point in world history.
This is God or Satan time. Every one of us, including our spiritual leaders, has to choose this day whom we will serve.
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