No crusade nor cure

Pope Leo XIV is an American, being the second consecutive pope from that continent, though the first from the USA. One would have thought the first Pope from the USA would have been an Irish-American, but no, His Holiness is of French origin.

Time was,’ the Pope used to be this old Italian dude,’ but that an changed in 1980, when the death of Pope John Paul I of a heart attack after a reign of just 33 days caused the College of Cardinals to elect a non-Italian as pope,’ a Pole,’ the Archbishop of Cracow. After he reigned for more than 27 years, it seems the experience was so good that the College never looked back and the next three popes,’ including the incumbent,’ have not been Italian.

Perhaps it was a good idea to have a French-origin rather than a French pope,’ for the last time it didn't end well, leading to the so-called ‘Babylonian captivity,’ when the papal court was moved to Avignon in France,’ and the French king made sure that his man became pope, There was a schism, in which there was one pope at Rome, an antipope in Avignon, and then a third pope at Pisa.

But then, the present pope should have been a firm supporter of President Trump, but unaccountably is not. Trump might be forgiven for wondering why the pope is not getting behind him in this difficult time, unless he is a Democrat. And Catholics have historically tended to be Democrats.

Look, Alfred Landon Smith was in 1928 the first Catholic to run for President. On a Democratic ticket. And he only two Catholics to be elected President, Kennedy and Trump’s nemesis, Joe Biden, were both Democrats.

Trump tried, selected Mike Pence as his vice-president in his first term. Pence had been raised Catholic, but had turned evangelical in college, but was still the nearest that the Republicans had to show to a Catholic.

Pence proved traitorous for he did not stop Congress from declaring Biden elected. In the good old days, that would have been clearly seen as Catholics sticking together. Trump, of course, is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who seems to have settled down as an Episcopalian after a Presbyterian past. He declared an Episcopal bishop, Juliann Good, a ‘Trump hater’ because she expressed opposition to his opposition to LGBTQ+ persons, migrants and others. Trump also dislikes people of colour and women, so adding Catholics should not be a hard task.

The Pope has not just riled Trump by his criticism of the war in Iran, but has also implicitly criticized some of his predecessors. He has taken the view that war is wrong, unchristian. That is not the view taken by those of his predecessors who, from Pope Urban Vi onwards, preached Crusades.

The best known are the Eight Crusades against the Muslims in the Levant, which resulted in the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem by the First Crusade. Then there were the various crusades preached by Popes for La Reconquista, which was the conquest of Muslim Spain, the conquest of Northern Europe from the Pagans, and against various heretics, like the Aligensians in 1107 and the Hussites in 1588. I wonder if Trump expected the Pope to support him, by preaching another Crusade, this time against Iran.

Of course, Trump has gone one step ahead. A recent post showed him as a Christ-like figure blessing people. That’s the job he would really like. It would also be a further step in his religious unification process, which has seen him accepted as the head of the world’s Sunni Muslims, and his attempt to become head of the Shias.

However, he has said that the image was of him as a doctor curing people. That reminds me of Imran Khan’s feat of diagnosing Nawaz Sharif as having a normal platelet count, from a photo of the back of his head. It also reminds me of his prescription bleach as a sovereign remedy for covid-19. No social distancing, or hand washing, or any of that nonsense. Just chug a bottle or so of bleach. It didn’t catch on. No cherry-flavoured bleach was marketed.