#trumpp

In January, a senior Pentagon official summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States and issued a stunning threat, The Free Press reported this week: “The United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby proceeded to raise with then-ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre the Avignon papacy of the 14th century, a protracted period of French royal interference in the Roman Catholic Church that resulted for a time in dueling popes sitting in Rome and Avignon, France (I’m condensing more than a century of papal history into a single clause).

. . .

“[S]ome Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.”

“Other officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

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