In discussing antichrist (“Is Donald Trump Antichrist?,” April 13, 2026), Matthew Walther writes, “No president, no medieval king, no emperor or modern dictator [before Trump] has ever publicly represented himself as Jesus Christ or claimed for himself the ability to raise the dead.”
Not quite true, I suspect, since “Papa Doc” Duvalier certainly issued a new version of the Lord’s Prayer.
A biography of Haiti’s Very Stable Genius, first published in 1969 and later revised to include Papa Doc’s death in 1971 (it was written by two American journalists, Bernard Diederich and Al Burt), quotes the relevant catechetical masterpiece, which starts, “Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for Life, hallowed be Thy name . . . Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti . . .” As Victor Borge would have said, it’s downhill from there.
Moreover, Duvalier also credited himself—as well as being credited by lots of his more cognitively challenged subjects—with sufficient sprezzatura in voodoo to raise the dead.
R. J. Stove
Brighton, Victoria, Australia
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Concerning Paul J. Griffiths’s essay (“Against ‘Natural Death,’” Lent 2026), Abbot John Chapman offers better advice for how a Catholic should think about death:
To die is a violence from one point of view; but from another, it is natural. And to most people it seems natural to die, when they are dying. Consequently it is easy to imagine yourself on your sick bed, very weak, and faintly hearing prayers around you, and receiving the Sacraments, and gently losing consciousness, and sleeping in God’s arms. (This is actually the way death comes to most people,—quite easily and pleasantly.) And looked at in this way, it does not feel like an extinction, the going out of a candle; it seems, on the contrary, impossible to feel that this is the end of one’s personality. But what comes next? We leave that to God,—we do not try to imagine it.
Only in prayer can you get near it—if the world ever falls away, and leaves you in infinity—which you can only describe as nothingness, though it is everything.
The moral of all this is,—do not try to imagine “after death”, for imagination is only of material and sensible things. Only try to realise what it is to be with God.
One’s terror of death, after seeing a dead person, is merely because it is unaccustomed. If you were an Undertaker, you wouldn’t feel it! Nor even if you were a Nurse in a hospital. It is a thing to laugh yourself out of. But it does not matter much. Some people are afraid of mice or frogs. Some people are afraid of corpses. Some people are afraid of ghosts. Others can’t stand the sight of blood. But you can get accustomed to seeing pools of it, and people blown to bits, and be cheerful and joking, and pass by taking no notice. It is all a matter of habit. The Chinese don’t mind dying, provided they are sure of having a really nice coffin. I can’t say the prospect would appeal to me.
These are gruesome subjects! I think it is much better to be accustomed to them, and to take them as a matter of course. The worst of death is really the blanks it leaves in this world. But it often fills up blanks in the next world; and we must rejoice when some one, dear to us, takes the place prepared “from the foundation of the world”, as our Lord tells us, for that soul.
Urban Hannon
Fribourg, Switzerland
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Regarding Matthew Walther’s essay (“How Cool the Wind,” Easter 2026), might there be something more? Are we not to build Heaven on Earth? To build the ekklesia? Isn’t that how we received the New Testament?
Michael G. Steger
The editor replies:
Indubitably.
