The Catholic blessing of the U.S. president may backfire as the Church distances itself from the show and grows warier of a presidency keen on using religious symbolism for electoral ends.

On Thursday, October 22, twelve Catholic bishops attended a meeting with the White House Faith Office at the invitation of the Heritage Foundation. Several Catholic members of the Trump administration joined them. After the meeting, the bishops were escorted to the Oval Office, where President Trump was waiting for them. They gathered around him for a moment of prayer.

Shortly thereafter, the White House posted a video online showing the bishops praying with Trump, which gave the impression that the bishops were endorsing President Trump’s Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections scheduled for November 3. These elections will play a crucial role in determining the composition of Congress and the course of the next two years of the Trump presidency.

After the video went viral, causing considerable embarrassment among American Catholics and the bishops’ leadership, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a brief.

On the eve of a party plenum in which 45 of 376 members have been purged, China faces its most pressing question: is the model it has adopted right for its historical phase?

Beijing is uncertain. Domestically, it faces many problems, and foreign examples aren’t reassuring. If the US offers a positive model, Beijing might reconsider, but MAGA proves its point. The Pentagon versus the Confucius Centers.

In the early 1980s, after the Wall of Democracy protests in Xidan, and in the early 1990s, after the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen, when today’s leaders in Beijing took their first steps in politics, China feared heping yanbian, “peaceful evolution.”

The phrase described the gradual transformation of a communist state into a capitalist democracy, achieved not by tanks or revolution but by trade, ideas, and contact with the West. For a generation of Chinese officials, it was the great strategic danger: communism could collapse because of it. Yet it was also an unstoppable force. The Chinese state had to embrace reforms, i.e., peaceful evolution; otherwise, it wouldn’t work.