Pentagon Threatened the Pope After He Criticized Trump
Relations between the US and the Catholic Church haven’t been the similar since January, when senior US protection officers shared an abrasive message with a Vatican official.
Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s US consultant, to a closed-door Pentagon assembly for a bitter lecture.
“The United States,” Colby stated, in response to a blistering new report by The Free Press“has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
One US official current at the assembly introduced up the Avignon papacy, a interval in the 14th century wherein the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an assault on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent loss of life and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a area inside France.
The Trump administration had taken problem with the pope’s criticism of his militaristic proclivities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and different prime Pentagon officers had been notably aggrieved by parts of Leo’s January 9 speech wherein the pope argued that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” and that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”
The pope’s handle was dissected line by line and interpreted as a hostile message towards the administration, reported Letters from Leo Substack author Christopher Hale.
It was tough to not interpret Leo’s feedback as an instantaneous commentary on Donald Trump’s second administration, which had at that time bombed Iran’s nuclear services, kidnapped Venezuelan chief Nicolas Maduro, fiercely advocated for the dissolution of NATO, and threatened America’s allies, together with claiming that the US would seize management of Canada and Greenland.
But the blatant intimidation tactic is the first of its type ever made by American officers to the Catholic Church. There aren’t any public data of any earlier conferences between Vatican and US officers at the Pentagon, not to mention an occasion wherein the world energy recommended that it may power the Bishop of Rome into captivity.
The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo canceled his plans to go to the US later in the 12 months, reported Hale, who famous that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”
Tensions had not been mended by February, when the Holy See rejected the White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo—the non secular order’s first US-born pontiff—for America’s 250th anniversary in July. Instead, the Catholic chief has organized to go to a really totally different locale on July 4: Lampedusa, a tiny island between Tunisia and Sicily the place North African immigrants washed ashore by the hundreds.
“Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident,” Hale commented.
The White House has dismissed the complete account, writing in a statement to reporter Barbara Starr that “the Free Press’s characterization of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”
“The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion,” the Defense Department official continued. “We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”
This story has been up to date.
