Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

Fr Patrick Corish was a native of County Wexford and a historian in Maynooth College. For years he taught church history in the seminary before moving, after a short term as college president, to Maynooth University. Better known as Paddy Corish, we students privately regarded his use of ‘Patrick’ on his impressive history books as almost an affectation. It wasn’t really but it was a handy rejoinder in our skirmishes with him which he clearly enjoyed.

A conservative Catholic whose enthusiasm for the promise of the Second Vatican Council he kept well under control – if it existed at all – every week he lectured a few hundred students in Loftus Hall and enjoyed teasing liberal students who, at the time, comprised most of his audience. Corish never sat down to lecture and preferred to wander, almost prowl around the lecturer’s podium throwing a piece of chalk a modest distance in the air and catching it again. I never remember him using it to write anything on the blackboard.

As well as generally setting out to disparage the (mainly) liberal tendencies of his long-suffering charges, a particular target of his was the then growing tendency of bishops to accept young men as students who didn’t in his opinion measure up to his exacting academic expectations for future priests. He ritually disparaged the Irish bishops – it was all a pose, of course – for ordaining ‘holy fools’ on the basis that ‘once they lost their holiness, what have you got left?’ He would then quote St Teresa of Avila’s famous response to a question as to whether if she was had a choice of spiritual director between a very holy priest and an intelligent priest, she would unhesitatingly opt for the intelligent guy.

So where is this going? Apart from the reminiscing of an old man, not very far you might say. But I thought of Paddy Corish when I read the news that 12 American bishops, including three archbishops, had responded to an invitation from President Donald Trump to pray with him in the Oval Office little more than a week before the American mid-term elections. The spirit of Corish and his ‘holy fools’ concept suddenly rang a bell. Could pious fools in losing their piety, inevitably be unmasked as mere fools? Could the experience of the ‘Twelve Apostles of the Oval Office’ prove Corish’s working thesis?

The poet Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Criticism (1711) wrote 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' – giving even more substance to Corish’s commentary. And even though nine of the Oval Office 12 are usually addressed respectfully (as is the case with Catholic bishops in America) as ‘Your Excellency’ and the three archbishops as ‘Your Grace, the nine suspects stand accused and convicted of an untold, incredible, outrageous level of foolishness that simply beggars belief.

What, in God’s name, were they thinking? More to the point, what were they thinking Pope Leo would be thinking? After confronting Trump’s anti-migrant phobia, Leo had courageously pointed out the scriptural imperative to Christians everywhere ‘to welcome the stranger’ and, by visiting the migrant port of Lampedusa instead of joining Trump to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, Leo had underlined a moral truth that it seems never crossed Trump’s mind and that clearly he was seemed incapable of understanding. 

When Trump decided, as now almost everyone accepts to be the case, to declare war on Iran as a way of deflecting public attention away from his apparently stellar role in the Epstein files, Leo quoted scripture and verse from Isaiah (1:15): Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.

When Leo confronted Trump, in the knowledge that the eyes of the world were trained on him as he outlined Catholic teaching on what was and what wasn’t a just war and when Leo made it clear that he wasn't afraid to confront Trump and to continue to explain and repeat Catholic teaching, he was indicating that he would use his position to frame publicly an unapologetically moral profile, an understanding of which this American president seems totally bereft.

In response Trump, who seemed to believe that because Leo was born in America he should do and be at Trump’s bidding, did his usual rant of bullying and abusing those who didn't bow to his every wish and command. Trump attacked Leo as ‘WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy’, accused him of being influenced by the radical left, suggested that he (Leo) owed his position to his American birth and to Trumpʼs importance in the world and that Leo was comfortable with Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Leo rejected the criticism, indicating that proclaiming the Gospel involves critiquing the moral consequences of political decisions. What Trump can't fathom is that Leo as pope cannot and clearly will not allow his moral authority to be ‘trumped’ by the outrageous presumption of being subordinated to Trump's political authority as president.

Trump simply doesn't ‘get’ it. But you'd expect that the 12 Catholic bishops should ‘get’ it! Or that they'd ‘get’ Trump. Where have they being living for the last 10 years? Don't they know or has no one told them that the shameless cavalier approach of Trump to electoral rectitude is summed up in the phrase: In America it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes. 

Don't they know or has no one ever explained to them that, though habitually dishonest and with a well-known reputation as a serial liar, almost nobody believes a word that Trump says. Haven’t they heard that Trump is a walking nightmare when it comes to mendacity. Didn’t they suspect that when Trump extended an invitation to them to join him at the White House and to pray with him in the Oval Office, less than two weeks ahead of the mid-terms, did it not strike them that with the upcoming key election – and with Trump's ratings being worse than that of any American president in history – something other than prayer might be the reason for his invitation.

When they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump presented them with ‘commemorative tokens’ and they were directed to stand behind him and pray while several photos were taken and a video was recorded and the bishops were ushered out, at what point in the proceedings did it dawn on the bishops that the whole scenario was a set-up? Was it when pictures circulated on social media in effect celebrating the support of 12 Catholic bishops for Trump and the Republican party in the coming elections and seeing themselves pretending to be praying that some at least had a light bulb moment and eventually realised the unexpected import of their outing?

It is simply beyond belief. So logically I have to rest my case with as much grace as I can muster and salute the unassailable verdict of Paddy Corish: the Catholic Church (or any other church) ordaining ‘pious fools’ is not a good idea.

American papers, as we used to say, please copy.