Omen, Schmomen: Sometimes Popes Die Five Minutes After You Meet Them

By J.D. Vance

Photo from SOPA images via Getty, byline photo from Gage Skidmore.

Libtards and naysayers are gunning for the Trump administration. Every small setback is treated like a crisis, every hiccup reported like it’s the end of the world. And that’s why, when I learned that Pope Francis had passed away almost immediately after meeting with me on Easter Sunday, and that basically his last act on Earth was to rebuke the path that President Trump and I have chosen, I thought: “People are going to make something of this.” That’s just the world we live in; when the Pope grasps your hand, issues a stark warning, and then dies, almost as if he had been kept alive purely to deliver a dire message directly from God, the bedwetters and snowflakes will try to find some symbolism in that sequence of events.

And sure enough, they have! Cut-ups on social media are trying to make a connection between me shaking the Pope’s hand and his so-proximate-as-to-be-functionally-concurrent death. But I know the truth: These things simply happen. Pope Francis was 88. And sometimes, you meet the Pope during a time of turmoil, he pulls you close and issues an admonition, and then passes away with your hand practically still clasped within his so that you may feel the icy grip of death enter his body in a chilling representation of what might happen to the Body of Mankind should you not heed his warning. Ho hum.

My meeting with the Pope went fine. In fact, it went great — he entered the hallway in the Domus Sanctae Marthae and announced that he was feeling better than he had in years! He then stunned me and the other well-wishers by doing 50 burpees and flawlessly executing the “run up the wall” trick! It looked like reports of him feeling better after a bout of bronchitis in February were true. And all seemed well as he greeted the select audience of Easter revelers — he was smiling and laughing, and even dishing out a high five or two. In no way was the event an eerie harbinger of impending disaster.

When it was my turn to greet the pontiff, I offered my hand and said “It’s an honor, Your Holiness.” Immediately upon taking my hand, Pope Francis’ posture shot perfectly straight and his eyes grew wide. A sudden burst of icy wind blew open the shutters of the ancient hall, and a deafening thunderclap disrupted what had previously been a pleasant day. Pope Francis looked at…well, not at me, but at my soul, if that makes sense, and began muttering “Tenebrae ego testor! Tenebrae ego testor!”, which I later learned translates to “The darkness! I witness it!” I tried to be affable: “I’m J.D. Vance, Vice President of the United States,” I said, summoning a polite smile. And I couldn’t quite make out the pope’s response, because by that point, the clouds had moved inside and spawned several tornadoes, and the wind was tossing relics and ancient art around the hall while people fled in terror, and that made it kind of tough to hear.

I thought my audience with Pope Francis might be over, but it wasn’t: He pulled me close and — in a voice that seemed to be coming from another dimension — said “My son: You must change course. Disaster looms.” I was shocked, because the pope — or someone, or something — spoke those words in Aramaic, which I don’t speak, but I understood the language perfectly in that moment. The pope then gestured to the frescos of Christian martyrs on the wall, and said “Mira ellos lloran” (“look, they weep”), and sure enough: Depictions of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and others had begun crying real, human tears. “Mirar!” the pope said (“Look!”), and held up his hand: The flesh had melted away like candle wax on the palm I had touched.

Is that weird? I don’t know — I’ve never met the pope before, I don’t have anything to compare it to. Maybe it goes that way pretty much every time. I’ve asked around and it does seem that my meeting was at least a little unique — people mostly report light banter and the occasional blessing of rosaries, very little apocalyptic weather or spontaneous comprehension of dead languages. But “unusual” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad”. I’d say that my meeting with Pope Francis was “singular”, but of course, the lamestream media will try to spin the otherworldly chaos that immediately preceded the pontiff’s death as some sort of negative.

They’ll probably also try to make something of the fact that as I was exiting St. Peter’s Basilica — possibly at the exact moment that Pope Francis was shuffling off this mortal coil — the Earth’s crust opened up and a thousand black angels emerged and began laying waste to Vatican City. That’s exactly the type of thing the media loves to exaggerate: I meet the head of the Catholic Church, the legions of the unholy emerge from the underworld and impale humanity at that precise moment, and CNN tries to insinuate that A somehow caused B. They’ll probably also center me in this story by pointing out that the destruction of Christianity’s spiritual core by scores of hell-spawned imps didn’t actually happen, but was, in reality, a terrifying hallucination experienced only by me. They’ll play the cell phone video that one of my staffers took of me trembling on the ground yelling “I SURRENDER TO THE TERROR!!!” But, folks: That horrifying vision of what might be came and went. There are other reasons why I might have had a vivid fantasy of humanity’s end. For example: I had eaten an expired Yoplait that morning — I probably just had a touch of food poisoning!

I don’t read much into the fact that I’ve been haunted by lucid visions of impending doom non-stop since I met the pope. It doesn’t bother me that every crucifix I see bleeds real blood, or that the beheaded ghost of John the Baptist lurks in the corner of the room endlessly repeating “RELENT” even as I write this. The expiration date on that Yoplait was April 4 — I’ll probably be out of sorts for a few days! And in no way will the pope’s eerily timed death — nor the unmistakable harbingers of doom that accompanied that death — deter President Trump and me from enacting our vision. Rest assured that I will stay the course, unmoved by the relentless portents telling me that by exalting Trump instead of God, I have come to embody the icy touch of death itself.

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