Dear Readers, the illegal oppression to which the “democratic” state of Germany, an offspring of Nazi tyranny, is subjecting Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, is identical to the illegal persecution of Julian Assange by the UK and US governments.

What Western peoples do not know, and do not want to know, is that they no longer live in democracies.  They live in tyrannies in which they have no reliable rights.  The orchestrated “Covid pandemic” perfectly demonstrated that civil liberty is totally dead in the Western World.

US President Donald Trump, a courageous man unlike the cowards of our time, has challenged the corrupt American and European Establishment.  He has undertaken to renew the principles and values that made the Western World great.  But has he the power?  It remains to be seen, and I support him.

However, it took Americans too long to realize and to acknowledge their peril.  Trump has been handed the challenge after the rot of every American value and principle has been institutionalized, set in stone, for so long that the institutionalized government is against him, the judiciary is against him, the Democrat Party and the RINO Republicans are against him,  the law and journalism schools are against him, the universities, the print, TV and NPR media are against him. The Establishment’s opposition to Trump expresses their opposition to democracy.

Only the dispossessed majority are for Trump, and they have no power.  The Democrats have proven that it is easy to steal the vote from them, to arrest them as insurrectionists, to seize their children from them, and to have them fired from their jobs because they gave voice to unapproved statements. The Biden regime had succeeded, and carried corporate America with it, in having a government in which there were no white heterosexual gentile males in senior positions and in which promotions of white heterosexual males in the military were put on hold in order to advance DEI.  The blatant discrimination against white heterosexual males was a violation of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  And the judiciary did nothing about it.  But the judiciary is active in preventing the deportation of illegals who have no right to be in the US.

Considering the extraordinary powers arrayed against Trump only violence can prevail over the powerful anti-American Establishment.  The American people do not understand this, and so Trump hasn’t the power to prevail.

When the Democrats return to power, Americans will experience tyranny not seen since Stalin. Like Cicero, who did his best to save Rome, Trump and his supporters will be hunted down and destroyed. All white heterosexuals will be suppressed, reduced to second class citizenship, and regarded as an unreliable element always under government surveillance. We will be put on terrorist watch lists and designated a terrorist group.  Already some years ago the Secretary of Homeland Security, a Nazi term, said that the focus had changed from the war on terror to “domestic terrorism” by which was meant white gentile heterosexuals who are pro-family, pro-life, and Christian.  Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave traditional Americans their term of demonization when she declared them to be the “Trump deplorables.”

Already, the tyrannical government of Germany, an alleged “democracy,” has exceeded in its treatment of  Dr. Reiner Fuellmich the invidious attacks by the US and UK governments on Julian Assange.

When truth cannot be spoken and truth-tellers are imprisoned, freedom is totally dead.  This is the situation today throughout the Western World.  Can Trump really resurrect the West from the dead?

The persecution of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich: the biggest judicial scandal ever seen in Germany

by Seba Terribilini and Cynthia Salatino

April 17, 2025

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is known and respected internationally for his work as a consumer defense lawyer and for having won major lawsuits against corporate giants such as Volkswagen, Kühne & Nagel, and Deutsche Bank. He was one of the first persons who recognized that the COVID measures constituted crimes against humanity and decided, together with three other lawyers, to create the Corona Investigative Committee, whose aim was to shed light on the actions of governments, public institutions, and the medical community in the context of the so- called “pandemic”.

Thanks to his brilliant investigative work and after having consulted more than 150 scientists and experts around the world in all fields, as well as numerous whistleblowers (from Pfizer, WHO, CDC, UN), he was able to collect an abundance of evidence of what he calls “the biggest crime ever perpetrated against humanity.”

He was ready to take action.

However, the German secret services, in cooperation with Göttingen public prosecutor Simon Phillip John and Fuellmich’s accusers, had already decided to construct a case against Fuellmich, aimed at stopping him.

He is accused of having embezzled 700,000 euro but, in truth, he did not. The imminent threat of seizure of the Corona Investigative Committee’s bank accounts by the German government during the fallout of the COVID pandemic, along with the risk of no longer being able to use the funds raised by private donations to carry out their investigative work, Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer took steps to protect those funds. They purchased 1 million euros worth of gold (current value: 1.8 million euros) and each took out personal loans (700.000 euros to Reiner Fuellmich, and 100.000 euros to Viviane Fischer). Their loan agreements were documented in written, signed contracts.

