Within three days of 12 Catholic bishops praying over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the apologies had begun. Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob regretted his participation and Des Moines Bishop William Joensen acknowledged that he should have anticipated the political uses to which the occasion might be put. The bishops had apparently expected a private audience with the president.
Instead, they emerged as supporting characters in a White House production, their outstretched hands preserved for posterity and, more immediately, for social media. One suspects the Vatican has encountered subtler exercises in the appropriation of ecclesiastical authority. All the more curious, then, that the bishops appeared so surprised to find themselves on the receiving end of one.
The episode highlights an intriguing inversion, a la Trump. The president, whose relationship with Christian doctrine has seldom been the principal attraction of his religious appeal, appears remarkably conversant with the political possibilities of Christian iconography. The bishops, whose vocation depends upon understanding the significance of ritual, seem to have underestimated what happens when the sacred enters the camera frame.
The October 22 meeting was supposed to concern matters of considerable seriousness: immigration enforcement and the treatment of religious workers among them. The bishops had reason to seek the president's attention, then. Instead, though, the enduring public artifact was a photograph of 12 prelates gathered around Trump, who sat at the Resolute Desk receiving their prayers.
The number 12 was presumably coincidental. The visual resemblance to a biblical tableau was nevertheless difficult to miss, although the question of who occupied the central role was rather more complicated. Grob subsequently explained that the recording had been made without the bishops' knowledge.
The meeting, he said, had never been intended as an endorsement. Unfortunately for the archbishop, photographs are notoriously indifferent to the intentions of their subjects. And, perhaps even more unfortunately for him, Trump has understood their utility for quite some time.
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