(From New York) Prayers for Donald Trump were said in churches across the USA yesterday. Prayers were offered for the ex-president in the wake of an assassination attempt on his life during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Prayers were also offered for the whole country. It follows a request made by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, speaking on behalf of the US Bishops’ Conference. In the statement, the archbishop condemned political violence, saying it was “never the solution to political disagreements.” The same request was made by the Bishop of Pittsburgh, David Zubik, whose diocese includes Butler, where Trump’s campaign rally was taking place. In fact, minutes after he began to address the crowd, the former president was hit by a bullet that pierced the upper part of his right ear, fired by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead by the Secret Service agents. Crooks, a member of the Republican Party, with no apparent passion for politics and few friends, has died carrying with him the motivations that drove him to brandish an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. This weapon is one of many deadly, easily accessible firearms that President Biden would like to see banned, while Trump is instead staunchly protecting gun rights. An investigation is underway into the attempted assassination, and in particular to determine the circumstances under which the young gunman was able to sneak onto the roof of a building and open fire against the former President, killing Corey Comperatore, a former local firefighter who was doing his best to protect his family with his body, and seriously wounding two others. As security controversies mount, conspiracy theories abound, going so far as to speculate that Biden may have commissioned the attack. The Bishop of Pittsburgh, Zubich, was quick to issue a statement seeking to defuse the controversy. “We are grateful for the swift actions of the Secret Service and our local first responders. Let us join together in prayer for the health and safety of all, for healing and peace, and for an end to this climate of violence in our world. May God guide and protect us all,” he declared.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence,” US President Biden reiterated in his six-minute speech from the Oval Office on Sunday night, following his initial remarks on Saturday when he said he had spoken to the former president and was praying for his speedy recovery.
“An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen” President Biden remarked, as he looked into the video cameras and repeatedly called for national unity. “We must unite as one nation – the president added – to demonstrate who we are.” Biden went on to say that the FBI investigation was still at its early stages. But above all, he encouraged Americans to rely on facts, not assumptions, and confirmed that Donald Trump will continue to receive “high level” security in the run-up to the Republican National Convention, which begins today in Milwaukee. A convention where the tycoon will be officially nominated as the party’s candidate for the November elections. And it is precisely there that the different visions of the country, which have not found a common ground for years, will face off against each other. “In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box,” said Joe Biden, speaking from the Oval Office on Sunday evening, winning praise even from various Republican pundits and indirectly from Trump himself, who brushed aside all the inflammatory rhetoric and appealed for national unity.
The attack on the former US president drew condemnation from political leaders around the world, joined yesterday by the prayers and Sunday sermons of several of the country’s Evangelical church leaders, all of whom readily referred to Trump as the political leader whom God wanted to protect and save because he was ”the bearer of a divine plan for the country”. Reverend Hibbs, who leads an assembly of more than 10,000 people in California, offered an unusual statement. According to Hibbs, the former president was saved because he is “a friend of Israel”. His words were echoed by Pastor Jentezen Franklin of the Free Chapel in Georgia, who asked God to make Trump “a man on a mission” to keep America “strong and powerful”. On the other hand, other religious leaders have wisely called for the overcoming of the “rhetoric of rage” that still characterises the discourse of both political camps, and which in recent years has been marked by indiscriminate attacks on judges and politicians. For months now, inflammatory rhetoric, used for the purpose of a political agenda that turns every political debate into a duel, has degenerated into bullets and blunt weapons, hurting and killing family ties, friendships and cooperation. This is a lose-lose situation for many, and especially for the founding motto of the United States: E pluribus unum (officially adopted on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782), meaning “Out of many, one”, which acknowledges the existence of a plurality capable of achieving unity.