When the defense demonstrated the erroneousness of the original accusation which asserted that Fuellmich had no authority to take a personal loan without the other committee member’s consent, the judge had to invent a new accusation in order to justify Fuellmich’s continued imprisonment. The judge thus declared that that the loans were “fake”.

What is interesting is that the previous Göttingen lead prosecutor Reinicke, who had been asked by the secret services to open an investigation on Fuellmich, had clearly stated that there were no grounds upon which to investigate him, and archived the case in June 2022. Merely two and a half months later, a young, inexperienced prosecutor by the name of Simon Phillip John was transferred from Hanover to Göttingen and given the task to do the dirty work that Reinicke had previously deemed unjustified.

Judge Carsten Schindler, as well as prosecutor John are, without any shadow of a doubt, following someone else’s instructions.

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been unlawfully held in pre-trial detention in the German maximum-security prison in Rosdorf for 18 months. This, despite the fact that the maximum term for pre-trial detention in Germany is 6 months. This, after his having been lured under false pretenses, subsequently abducted in Mexico, and then deported to Germany –without an international arrest warrant NOR a formal extradition order– where he was then arrested and imprisoned.

The circumstances of his illegal arrest and subsequent mistreatment in prison are very concerning.

From June 2024 until December 2024, Reiner Fuellmich was placed in solitary confinement. The official reason was that he was providing fellow inmates with legal advice. Fuellmich was also subjected to various forms of abuse, in clear violation of his human rights: physical and psychological mistreatment including prolonged solitary confinement, deprived of sunlight, deprived of outdoor physical activity, deprived of sleep, forced to choose between taking a shower or having his one-hour outdoors, and even prohibited from calling his lawyers. Aside from their brief (and monitored) telephone calls on Skype, he has not seen his wife since his arrest.

He is only permitted three hours per month of visits and telephone calls.

On top of that, he has been denied adequate medical care, including simple access to vitamins.

Moreover, Reiner was not allowed to visit his dying mother nor attend her funeral.

Both the inhumane prison conditions as well as the manner in which his trial is being conducted raise serious doubts about the level of respect for fundamental rights in the German judicial system.

From June 10, 2024 to this day, Reiner Fuellmich, after being body-searched, is brought to the court and back to prison in shackles and handcuffs, escorted by armed security officers in armored vehicles, as if he were a serial killer!

He is being denied a fair trial, in that any motions presented by his defense lawyers are rejected without explanation. As of July 2024, Judge Schindler ordered that the defense motions and arguments, instead of being read aloud to the court, were from then on to be presented in writing only, thus impeding court observers from understanding and properly documenting the proceedings. These same court spectators have been subject to threats, as have Fuellmich’s defense lawyers.

In addition to not permitting defense witnesses to take the stand, Judge Schindler steadfastly refuses to allow the person who actually pocketed the funds to testify in court.

This “kangaroo court” proceeding” is now in its final phase. As we write this, the defense lawyers have completed their closing statements, and Fuellmich has begun to make his final, closing statement before the court, which, in order to silence him, interrupted and admonished him at least 12 times. It is feared that the court may impose upon Fuellmich a time limit for the presentation of his final defense statement, as they did to his defense lawyers, forcing them shorten their closing statements.

In the course of 51 hearings, what we have witnessed is nothing less than an egregious case of obstruction of justice –a criminal offense in Germany– which confirms the intent of the German secret services as stated in their dossier on Reiner Fuellmich. This dossier was presented to the court by one of Fuellmich’s defense lawyers. It specified that Fuellmich was to be stopped “at all costs”; that “it is necessary to prepare a criminal case against Fuellmich, [including the] collaboration of prosecutors and suitable third parties”; and recommending “the recruitment and involvement of trusted persons amongst Fuellmich’s closest circle.”

It was also their stated objective to convict Fuellmich; that “the possibility of [him] obtaining a politically exposed position must be prevented by any means”. This dossier, provided by a whistleblower, demonstrates that Reiner Fuellmich was already under special surveillance as far back as 2021.

