When U.S. Vice President JD Vance appeared on conservative Christian Bryce Crawford’s podcast last week, he said it would be “spiritually impoverished” to see the failed assassination attempt against Donald Trump as a mere coincidence.

Vance said God often speaks to him through “little coincidences”, events that may have perfectly ordinary explanations but that, to him, point toward a spiritual reality.

I get why this is good spiritual practice. I sometimes pray when I’ve lost my keys and thank God when I find them just in time to make the bus. I have interpreted unlikely encounters as answers to prayers. I believe it is good for my soul to think of the world as full of grace, rather than trapped by necessity.

For Vance, Trump’s survival in Butler, Pennsylvania, was one of those moments. “It is just so obvious to me that coincidences like that don’t happen without the hand of providence,” he said.

The Catechism teaches that God is “master of the world and of its history,” but immediately adds that “the ways of his providence are often unknown to us.” That distinction becomes difficult to maintain in Vance’s account of Butler. Trump survived, and Vance sees God's providence and a higher purpose. But he also said that, had Trump been killed, he would have assumed that “very dark forces” had taken him out. In one possible history, the outcome points toward God’s purpose; in the other, toward dark forces. But those are not, in Catholic theology, alternative explanations for history.

The Catechism, again, is explicit on this point. Satan is real, but “the power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature.” Evil can act in history, sometimes with terrible consequences, without becoming a rival providence. God and the forces of evil do not take turns determining the outcome of events. Neither I, nor JD Vance, nor anyone else can reliably tell one from the other by reading history backwards.

Often the spiritually mature response to what looks like a coincidence is to let it remain a coincidence: to acknowledge the difference between believing that history is held by God and believing that we can read God’s intentions from it. We’re only human, after all.