- Head of Church vs Head of State - 22nd April 2025
- Taken for granted - 22nd April 2025
- In through the out door - 22nd April 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, changes of personnel at the top and how they may affect alterations in policy have always been crucial, and now this is underlined by the Pope’s death with Donald Trump praising him, and announcing that he will attend his funeral, although onlookers believe this strange because the pair have been at loggerheads on a huge range of issues.
There would often be a glossing over of history.
i might expose the dodgy practices of a corrupt organisation, and then the ‘new broom’ would come in to change things quietly but ignore what had gone before, or even praise the previous person in charge when I knew for a fact they hated each other, and the pair’s policies were diametrically opposed.
This seems to be happening (on a very much larger scale) following the death of Pope Francis.
Donald Trump described him as a “loving and caring person” saying that the late Pope was: “A very good man who loved the world, and he especially loved people that were having a hard time, and that’s good with me”.
It didn’t stop there either, because President Trump signed an executive order that proclaimed all federal and state flags across the United States of America (USA) to be flown at half-mast in the Pope’s memory.
The president also addressed the death on his Truth Social (TS) platform writing: “Rest in Peace Pope Francis! May God Bless him and all who loved him!”.
President Trump has been keen to stress that he and his wife WILL be attending the funeral, in what would be the president’s first foreign trip during his second administration.
He said on TS: “Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome. We look forward to being there!”.
All of this seems odd in the circumstances to many onlookers, and has underlined for me how there is often a re-writing of the past.
The plain fact is that President Trump and the Pope were at odds on a whole load of things.
For example, Pope Francis could scarcely have given a clearer sign of his disapproval of the president’s plans for the mass deportation of America’s illegal immigrants.
On January 19 he called them a “calamity”. His ideas on climate change were completely different to those of Mr Trump and his movement as well.
“We must commit ourselves to…the protection of nature, changing our personal and community habits”, he said last year.
The people the Pope appointed were no friends of Mr Trump’s policies either, and sometimes it seems that they were named as a way of thumbing his nose at the president.
On December 20 Mr Trump put in position Brian Burch, a hardline critic of Pope Francis, as his envoy to the Holy See.
The Pope appeared to respond with the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy, an outspoken champion of immigrants, as archbishop of Washington, DC.
So it can be seen that for many president Trump’s praise of the late Pope, and his attendance at the funeral appear strange.
Not for me though, because the past is often whitewashed!
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when senior people would often praise those in organisations he had exposed ) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