That said, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Reiner Fuellmich had to be stopped in order to prevent him from continuing his precious investigational work exposing the truth regarding the “pandemic” as well as the so-called “vaccines”.

Fuellmich is clearly a political prisoner, punished for having spoken the truth. His case demands the attention of international human rights organizations, as well as the indignation of worldwide public opinion.

Pre-trial detention must never be used as an instrument to defer, suppress, or completely substitute the justice system in the form of a legitimized punishment without a sentence.

Justice, free speech, and respect for fundamental human rights are the pillars of a democratic state, not only for but especially for those individuals who raise uncomfortable questions and have the courage to speak up.

For Americans who still think that Donald Trump is an advocate of realism and restraint in foreign policy, the events in Yemen should come as a rude awakening.  Unfortunately, the most prominent indicator enabled the president’s political opponents to evade their own share of the blame for the tragic events in that country.  Revelations that members of Trump’s national security team had conducted a discussion of highly classified information about war plans in Yemen over an insecure system exploded in the news media last month.  One official, apparently National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, had even inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, to join the chat.  The resulting “Signalgate” scandal dominated the news cycle for the next two weeks.

The dominant focus of most news stories about the episode was both revealing and depressing.  Critics vehemently denounced the Trump team for an egregious inability to keep the Yemen war plans secret.  Few journalists or members of Congress condemned the participants in the chat for planning an unconstitutional war.  There was no hint that President Trump planned to seek a formal declaration of war as required by the Constitution.  Instead, the principal officials intend to continue the illegal practice of waging presidential wars that has become the norm since the end of World War II.

Indeed, a new phase of the conflict with Yemen was already well underway. Vice President J. D. Vance boasted to the other participants in the chat that U.S. forces had located a “terrorist leader” (i.e. a high-level military official of Yemen’s Houthi rebel government) and would be taking him out.  Indeed, the U.S. launched an air and missile attack on the apartment complex where the official was visiting his girlfriend. The collateral damage included the collapse of the building along with extensive casualties. Notably, very few administration critics bothered to criticize the Trump foreign policy team for such conduct.

Matters have grown worse since that episode.  On April 17, U.S. forces conducted an even larger assault on a civilian port in Yemen.  This time, more than 80 people, mostly civilians, perished.  And once again, there was silence from critics who have denounced the Trump administration for everything from the ill-treatment of immigrants, to harassment of law firms linked to the Democratic Party, to the White House’s efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy.

Bipartisanship about waging brutal, unconstitutional wars, though, apparently remains thoroughly intact. Given the long history of pro-war views on Yemen in both parties, one should not be especially surprised that there would be no meaningful dissent regarding Washington’s current belligerence toward that country.  When Saudi Arabia first intervened in Yemen’s simmering civil war in 2015, Barack Obama’s administration gave full backing to its ally and the coalition that Riyadh led.  Washington supplied weapons to the Saudi-led forces, shared military intelligence with those forces, and helped to refuel coalition warplanes.  Most of that support continued through both Trump’s first term and Biden’s presidency.

The U.S. meddling helped produce one of the worst tragedies in the perennially troubled Middle East.  In the years that followed during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the people of Yemen suffered from famine, a cholera epidemic, and the chronic infliction of military casualties.  Even when the fighting subsided from time to time, the respites were relatively brief.  Before Trump took office for his second term in 2021, the Biden administration had launched a new wave of attacks on Houthi targets because the Yemini regime condemned Israel for its war crimes in Gaza and harassed Western shipping passing through the Red Sea.

The Trump administration’s decision to reignite full-scale warfare in Yemen is horrifying and immoral.  To do so without a declaration of war is also unconstitutional.  For administration critics to condemn officials for insufficient skill in concealing such illegal and immoral conduct but not to denounce the conduct itself is disgraceful.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

Speaking on Thought for the Day this morning on BBC Radio 4, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, expressed sadness at the death of Pope Francis.

The Cardinal said that “the death of Pope Francis takes from us a voice that has been heard in every corner of the world”.

Cardinal Nichol’s full message can be read below. 

“Good morning.

“Today a voice has fallen silent. The death of Pope Francis takes from us a voice has been heard in every corner of the world: a voice of warm encouragement and sharp challenge, expressing both love of God and love of our shared humanity.

