The act of refusing to name someone can be the greatest form of humiliation, as it dehumanizes them.

The biblical book of Exodus employs this rhetorical device to devastating effect. It records the names of the two ordinary midwives, Shiprah and Puah, for courageously defying Pharaoh’s orders to murder the Hebrew male babies. Conversely, the genocidal Pharaoh is purposefully left unnamed.

What’s in a Name?

The morning after the assassination attempt on former U.S. president Donald Trump, the Holy See Press Office issued a statement (not published in the regular bulletin or sent to journalists) which read:

The Holy See expresses its concern about last night’s violence, which hurts people and democracy, causing suffering and death. It joins in the prayer of the U.S. Bishops for America, for the victims and for peace in the country that the motives of the violent may never prevail.

In those few sentences, Pope Francis accomplished what the assassin’s bullet could not: He added an egregious insult to Trump’s minor injury. The intentional omission of “Donald Trump” by the Holy See Press Office is stunningly conspicuous.

It is noteworthy how the Holy See Press Office went to great lengths to carefully craft the statement using the most generic and fuzziest language it could find. The Vatican’s Ministry of Truth shares the honor of framing the assassination attempt in a manner similar to other Trump-hating legacy media.

Media Farce

Here’s a sampling of the farcical headlines that initially clogged the media space before people began to realize that’s bad for business: “Trump rushed off stage after loud noises at rally,” (Washington Post), “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally” (CNN), “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after popping noises heard at his Pennsylvania rally” (Newsweek), “Trump removed from stage after loud noises startle former president, crowd” (USA Today), “Donald Trump escorted off stage by Secret Service during rally after loud noises ring out in crowd” (ABC).

If truth be told, the legacy media outdid the Holy See Press Office by at least naming Trump! Even China put the Vatican to shame this weekend. “China is concerned about the shooting incident of former President Trump. President Xi Jinping has expressed sympathy for former President Trump,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in a statement.

On Sunday morning, Pope Francis didn’t whisper a word about the assassination attempt in his Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square, as is customary in case of an international incident. He did, however, pray for those in the “maritime sector” and for “all populations who are oppressed by the horror of war.”

“Please, let us not forget tormented Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, and Myanmar,” he added.

Francis forgot to pray for the tormented U.S.A. and its former president who miraculously dodged an assassin’s bullet?

Popes and Presidents

In a statement following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, Pope Paul VI said he was “shocked” and “profoundly saddened by so dastardly a crime, by the mourning which afflicts a great and civilized country” and “by the suffering which strikes at Mrs. Kennedy, the children and her family.”

During a general audience on June 5, 1968, following the shooting of former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the night of the U.S. Democratic primary in California, Pope Paul VI expressed sorrow at the incident, saying, “We deplore this manifestation of violence and terror and pray for the life and health of the men who are suffering in service to the public service of his country.”

After Kennedy’s death on June 6, Paul VI in his Angelus address said, “We would do well to remember his actions in favor of the poor, the dispossessed, the segregated, the need for urgent progress, and, in a word, social justice.”

Trump’s Enemification

Francis has signed and renewed a concordat with the communist dictator who is terrorizing Christians in China. You would think Trump is more genocidal than the Egypt’s unnamed Pharaoh if you paid careful attention to Francis’ repeated sniping at the former president.

Over the years, he has religiously demonized Trump, even using the reductio ad Hitlerum rhetoric in his “enemification” of populist leaders like Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni.

“I am concerned because we hear speeches that resemble those of Hitler in 1934,” Francis said in August 2019. “‘Us first. We … We … ’ These are frightening thoughts.

“Today, listening to some of the populist leaders we now have, I am reminded of the 1930s, when some democracies collapsed into dictatorships seemingly overnight,” Francis said, hinting that the rhetoric of leaders like Trump were comparable to “speeches by Hitler in 1934, 1936.”

“It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies, and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred,” he said in his address to the International Association of Penal Law in November 2019.

Un-Christian Trump 

When Trump issued an executive order in February 2017 banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., Francis launched a thinly veiled attack on the president, noting: “A Christian would never say, ‘You will pay for that.’ Never.” Francis added: “This is not a Christian gesture.”

In February 2016, after Trump declared during his presidential campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the border, Francis denounced him, telling reporters on board the papal plane that anyone who wanted to build a wall “is not Christian.” The Washington Post ran with the headline: “Pope: Donald Trump ‘is not Christian’ if he wants to build a border wall.”

Francis added: “I’d just say that this man is not Christian if he said it this way.”

Trump replied: “He actually said it, that maybe I’m not a good Christian or something — it’s unbelievable — which is really not a nice thing to say.

“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”

Blue-Eyed Biden

In a March 2017 New York Times essay titled: “Is the Pope the Anti-Trump?” papal biographer and Francis-fan Austen Ivereigh wrote, “Pope Francis has become the flag-bearer of the global anti-Trump resistance.”

Indeed, the pope’s contempt for Trump is so palpable that it is the subject of the peer-reviewed article “Dialectical tensions in the narrative discourse of Donald J. Trump and Pope Francis” exploring the conflict narratives “evoked in the many speeches and tweets of Pope Francis and President.”

In contrast, Pope Francis’s relationship with President Joe Biden has been almost chummy. Faithful Catholics have frequently asked why Francis rolls out the red carpet for a president who professes to be a devout Catholic but is one of the staunchest supporters of abortion on demand and same-sex marriage the world has ever seen.

In July 2022, Francis told Univisión and Televisa that he left abortion to Biden’s “conscience,” adding: “Let (Biden) talk to his pastor about that incoherence.”

When conservative bishops in the U.S. were pushing for guidelines that would deny communion to pro-abortion politicians like Biden in September 2021, Francis responded: “I have never refused the eucharist to anyone.” The pope told reporters traveling with him that “communion is not a prize for the perfect.”

When Biden met the pontiff at the Vatican a month later, reporters if the topic of abortion had come up during their meeting. Biden replied: “No it didn’t … we just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion.”

If the Holy See Press Office had to rewrite the book of Exodus, I wonder if they’d be comfortable naming the genocidal Pharaoh Joe Biden, while erasing the name of a president who was responsible for appointing pro-life judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and overturning Roe v. Wade.

 

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.