Left-wing Jesuit priest Thomas Reese has just accused former President Donald Trump of being a form of the “antichrist.” Ordinarily, Reese spouts opinions and ideas more inane than those held by the oft-caricatured tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist but with a progressive bent almost comical in its extremity.
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Catholic Priest Sentenced to Life for Sex-Trafficking
Reese has promoted the “seamless garment” or “consistent ethic of life” theological theory, which places the systematic slaughter of millions of unborn babies on a moral par with such issues as minimum wage and social welfare programs. He has argued that Pope St. Paul VI’s landmark encyclical Humanae vitae made a “mistake” in forbidding Catholics from using artificial contraception to thwart God’s plan for sex and procreation. He has also (unsurprisingly) issued endorsements of openly gay clergy and advocated for the Catholic Church to alter her unalterable moral teachings on homosexual acts.
Ordinarily, the sight of Reese’s name in an article’s byline is enough cause to dismiss the argument and its claims out of hand, so perverse a progressive propagandist is he. But however misguided the Jesuit’s aggressive animus is toward Donald Trump, he does actually have an argument to be made in this case. In a recent op-ed for the largely leftist Religion News Service, Reese writes:
Today, as between the two world wars, authoritarian leaders around the world are promising justice by any means necessary. They portray themselves as the heroes of their narratives where they alone can save the nation. They will destroy our enemies and protect us from outsiders. They will not be slowed down by democratic niceties or laws. Each promises that if we put him in power, if we make him king, he will save us. We will have success and prosperity.
He crucially notes: “This is not the platform of Christ the King. These authoritarian leaders are the antichrists of our time.” These include, in Reese’s thesis, Trump, who is singled out by name in his conclusion. This is about where Reese’s declaration ceases to propose ideas worth pondering — but this notion is.
The Catholic Church actually has very few strict teachings on the Antichrist. One key distinction to bear in mind, based on references from Sacred Scripture, is the use of the definite article “the.” According to St. John the Evangelist, there is a difference between the Antichrist and other, lesser antichrists. The Gospel author writes:
Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us. [1 John 2:18–19]
There are, thus, two different types of antichrist, which may be roughly divided into shadows of the Antichrist, prefiguring the final Antichrist himself. At least according to this passage of Scripture, all antichrists to come will be apostate Christians. Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin explains, “Since the many Antichrists are identifiable as apostate Christians, the future, individual Antichrist may also be an apostate Christian or from an apostate family, people, or nation (i.e., that used to be Christian but by then will not be).”
But what does an antichrist actually do? Contrary to popular belief and iterations, an antichrist is not necessarily some deranged Satanic cult leader but instead simply offers the same goods that Christ does, but with the notable absence of Christ. According to St. John, the Antichrist will expressly deny the divinity of Christ — just how he will do so is not explicated by the Gospel writer, but it could range from heresies such as Ebionism, which claims that Christ was merely a great man and not God Himself, to preaching that Christ was not the Messiah promised to the pre-Christian Jews, to claims that there is no God.
Countless saints, mystics, priests, religious, lay Catholics, and even non-Catholics have written on the end of the world and the coming of the Antichrist. In Robert Hugh Benson’s 1908 novel Lord of the World, which both Pope Francis and the late Pope Benedict XVI hailed as prophetic, the monsignor imagined that an American politician and Freemason would achieve world peace, establish a one-world government with an idolatrous state religion, and attempt to destroy the Catholic Church. Decades later, C.S. Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength, which envisions a demonically possessed physicist leading a cabal of atheistic bureaucrats, journalists, and scientists in the creation of an explicitly anti-Christian police state. More recently, Michael D. O’Brien imagined a Carmelite priest being called out of obscurity by the Vatican to spy on a powerful politician suspected of being the Antichrist in Father Elijah. (RELATED from S.A. McCarthy: The Irreconcilability of Catholicism and Freemasonry)
The collective image of the Antichrist that such visionaries (from Gospel authors to devoutly Christian novelists) have painted may be parsed into the countless little antichrists who have preceded their master: men who offer safety, prosperity, peace, and (in either a spiritual or temporal sense) salvation, but on their own terms, not on Christ’s. Such men are echoes of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, who promised the first man and woman that they could “be like gods” but made his pledge on terms other than God’s own (Genesis 3).
Reese proposes the thesis: “If we compare the Gospel message with that of Trump and other authoritarian leaders, we can only conclude that he and they are antichrists.” Of course, the Jesuit’s interpretation of “the Gospel message” is a theologically, philosophically, and politically progressive one that has been contradicted at various times by Church leaders and the very teachings of the Catholic Church, rooted in that same Gospel that Reese seems never quite able to grasp.
Once again, there’s an argument to be made for and against declaring Trump an antichrist, but the strongest argument of all may be that Americans have treated Trump as an antichrist. That is to say, the former president has been hailed as a savior, a godlike figure capable of freeing the nation from the bonds of Marxism and multiculturalism and leading his people to the proverbial promised land. While expecting an elected leader to guide the nation to security and prosperity is far from a bad thing — in fact, Americans don’t seem outraged enough when their representatives fail to do so or outright work against that noble objective — Trump has, at times, been treated almost as a Christ-figure.
In the Old Testament, God allowed His chosen people to fall into slavery and be conquered by neighboring kingdoms and empires when they abandoned Him spiritually. So also the United States seems to have fallen into the hands of its enemies, in the form of Marxist ideologues and Chinese communist allies in the White House to LGBT activists sexually grooming children in classrooms and surgical theaters. Perhaps that is why the Democratic Party wound up taking the presidency in 2020 — American Christians turned to Trump for salvation instead of to Christ. While not making Trump an antichrist, it presents a prime opportunity for Americans to reflect on what they expect from a political leader and to learn from their past mistakes.