“He had a single focus in life: to do the will of God, as it was given to him in the Catholic Church and in honouring the summons to holiness which touches every human heart. Once asked ‘Who is Pope Francis?’ he instantly replied: ‘A sinner’. His discernment was sensitive and profound. He knew that maturity, growing closer to God, comes mostly through our struggle with weaknesses and not by the highway of our own achievements. He taught that our best way of life is one of loving mercy, received and given. For we know the mercy of God outweighs the burden of our faults.

“He gave his voice to share the Word of God. This is why he spoke so directly to countless people.

“He spoke of hope. To millions of young people he said: ‘If you want to be a sign of hope, go and talk to your grandparents.’

“He spoke for those on the margins of society. He said: ‘If you want to know how successful your economy is, go and speak with an unemployed person.’

“He spoke of those imprisoned in slavery and suffering other terrible forms of abuse. He said: ‘These are gaping wounds in the flesh of humanity, wounds in the flesh of Christ himself.’

“This voice, filled with compassion, mercy, and righteous indignation, is now silent, for a more authoritative voice has spoken, that of his heavenly Father, calling him home, to be with his Lord and Master for ever. And he has done so on the day after the great feast of Easter, the solemn proclamation of the victory of Christ over death. Pope Francis died in the light of the brightly burning Pascal candle, the symbol of the risen Christ. In this hope he lived, in this light he has died. Its promise will be fulfilled.

“It is for us to continue this task: to make humanity great: great in strength of service, great in depth of compassion and great in richness of generosity. These are the measures of true greatness.

“May Pope Francis, beloved of so many, rest in peace.”

(Cardinal Vincent Nichols attends a press conference at the Throne Room of the Archbishop’s House in central London on April 21, 2025, following the news of the death of Pope Francis. (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP)

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SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Pope Francis’s death at 88 in Rome on Apr. 21 has truly affected his motherland of Argentina.

Since the Vatican released the tragic news, there has been unprecedented commotion in the South American nation. The most visible expressions of grief have been coming from the so-called villas de emergencia o villas miseria, as the Argentinians call their slums.

“Sadness is noticeable among the poorest social segments. He was an icon for the poor,” said Bishop Marcelo Margni of Avellaneda-Lanús.

Cesar Sanabria, a community leader at Villa 31, noted the atmosphere has been one of sorrow all over the region.

“We, the poor, had a fantastic connection with him. He knew how to talk and how to motivate us,” Sanabria said.

After he was appointed as an Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires, in 1997, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became a frequent visitor of Villa 31 and other poor neighborhoods. With his incentive, the movement of slum priests, created in the 1960s, gained strength.

“He knew our problems, because he frequently came to us and talked to us,” Sanabria remembered.

The Argentine Church plays a central role in providing charitable work for the poor in the country. It keeps numerous social services in poor districts, distributing food, hot meals, medicines, and other goods. Such a network grew during Bergoglio’s years as the capital city’s archbishop (1998-2013).

In 2018, already as the pontiff, Francis welcomed Sanabria in the Vatican for a meeting.

“I had the rare opportunity of showing to him a number of projects for Villa 31. We discussed several of them. He was a great listener and had a peculiar way of being Saint Peter’s successor,” Sanabria said.

Carlos Custer, a long-time labor leader who was Argentina’s ambassador to the Vatican (2003-2008), spoke about Bergoglio’s solidarity with the poor was also noticeable in his defense of the dignity of the neediest in society.

“He would always criticize the current system’s inhumanity, defending those who have been discarded,” Custer told Crux.

That stance would put Francis and current Argentine leader Javier Milei on opposite sides. An ultra-libertarian economist, Milei had been advocating for years a broad transformation of the country’s socioeconomic structure, with the goal of reducing the State’s presence economically and as a provider of relief aid.

On different occasions, Milei would insult Francis during TV interviews, calling him a “communist” and “an imbecile”.

“For a Jesuit, to be called a ‘communist’ is not relevant, but to be called an ‘imbecile’ is not acceptable,” Custer humorously remarked, emphasising that they met in Rome in Feb. of 2024 and that the Pope “pastorally forgave Milei, but he kept opposing his economic ideas.”

Elected in 2023, Milei put in practice his vision, taking economic measures that further debilitated the poor’s quality of living.

