What Reported US Threat to Pope and Vatican Means

[struggle4progress]

1. Pentagon Threatened the Pope After He Criticized Trump

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Wed, April 8, 2026 at 5:25 PM EDT

... 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 fourteenth 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 ...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pentagon-threatened-pope-criticized-trump-212552754.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGp2C2AGCz1K9tGE4Sdy7l1hzh-VDTts0gxVVPAJxF4PzPVtDcopu88NE3pYDyoIwKgakvcNbNrfI5r34WTKu1tRbDyolN9ra5SUNrUuSwYr8NuTeyByPW8Pl-a-9UYmCYndMgJiCsLT9HZfiqPwlMhtVlwokfALMI3ZTx3cy72h