Donald Trump's Poignant Nod to Mary...
... with "Bells of Notre Dame" and Schubert's "Ave Maria" beautifully filling "moment of silence" in Butler, PA
Updated, October 13, 2024
One of the most uncommented upon aspects of yesterday’s Trump-Vance rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, besides the size, perhaps the largest in American political history—an estimated 100,000 plus attendees—was how it signaled that Donald J. Trump knows that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, reached down and saved his life on July 13, 2024.
Accenting the event with “the great Bells of Notre Dame” followed by Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” was unmistakable testament to that fact and underscores his intent to infuse a tangible sense of the Divine back into America—its loss being the signal moment and inflection point of our turbo-charged moral slide downward. Pres. Trump highlighted these two beautiful grace notes in the first few minutes of his sitdown with Maria Bartiromo on October 13, the anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima’s final apparition to three shepherd children in Cova da Iria Portugal in 1917, and the “Miracle of the Sun.”
At 6:11 pm, precisely when, twelve weeks earlier, he was nearly felled by an assassin’s bullet, and Corey Comperatore was killed; Pres. Trump— a class act, in one of his classiest acts—asked for a moment of silence, followed a few pregnant moments later by Christopher Macchio’s soul-searing performance of “Ave Maria” echoing across America and the world and recalling this signature tribute to Mary by other famous tenors, notably Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli.
On July 13, at 6:11 p.m.—like St. Pope John Paul II, whose life was spared when he bent down to bless the Our Lady of Fatima medal worn by a young girl in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, Feast of Our Lady of Fatima—Pres. Trump turned his head and looked up to point to that iconic chart, highlighting perhaps the most significant issue of the 2024 campaign, which will likely catapult him back to the White House on November 5th.
Because he moved his head at that precise moment, his life and the life of our nation, was spared.
The pièce de résistance is the fact that mere hours before the July 13 rally, Trump had visited the Fatima shrine near his Bedminster estate on that Fatima anniversary.
Twelve weeks later, he finished his remarks, but not before giving the nod to Mary in the most poignant way possible.
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends. The sequel, Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness & Lemmon, was just published. Her biography of Ernest Hemingway, titled Hemingway’s Faith, is being published Christmas 2024 by Rowman & Littlefield, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. She writes a regular bi-monthly column for Aleteia on legends of Hollywood and hidden screen gems.