Despite a continuous demand from the Argentine Church for a papal visit, Bergoglio ended up never traveling to his home country again.

“There were no conditions for him to visit Argentina. Our government stimulates intolerance,” Custer said.

In his opinion, Francis had a very clear stance against ultra-liberalism, the financialisation of the economy and cutting the rights of the poor.

“That was a political voice, but without a party politics nature. He would denounce bad ideas and suggest ways to deal with the ensuing problems,” he added.

The president issued a statement on Apr. 21 lamenting the pope’s death and praising his “goodness” and “wiseness”.

If his clashes with Milei didn’t necessarily bring him popularity among Argentinians – the president enjoys about 50 percent of support – his defense of a Church that welcomes everybody, from divorced people to members of the LGBT community, apparently led him to be viewed with positive eyes among many.

“His efforts to empower women in the Church, including the appointment of women to play central roles in the Vatican, and his insistence in a synodal Church, in which laypeople and the clergy are equally important, drew the attention, and the support, of many Argentinians,” Custer said.

Taty Almeida, one of the founders of the Mother of Plaza de Mayo – a movement formed by women whose children were abducted by the Armed Forces and disappeared during the Military dictatorship (1976-1983) – defined Bergoglio as “the pope who transformed the Church.”

“Women didn’t have any place in the Church. Now they’re in very relevant offices. Can you imagine the explosion he detonated? Not to mention his humbleness,” she told Crux.

In Almeida’s opinion, “we can only wait that the next pontiff will be faithful to Bergoglio’s legacy.”

That seems to be the expectation of many in Argentina, people who not only celebrate the fact that the pope was their countryman, but also feel that maybe precisely because of it he was able to boost relevant transformations in the Church.

“He was the pope of the poor. We’ll miss him forever. He’s mostly irreplaceable,” Sanabria said.

A woman holds a picture of late Pope Francis during a mass at the San Jose de Flores Basilica in Buenos Aires on April 21, 2025. The San Jose de Flores Basilica was the church where Pope Francis was inspired to consecrate his life to God and the Catholic Church. (Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP)

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“Pope Francis has returned to the House of the Father.” Those sad words, read out by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, a former Bishop of Dallas, shortly after 10 a.m. local time yesterday morning echoed John Paul II’s final utterance in April 2005: “Allow me to depart to the house of the Father”. It is twenty years since the world last saw a pope die in office.

Few Catholics can not have been moved by Francis’s dignified response to suffering and decline over the past few months, which his spiritual testament has now told us he offered “to the Lord, for peace in the world and for fraternity among peoples”. His long hospitalisation occasioned an outpouring of sympathy and concern; he willed himself to be discharged from the Gemelli Hospital to reach the Easter liturgies, and to appear amongst his flock one last time.

Francis’s demise has now set in motion an ancient and well-established series of rites. Farrell, the cardinal camerlengo (the chamberlain), will have verified the pope’s death, removed his fisherman’s ring, and have sealed off his private apartments – the added complexity that would have ensued had the pope died in hospital has been avoided. However, the Church has now entered a period of sede vacante (the time of “the seat being vacant”). Her normal laws and structures of authority are suspended. The world, even as it mourns, now waits expectantly for information about what will follow.

The first phase of activity during the sede vacante focuses on the repose of the papal body. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI lay in state only two years ago; around 200,000 people filed past this venerable priest to pay him their last respects and to pray for his soul. The practice for Francis is likely to be similar, although the numbers coming to Rome to honour his memory may be considerably larger. Eyes will also turn to Buenos Aires, where mass for Francis has already been said, and where further commemorations are likely being planned.

The papal funeral in St Peter’s Square is traditionally presided over by the Dean of the Sacred College (currently the ninety-one-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re). It should take place between four and six days after the pope’s death. Dignitaries are expected to fly in for it from around the world – including, we have learned, President and Mrs Trump. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary mourners will also make the journey; security will be tight, and the Italian government will hope that everything passes as smoothly as it did in 2005.

There are then nine further days of mourning for the late pope (the novendiales). Historically, these have provided an opportunity to make arrangements for Church governance during the vacancy and the conclave. However, they are also important as a moment of breathing space for the cardinals entrusted with the awesome task of electing a papal successor.

