WASHINGTON DC, Sep 13 — A Ukrainian Catholic pastor, Father Jason Charron, gave a benediction in advance of President Trump’s fateful rally on Saturday, July 13. He encouraged attendees to pray for Mr. Trump. Moments later a gunman shot and wounded the former president. In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Fr. Charron told his audience that he “prayed for him and his safety, but they have to pray, as well, because there are people who want to kill him. And literally a few minutes later there was this kind of indistinct sound, and people began leaving, and at that point I heard someone saying that it was a gunshot.”
In a new Better For America podcast with Matt Kane at the Association of Mature American Citizens, Fr. Charron said “it was a sense that I had. There are people who want to hurt him, but specifically, that particular moment, I felt a need to encourage people to pray for his protection.” He explained that it was “Divine grace. In my line of work this is not unusual for something to be placed in the heart of a priest and, moments, days, years later, it seemed to be, the hand of God. We get a little immune to it because it happens a lot. But that’s what I attribute it to. People who don’t believe in God have difficulty accepting that and they try to create other ways to understand it.”
Fr. Charron went on to note that “God judges a nation by the way her people treat their orphans, their widows, their poor. St. James said that the gauge of a people is the way that they deal with the most vulnerable and the most innocent. In this obstinate refusal to love what they can, to refuse to love what they can see, then it’s a manifestation that they really don’t love the one they cannot see. I think of the pre-born little babies that we’ve slaughtered in blood sacrifice to Moloch [a Canaanite deity associated in biblical sources with the practice of child sacrifice] indicates that the nation as a whole is most likely involved in idolatry and at that point, we’re given the leaders we deserve. We see that when Israel was unfaithful, they were given unfaithful kings. That’s where we are right now.”
But, he added, “you can pray, you can be sorry but you have to make reparation. You broke the widow’s window. You have to replace it. And, that means being involved in the political process. If you don’t like what corrupt men have done to the system you cannot just absent yourself. You have to be involved in correcting wrongs. We are in the midst of a dark period in secular and church history; perhaps it is the most urgent time in church history for the laity to lead the charge. What I’ve already started is a national sanctuary of reparation, because it has to begin liturgically. We cannot vote ourselves out of this hell hole, this hellscape.”
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.