There are said to be more than a billion Catholics in the world and almost 100 million Anglicans. Right now, all of them are without a supreme spiritual leader, since we currently have neither a Pope nor an Archbishop of Canterbury. The last such simultaneous interregnum was 333 years ago. Being without both is quite the coincidence.
What do we mean by that word: coincidence? The dictionary definition offers this: “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection”.
For atheists, coincidences are never more than a series of haphazard events without rhyme or reason. And to ascribe supernatural significance to them is plain daft. Psychologists even have a name - apophenia - for the mental habit of finding apparent patterns where none exist.
But there are plenty of Christians who believe that coincidences are rarely without “causal connection”. That they are, instead, signs from on high. America’s vice-president, JD Vance, has talked about a series of coincidences which helped nudge him towards becoming a Catholic convert. Coincidences were, he wrote in 2020, evidence of “the touch of God”.
Certainly, when Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, survived an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, Vance took it as evidence that “God has a plan for the United States”.
Of course, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream British politician invoking Divine Intervention in such a way. Famously, when another convert to Catholicism - Tony Blair - was asked about his faith, his spin doctor Alistair Campbell stopped the interview with the words “…We don’t do God”.
But sometimes it can be hard not to see something at least a little eye-popping in a run of coincidences. Take presidential assassinations. Not the one which failed to end the life of Donald Trump, but those which did result in actual presidential murders. The two most talked about in history. The killings of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy.
We currently have no Pope nor Archbishop of Canterbury. For believers, that's no coincidence - Colin BrazierReuters
Consider these coincidences:
- Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, JFK exactly 100 years later in 1946.
- Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, and Kennedy in November 1960.
- Lincoln was succeeded by a southerner named Johnson.
- So was Kennedy.
- The first Johnson was born in 1808, the second in 1908.
Okay, not so very, very odd. But when it comes to the assassinations of both men, the coincidences do seem to test the bounds of probability. And remember. This is not to peddle conspiracy. These are not contested hypotheticals; they are recorded historical facts, albeit ones which seem to offer a strange echo a century apart.
Here goes:
- Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy who told him not to go to the theatre.
- Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln who advised against his going to Dallas.
- Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and ran off into a warehouse.
- Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran off into a theatre.
I suppose the problem is that if you are of a mind to find ‘signs’ in events, you are also in danger of dismissing all the other facts that pertain to those two assassinations, which don’t join up. You will have succumbed to a form of confirmation bias.
Take another assassination. The Vatican shooting in 1981, which almost succeeded in claiming the life of the then Pope (later canonised), John Paul II. The attack coincided with the anniversary of a famous vision of Mary in Fatima, Portugal. Afterwards, the Holy Father, who’d survived several bullets to the chest, said that: “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences”. Sceptics pointed out that, given how many saints, solemnities and holy days of obligation pepper the Roman Catholic calendar, it would be hard for any date not to coincide with one of apparent significance.
Where am I going with this? Well, for many Catholics, the death of Pope Francis (just hours after the moment Christians celebrate the Resurrection) was a remarkable coincidence. But the timing of Francis’s death also meant something else to those of a mind to find meaning in a moment.
Liberal Catholics were said to have hoped the Pope’s improving health would mean there would be no papal election until at least the summer. And in particular, not before June 15th. Why that date? Because it marks the 80th birthday of the cardinal conservative catholics most want to see emerge as the 267th pope (when a cardinal turns 80, he is no longer eligible to be elected pontiff).
His name is Robert Sarah. He is the only contender, or ‘Papabile’, going into the Conclave whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting in person. Coincidentally.