All cardinals, even the non-voting ones over 80, are eligible to take part in the discussions that take place at this time, both during the formal consistories and at their fringes. Many current cardinals will not know each other well – a legacy of Francis’s push to have all Catholic communities represented, no matter how small. The non-curial cardinals in particular will need this time to become acquainted, to sound out each other’s views, and to form judgments about each others’ qualities and vulnerabilities.

The voting cardinals will also likely turn to their non-voting brethren for advice. Many of these elder statesmen will play an important and active part in the proceedings. Their voices, those of experience, will be valued and consulted.

The conclave itself should begin anywhere from fifteen to twenty days after the pope’s death. That said, Benedict XVI’s constitution Normas nonnullas (2013) in fact gives the cardinals unprecedented discretion over its timing: they can move it forwards, but also backwards. 

Recent conclaves have taken place in the Sistine Chapel and it would be a major surprise if this were not the case this time around. The cardinals themselves will stay at the Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis’s former home, for the duration. Electronic communications will be closely monitored, not least for outside interference. Two ballots will likely be held each day: one in the morning and one in the evening. Prayer and contemplation will fill the time in between.

Voting regulations for the conclave have varied considerably over time, but the modern “one cardinal, one vote” procedure has been in place since at the Third Lateran Council of 1179. Pope Alexander III instigated rules then that each cardinal has an equal vote, and that the votes of two-thirds of the cardinals are required to win. The only slight modification in place today is that there is now a “run off” between the leading candidates after thirty deadlocked ballots.

Although the Church currently has fifteen extra voting cardinals above the 120 named by John Paul II’s conclave constitution Universi Dominici gregis (1996) they are all likely to be welcomed in. Whom the cardinals will choose is historically very difficult to predict. Much media commentary in recent months has focused on the Sacred College’s so-called “progressive majority”. Over two-thirds of cardinals are Francis’s picks so it would seem logical that they would be willing and able to elect someone in his image.

Alas, voting for a pope does not work quite like that, not least on account of the influence of the Holy Spirit. Cardinals are a sophisticated electorate who will consider the many facets of a man’s character, not just his most obvious ideological leanings.

Some Catholics will be hoping for another pope from the Global South, others for a man who will be more sympathetic to traditionalism within the Church than Francis sometimes was. Whatever their views, the cardinals themselves will be tight-lipped and respectful – both to Francis and to the process of choosing who will succeed him.

We will only know what has happened once the senior cardinal-deacon intones the famous “habemus papam” from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica. He will then inform the world of the name the new pontiff has chosen, who will to pray with and for the whole Church. “He who enters the conclave a pope leaves it a cardinal,” an old saying goes. We will just have to wait and see, with hearts primed and eyes peeled.

Photo: A mourner holds a portrait of Pope Francis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 
(Gustavo Garello/AP)

Dr Miles Pattenden is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 (OUP, 2017).

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In the Gospel for Easter Sunday, we have St. John’s account of the two apostles, Peter and John, discovering the tomb empty. The evangelist records how John, the younger of the two, outran Peter and arrived first at the sepulcher. But the younger apostle deferred to Peter and allowed him to enter first. John followed, and the evangelist remarks of him that he saw and believed (John 20:8).

Source

President Donald Trump has ordered that flags at federal, state and military buildings be lowered to the half-mast position – referred to as “half-staff” in the US – in honour of Pope Francis who died on Monday at the age of 88.

The 47th US president also announced that he and his wife will attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome. US flags shall remain lowered until the Pope’s funeral, according to the executive order.

“As a mark of respect for the memory of His Holiness Pope Francis, by the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, on the day of interment,” the executive order reads.

“I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same length of time at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.”

The US President announced the order and spoke about the Pope during the White House Easter Egg Roll that occurred on Monday. “He was a good man, worked hard. He loved the world, and it’s an honour to do that,” the US president said of the late pope, addressing a crowd from the balcony of the White House while in typically Trumpian unorthodox fashion standing next to a large Easter Bunny.

On Monday afternoon, the president also announced on Truth Social: “Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome. We look forward to being there!”

