At the checkout-line at Acme’s a worker asked was candidate Donald Trump a providential figure given his hair-breath escape from an assassin’s bullet? The quick answer is that everyone’s life, the length of one’s life is governed by God’s Providence. God is also the Lord of history and intervenes as He wills, according to His Providence. Did the check-out worker mean: is God using Donald Trump for a special task? Is he a providential figure for the U.S. and the world?

A number of Catholics were quick to point out the date, July 13. On July 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, and revealed three secrets to them about the future: a vision of Hell, a prediction of World War II, a prophecy about the future role of Russia, and how to prevent it, a warning of the harm people would inflict on themselves through their sins, such as wars, famines, plagues, and the persecution of the Church. In the past God has sought to use kings, queens, political figures, if you will for His purposes.

For example on June 17, 1689 the Sacred Heart of Jesus manifested to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque His command to the King of France [Louis XIV] that the King was to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart. For 100 years to the day the Kings of France delayed, and did not obey. So on June 17, 1789 the King of France was stripped of his legislative authority by the upstart Third Estate, and four years later the soldiers of the French Revolution executed the King of France as if he were a criminal. In 1793 France sent it’s King, Louis XVI, to the guillotine. He and his predecessors had failed to obey Our Lord’s request that France be consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and thus misfortune had befallen both the King and his country. Of course unbelievers and atheists see in the events of history blind chance based on human calculations alone.

An influential Spanish blog, specola en infovaticana, also considered the question of Trump and Divine Providence: Trump talks about God and this is not liked. The candidate and former president of the United States, Trump, attributes his salvation from the assassination attempt to divine intervention. Today it is more than criminal to mention God and it is considered "blasphemous even for those who do not believe" to think in this way of God as a "superhero" who "cultivates great designs on Trump…. Benedict XVI wrote that a God without power is not God, and that there is no area of creation that is independent of God the creator. The mystery that is not evident to rational investigation is denied. Reason that denies the presence of God in the world is an arrogant reason, which goes beyond its own possibilities.

Since the time of Arius, rationalism has plagued the correct view of …God. All heresies ultimately arise from the attempt to fully understand God with reason. The heresy of heresies – Gnosis – embodies precisely this project. If the question is how do we know that God intervened in something, we can ask how do we know that he did not intervene? We address God in many ways and with many forms of prayer, knowing that He governs the history of men and directs it towards its ultimate end according to His plans, which are not ours and which we cannot oppose…The idea received from faith that God is provident, who governs the world towards its ultimate end, is not repugnant to reason, when it, from the things close to us, ascends to God who governs the entire world that he created. (Note: Arius was a heretical priest who denied that Jesus is God equal to His Father.) Sadly the U.S. has experienced a number of assassinations against U.S. Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, John Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, who survived, and John F. Kennedy. They involved fanatics and crazed individuals. In the case of Kennedy there is a serious case being made that his death was carried out by our own security-state.

The Fifth Commandment forbids direct and intentional killing as gravely sinful. The murderer and those who cooperate voluntarily in murder commit a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance. Elections exist to decide who it will be who governs, not assassins, a security- state, the media, or illegal ballots. Was the colossal failure of the Secret Service just incompetence? That remains to be seen. Hence we should pray for all political candidates to be protected from murder by assassination. Is Trump a providential figure spared from death destined by the Lord for His purposes? Catholics need to be familiar with Catholic teaching on Divine Providence: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: 302…By his providence God protects and governs all things which he has made, "reaching mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and ordering all things well". For "all are open and laid bare to his eyes", even those things which are yet to come into existence through the free action of creatures. 303 …God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history. The sacred books powerfully affirm God's absolute sovereignty over the course of events: …304 And so we see the Holy Spirit, the principal author of Sacred Scripture, often attributing actions to God without mentioning any secondary causes. This is not a "primitive mode of speech", but a profound way of recalling God's primacy and absolute Lordship over history and the world, and so of educating his people to trust in him. The prayer of the Psalms is the great school of this trust.

306 God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creatures' co-operation. This use is not a sign of weakness, but rather a token of almighty God's greatness and goodness. For God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of his plan. 307 To human beings God even gives the power of freely sharing in his providence by entrusting them with the responsibility of "subduing" the earth and having dominion over it. God thus enables men to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbors. Though often unconscious collaborators with God's will, they can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions, their prayers and their sufferings. They then fully become "God's fellow workers" and co-workers for his kingdom.

308 The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator. God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes. 309 If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.

310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better. But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection. 311 …free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it: For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.

312 In time we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures: "It was not you", said Joseph to his brothers, "who sent me here, but God. . . You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive." From the greatest moral evil ever committed - the rejection and murder of God's only Son, caused by the sins of all men - God, by his grace that "abounded all the more", brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption. But for all that, evil never becomes a good. 314 We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God "face to face", will we fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest for which he created heaven and earth. (All emphasis in this essay was added)

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