One thing I like about US president Donald Trump is his magpie-like instincts. He is attracted to the opulent, the ornate, the gauche.
In a side-by-side analysis of the Oval Office under former president Joe Biden and the Oval Office now, you will notice a significantly higher preponderance of gilded frames. His Manhattan apartment appears to be entirely gold-plated. Ascetic, pious, restrained – these words are not in the president’s vocabulary. In a world of affected Scandi-minimalism and so-called “quiet luxury”, it is nice to see a taste for the haute.
We all know by now that this is the opposite sensibility of the late Pope Francis. He traded the ermine cloaks for simple cassocks; he swapped the papal throne for a humble wooden chair (Trump would have done the opposite, of course). Even rhetorically, he was pared back – when he first emerged on the balcony of St Peter’s as pope in 2013, he greeted the crowd with a simple “buona sera”. We do not need to work hard to guess how Francis may have privately felt about Trump, nor the other way round.
That matters not all that much. When Trump arrived in the Holy See on Saturday, he was not expected to have any serious meetings. But, perhaps overcome by the finery and gravitas of the whole place, we know he spoke one-to-one, knee-to-knee with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in St Peter’s Basilica just before the funeral. And they sat below a copy of Carlo Maratta’s late-17th-century painting The Baptism of Christ (Francis’s favourite painter was Caravaggio, at odds with the otherwise taste for refined). “It was a beautiful meeting,” said Trump afterwards. “I’ll tell you it was the nicest office I’ve ever seen.”
Maybe Trump was moved by the vaulted knave and baroque painting. Or perhaps he was touched by the strangeness and power of the spirit itself. Who knows? Whatever it was, it was a miracle. It was 57 days on from the shouting match in the White House, where Zelenskiy was dressed down by US vice-president JD Vance for his attire and then all but kicked out and sent home. Trump in the intervening time continued to dismantle the United States’s security guarantee for Europe, appeared too willing to offer the Kremlin even further concessions, and was smashing through Ukrainian hopes for a fair deal minute by minute.
And lo, perhaps the most godly image of the entire day – two men, one driven by his caprice and the other by his truculence, able to sit across from one another despite the seething animosity. When it comes to Trump, it is impossible to know whether it will work or whether it will mean anything at all (his unpredictability being the only predictable thing about him). But the meeting preceded his strongest criticism of Russian president Vladimir Putin to date and the threat of secondary sanctions. We do not need to be carried away with the technical likelihood of any of this happening, nor with the next tactical steps. The image alone is enough to bolster faith.
Broadcaster CNN wrote that “Saturday’s meeting underneath the Vatican vaults was a remarkable collision of diplomacy and coincidence”. They are mostly wrong. You do not have to be religious – even this relatively lapsed writer can say – to understand the incontrovertible fact that it was God who brought the pair face to face, hunched over in the Vatican. Why else were they in Rome? How else would Trump be taken by the “nicest office” he’s ever seen? How else could the world view a Maratta painting of Jesus – and the two mortals below it – and wonder if this was the pontiff’s final act?
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I have not forgotten the historian Tom Holland’s 2018 line: “The risen Christ cannot be eluded simply by refusing to believe in him.” What did he mean? Simple things about religion that have informed the shape of the world we inhabit: weekends are a hangover from religious observance, for example. And then there are kinds of generalised values derived from a Christian scripture: generosity, reciprocation, loving thy neighbour (and all that). And then there are all those religious wars we have observed in the shortish history of Christianity – the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War.
But the real point is that you do not need to have faith or belief in a material deity to see its impact. You can believe all of this religion stuff is the construct of swivel-eyed loons and still find it impossible to argue the world is more godless than ever. New atheists (who make good points about a lot of things) still get it wrong.
Yes, day-to-day observance might be waning, and the public might not be particularly alive to questions of theology either. And sure, people don’t report divine encounters so frequently these days. But tongues of fire and shafts of light are not the only proof of God’s resonance – one thing Trump and Zelenskiy can agree on.