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump welcomed approximately 40,000 attendees to the first Easter Egg Roll of his second term, reports Fox News. Children participated in activities such as egg rolling and hunting, alongside celebrations promoting next year’s 250th anniversary of the US’s founding.

The annual tradition of rolling coloured eggs down the White House lawn was started by President Rutherford B Hayes in 1878.

Soon after the death of Pope Francis was announced on 21 April, the US President posted a statement on his social media platform, Truth Social: “Rest in peace Pope Francis! May God bless him and all who loved him!”

Pope Francis and Donald Trump had an at times tense relationship, particularly over immigration and social policy, which was often marked by visible unease and diverging visions of moral responsibility.

In 2016, Pope Francis criticised Trump’s plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, saying: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Trump responded that it was “disgraceful” for a religious leader to question someone’s faith.

Their differences continued during Trump’s first presidency and seemed to be reigniting during his return to office. In 2025, Pope Francis condemned the renewed plans for mass deportations, calling them a “disgrace”, and warned that policies built on force rather than human dignity “begin badly and will end badly”.

JD Vance, a practising Catholic convert who met the pontiff only the day before his death, also released a statement following news of the Pope’s death. Vance wrote on X: “I just learned of the passing of Pope Francis. My heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him.

“I was happy to see him yesterday, though he was obviously very ill. But I’ll always remember him for the below homily he gave in the very early days of COVID. It was really quite beautiful. May God rest his soul.”

Vance attached to his message the Urbi et Orbi blessing delivered on 27 March 2020 by Pope Francis that called for faith and solidarity, urging people to trust in God’s presence amid the pandemic and to rediscover the importance of prayer and service.

In that 2020 message, the Holy Father reflects: “We have realised that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed.”

First Lady Melania Trump, who grew up in Slovenia when it was part of Yugoslavia, in eastern Europe, is reported to be a practicing Catholic. During a 2017 visit with her husband to meet Pope Francis, she adhered to Vatican protocol by wearing a mantilla during her visit to the Vatican.

During Donald Trump’s re-election bid in 2024, he energetically campaigned and pushed for the Catholic vote in the US, which may well have given him the edge in his ultimate victory.

At the beginning of Lent this year, the US president and First Lady issued a Lenten message for Catholics and other Christians, a striking and rare move in the secular era of modern politics.

The Lenten message from the couple concluded: “We offer you our best wishes for a prayerful and enriching Lenten season. May Almighty God bless you, and may He continue to bless the United States of America.”

President George W Bush attended Pope St John Paul II’s funeral in person. President Joe Biden sent a delegation for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2023.

Photo: US President Donald Trump, Melania Trump and the Easter Bunny, delivers remarks, including his declaration that flags shall remain flying half-mast in honour of Pope Francis, during the White House Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House, Washington, DC, USA, 21 April 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The post Trump orders US flags at half-mast for Pope Francis first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Trump orders US flags at half-mast for Pope Francis appeared first on Catholic Herald.

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church’s future.

I sat down and began writing this essay on the morning of April 21, 2025, less than thirty minutes after learning of Pope Francis’s death. Now is the time of pre-written obituaries, the lull before arguments about his “legacy,” or whispers in the loggia about the politics of succession. But such matters are not my focus here—nor is, at least directly, any claim about the proper direction of the Church’s doctrines, teachings, or practices. Absent the kind of crisis or rupture that would make essays like this irrelevant, my simpler point pertains no matter who greets the faithful in St. Peter’s Square. My claim is this: the Church needs to be a site of real, concrete encounter, a place of face-to-face friendship and even interpersonal friction in a time of disenchanted angelism that renders real transcendence unreachable. This plea for concreteness is, thus far, ironically abstract, but I hope the rest of this essay makes it more tractable.

The Church will always be a hopeful sign of contradiction, though what it corrects will vary with the errors of the age. The pagan world the Apostles confronted was one of suffocating immanence: an eternal universe of cyclical time, the heavens a ceiling, one’s station one’s fate—with most stations leaving their holders vulnerable to the whims of capricious gods or, more likely, of men who acted like those pitiless deities. The Gospel was truly good news: the cosmos had a beginning and an end (in two senses of “end”), that heavy sky would be torn like a curtain, and our ultimate station was to be united, should we so choose, with a God who made us in His image and was love Himself. Given the dark, stuffy stasis of the pagan dispensation, it was not surprising and perhaps altogether fitting that the Holy Spirit came as fire and wind. Nor, given the oppressive concreteness of the previous metaphysical regime, was it surprising that the countervailing temptation would be toward an all-spiritualizing Gnosticism.

