There is no one they won’t threaten:
A top Vatican diplomat was summoned to the Pentagon for a “bitter lecture” demanding that the Pope get behind Donald Trump, it has emerged.
Vatican officials briefed on the meeting told The Free Press that one of the Pentagon’s most senior officials summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre to meet in January—then told him that the United States has the military power to do “whatever it wants,” and that Pope Leo, the first American-born pontiff, “better take its side.”
The site writes that “as tensions escalated,” one U.S. official “went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”
Pierre was reportedly summoned to the meeting by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a Catholic who served in the first Trump administration and was nominated by Trump to his current role. Colby is a close ally of Catholic convert JD Vance. Such a meeting between Pentagon officials and the Vatican is believed to be unprecedented.
The Free Press writes that Pentagon brass “picked apart the pontiff’s January speech,” referring to his inaugural State of the World Address. They reportedly took issue with a passage in which Leo challenged Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine, saying, “A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.”
I’m sure Vance will find a way to excuse this insanity despite the fact that he’s even written a new book about his Catholic faith, which is about as authentic as his politics.