Pittsburgh priest who led prayer at Butler Trump rally recounts his experience one year later – His Five Words Leaves us Stunned!

A local Ukrainian Catholic priest opened up about his experience at President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler one year after the attempted assassination.

Fr. Jason Charron of Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in Carnegie was at the Butler Farm Show grounds on July 13, 2024. He opened a rally for Trump with a prayer.

Charron said he was leaving the event just as Trump was getting on stage.

“People began to ask me, you know, why I was leaving, and I said, ‘Well, my job is done. I prayed for, you know, God’s blessing upon everyone here, but your job is just beginning,’ I said to the people,” Charron said. “And that is that you will pray for his protection because there are people who want to shoot him.”

Not even 10 minutes later, the priest said gunshots rang out.

“Despite my kind of saying that, it was initial disbelief. No one really knew what was going on, you have a lot of second-guessing and people thinking it’s fireworks and everything like that,” Charron told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4.

Slippery Rock Mayor Jondavid Longo was 15-20 feet away from Trump when he survived the attempted assassination.

“President Trump showed all of us, everyone in the world, at that moment that he was who all of us at that rally believed him to be, and that was the leader that the United States needed and deserved at that time,” the mayor said.

Both men described a sense of calmness displayed in the aftermath of the shooting.

“It was beautiful to see how people were calm despite everything going on,” Charron said.

Nearly one year later, Charron reflected on the moment as he said, “Through the eyes of faith.”

“I think that’s why God spared his life is because he wasn’t trying to canonize Donald Trump. He’s a sinner like the rest of us. But he was, I believe, through that incident, he was trying to communicate to him and to our country to be bold, and to fear not. For evil has its hour, but God in goodness has its day,” Charron said.

Charron said he wrote two letters to the president since the incident, but the two have not reconnected in person.