Our current age, by contrast, flees concreteness of any kind. It is by now a cliché to bemoan the fact that most of us live in a world of distracted virtuality, but that does not make it any less true or urgent. Antón Barba-Kay’s bracing book, A Web of Our Own Making, explores how digital culture is changing, indeed rewiring, our very understanding of ourselves and our world. We reckon ourselves in terms of what is digitally quantifiable (and commodifiable), and we spiral toward a frictionless existence of distraction and distance from others—a world of avatars engaged in mimetic rivalry with other avatars, not a community of persons. When we unlock our phones, the eyes we are most likely to look into are our own. In this world acedia is not just one vice among others, but the way of life. This arrangement combines both unhappy dispensations discussed above: the suffocating immanence of the pagan cosmos with the abstracted angelism of the Gnostic. We are disembodied, capricious sublunar gods, fleeing death by living an infinite doomscroll.

We are not made to be this way, so of course we are unhappy. Nor can we lifehack our way out of this discontent; seeking out an app for that only reinforces those imprisoning structures. The Church, as it always manages to do, can name, speak to, and cure this current ailment. In a disembodied time, it is resolutely concrete: the splash of holy water, the smear of oil, the pinch of exorcising salt, the smell of incense, the quiet voice of absolution in your ear, the gentle slap of confirmation, Blaise’s candles on your throat, the laying on—or grasp—of hands, the gentle ache of the knees at consecration, the weird, withered relic of a saint, and, of course, the taste of bread and wine that are, mysteriously, His flesh and blood—suffering embraced and given loving meaning. This revolution will not be digitized. Yet unlike the pagan pinch of incense, this materiality does not point to things sufficient unto themselves, but rather to the resurrection of a body mysteriously spiritualized, a hypostatic union that is the heavenly inversion of our slothful abstraction.

This is not a new program, but a perennial proposition that is providentially apt for our times. And the most important thing for the Church to do today is to present it and be aggressively present with it. To be itself, but even more so. It’s not clear we need new formal initiatives, and I do not have grand strategies about how best to reach out in new ways. But perhaps we can learn lessons from earlier times, and embrace successful forms of evangelization: to be joyously, publicly different and let the world know, one person at a time, why we are. For parishes it means open doors, opportunities for the sacraments, preaching the faith, welcoming the curious, and reaching out to the stranger. Nothing strikingly new, though nothing easy, given the strains and claims put on a dwindling number of priests. For the laity, it means converting, and returning, daily to the riches that the faith offers us. It means to pray, to embrace the sacraments—to draw on the Church’s strength not as a spiritual lifehack, but as a path to being who we are truly called to be and to loving Whom we are called to truly love; and, more concretely, to live joyfully and differently as welcoming witnesses to a way of life that is truly better than what is on offer. Our priests cannot do it alone, and no parish program is a substitute for the friction that is actual encounter with another person. As banal as it sounds, the mission of the Church today boils down to being there: being there for a dislocated and disembodied world that needs to know that Being is there.

Catholics disagree on a lot these days, and these disagreements are important. It would be naïve to say that some kind of vigorous emphasis on an overlapping consensus among doctrinally, liturgically, or ideologically divided Catholics will save the day. And I recognize that, to certain kinds of Catholics, the emphases in the paragraphs above are in themselves an implicitly polemical brief for a kind of “normie” orthodoxy—neither “beige” nor “based.” That, I guess, is inevitable, as there is no neutral standpoint on these things. Nevertheless, believing in something like the Catholic Church and her deposit of faith presupposes a non-contestable core that is insoluble to the political waters that seem to suffuse everything these days. And that, it seems, is sufficient unto the day. Indeed, it is challenging, exciting, and deeply countercultural, a sign of contradiction that we should aspire to have emblazoned on our foreheads for all to see—whether we take communion in the hand or on our knees.

In short, what the world needs is mere Catholicism, and a lot more of it.

Image by Benhur Arcayan and sourced via Wikimedia Commons.