Easter means different things to different people everywhere – not only solemnly religious, but also a Happy Holiday season for most.
The Caribbean cultural tradition has been to mix-and-match Easter’s Holy Days and related Holidays, to pray and play accordingly – flying kites, eating Hot Cross Buns, drinking strong grog and attending Mass.
But Easter Sunday 2025 is also one like no other, with Christians of all denominations and people of all religious beliefs facing one common problem across Planet Earth: the impending disastrous effects of US sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump on Christendom and the rest of the world.
Today (April 19) is one day short of exactly three months since the Second Coming of President Donald Trump on January 20 – and everything the not-so-new US President has done and said since winning the November 5, 2024 Presidential Elections has had a veritable messianic ring to it.
Indeed, ‘The Donald’ behaves like he sees his return to The Presidency as a Second Coming too — like Jesus Christ.
By his supporters’ measure, just as the Bible says Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, President Trump’s second election victory is being seen in the same light.
Some even say Trump’s survival of two assassination attempts amounted to a call by God for his Second Coming.
President Trump has said and done everything to assure Christians everywhere — today and tomorrow — that he also seems to feel he’s the 21st Century’s ‘God Almighty’, the world’s New Messiah.
He’s operated more like an imperial emperor than an elected president, more like a King Donald II and above the law — defying the Supreme Court and Federal judges, while pursuing vengeance against all he feels may have sinned against him.
His promoters use selective quotes and misinterpretations of the Bible to wash away all the dozens of judicial Sins of Commission and omission that Candidate Trump was charged with.
Of course, no religious leader of global stature behaves like that.
Take Pope Francis II, the Latin American head of the Roman Catholic Church, who’s the total opposite – an example of the humility and brotherly love Catholics and Christians everywhere will appreciate.
Not all religious leaders are perfect, as even popes are not infallible; but this first non-European pope in the history of the Catholic Church (from Argentina), has consistently exuded the humility in power that world leaders on the political stage simply have not matched, or simply cannot match.
Just this past week, Pope Francis cancelled the license of a Catholic order that fell into disrepute and made the church look bad.
According to Vatican News (the Vatican’s official news agency), in an article by Salvatore Cernuzio, earlier this week, as of Monday, the entity known as Sodality of Christian Life (SCV), also known as ‘Sod-alicio’, no longer exists.
That’s what’s come out of just one action by the Vatican under Pope Francis – and note the differences between how a genuine church-leader talks and how politicians anointed by God, their fellow flesh-and-blood, talk and behave.
But that’s not all in terms of the Vatican, under Pope Francis, which is also currently witnessing the closing down of misbehaving Catholic orders the world over, including in his native Latin American and Caribbean region.
A group of 43 women in the Pope’s native Argentina have accused another Catholic Order — Opus Dei–– of coercing them as children and adolescents into a life of domestic servitude.
(Opus Dei has a presence in more than 70 countries but is strongest in Spain, Italy and Latin America.)
The women say they were forced into working up to 12-hour days, cooking and cleaning for the elite members, without pay, faced extreme control, their letters censored and were banned from reading anything but children’s books or religious texts.
When they eventually escaped, the women say, they were left without money, clothes or qualifications.
After a two-year investigation, Argentinian federal prosecutors have taken on their case, accusing senior leaders of Opus Dei in South America of overseeing the exploitation and trafficking of girls, adolescents and women between 1972 and 2015.
The prosecutors’ report is now before a judge, who will decide whether to proceed to trial.
But try telling that to President Trump, who’s showing increasing disregard for the rule of US law, overruling judicial decisions with his patented hundreds of Executive Orders.
So, President Trump is spending his Easter Weekend thanking God for his Second Coming, while his Republican cardinals declare him King of Kings and Earth’s Rightful Ruler.
Easter 2025 is hot everywhere – from the unification of observance of Easter Sunday this year by Western and Orthodox Catholics, to the deification of President Trump as God’s Chosen One.
Meanwhile, the Wannabe King is also learning – very quickly – that he’s already starting to lose any Midas Touch he might have thought he had, in terms of Americans supporting his policies.
He insists the tariffs and other measures he’s implemented are just medicine Americans must take to Make America Great Again under his watch, but his policies are starting to backfire.
Some nations, small and large, are actually telling and showing President Trump he’s definitely not their king – and they include Mexico, Canada and China.
And not only that — the tariffs and other tantrum actions taken by the American president in only three months are also starting to backfire in bigger ways than expected.
His ratings and also going down in the courts of American public opinion, as independent voters are withdrawing their support rapidly, leaving President Trump at the lowest approval rating ever by any US president three months into office.
Many Christians will mistakenly continue to believe that Christ ascended to Heaven simply to keep taking care of Planet Earth forever and ever, Amen.
But it’s also very likely that most will never believe what President Donald Trump’s Second Coming will actually mean for them — after Easter — with the effects of the global trade war he’s unleashed.