The Administration Threatened the Pope With Dire Consequences if He Didn't Back Off His Criticism of Trump's Wars

The Trump administration’s professions of religious piety have always been repeated with greater vehemence than credibility, but it is still shocking to see a new report claiming that in January, top officials at the Pentagon attempted to strong-arm Pope Leo XIV for refusing to lend his moral authority to Trump’s wars.

The normally Trump-friendly outlet The Free Press couldn’t pass up the scoop, but if you don’t want to cross their paywall, The New Republic has a summary:

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 U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according 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 U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France. …

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted 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.”

As appalling as this is, it is also somewhat comical, and not just for the hypocrisy given the administration’s loud appeals to Christian traditionalism. It raises the Trump administration’s attempts to persecute and intimidate his critics to the level of insane hubris, targeting an institution so large and powerful that it has humbled kings centuries before Trump came along.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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