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It turns out Greenland/Denmark and Canada aren't the only friendly countries that the US has been threatening, the Vatican's ambassador to the US (according to The Free Press and Letters from Leo a Catholic focused blog) was given both explicit and coded threats of military force against the Holy See.
JD Vance, a Catholic himself, has done a pretty rare thing for the Trump admin and said they're gonna get to the bottom of it first, instead of immediately dismissing it as fake news.. This doesn't confirm it as real, but that it wasn't immediately denied and dismissed like the typical M.O. is quite interesting.
This could help explain why Pope Leo has felt so emboldened to speak up against Trump's war efforts in Iran, cause the administration officials have been warmongering against them behind the scenes. The chance that the admin actually pulls the trigger and attacks the Vatican is obviously low, but that they keep threatening many of our allies both publically and privately seems quite concerning to me. It also opens up a new thing to consider, how many other allies are they threatening behind closed doors too?
Didn't JD Vance kill the last pope. Seems like a serious threat to me.
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The administration has now denied it, so given the truism that the Trump administration always lies and will always do the stupidest and most thuggish thing possible, we can safely assume it is not only true but probably worse than reported.
This is just zealotry. There's a reason we call it "fake news".
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The Catholic Herald and the Pillar(both much better news sources than Letters from Leo) are both taking the editorial stance that this meeting went nothing like what was described.
The pillar gave basically the same description, except without the 'avignon papacy' comment, which was kind of ridiculous.
Another source told NBC that the meeting was "most unpleasant and confrontational."
The catholic herald appears to just have the 'no comment' from the vatican.
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[Cardinal Pierre][https://x.com/BrianBurchUSA/status/2042307511504519366] also denies it.
He's also denied it to the Catholic Herald, so this isn't just the US government covering for its embarassing actions.
Nope, he actually declined to speak about it at all. https://thecatholicherald.com/article/vatican-stays-silent-over-reported-pentagon-meeting
He did not deny it.
And this is more or less a denial and being treated as such by non-joke commenters. Even fr James Martin released a statement about how it didn’t happen but the trump admin is gross enough to do it.
There are norms for Vatican communication, and ‘Letters from Leo’ is not a good source(and there are good liberal sources on this stuff, albeit often published monthly rather than daily/weekly). This is a salacious rumour that was being treated as fact on Twitter, I don’t blame you for being taken in briefly- but holding to it so tightly is a bit queer, thé USCCB doesn’t believe it, thé Catholic journalists with any standards at all don’t believe it, even if they’re liberal activist hacks- this is simply a thing that didn't happen, and the Trump admin is denying it for that reason.
It's literally declining to speak on the matter, not a denial.
Ok sure I checked that too and you're also wrong about his statement. https://x.com/JamesMartinSJ/status/2042335054072873249
His statement is we don't know, and the cardinal along with the other holy see officials are not the types of people who would ever officially confirm or deny this story regardless of truth.
This story was broke by The Free Press, I think it's interesting that almost all the derision here I've seen is entirely focused on letters from leo (who simply said they independently verified TFP) and basically no one has tried to target the story's credibility from TFP. That is Bari Weiss's news outlet, she hasn't shown herself and her editorial and management team to the type to be publishing mere rumors made from whole cloth has she?
Either The Free Press made a huge mistake here and fell for a fake source (they currently at least seem to be sticking with it, I don't see any edits on the article).
Or there's a real source but the source lied about it for some reason.
Or they've made it up completely, which why? No one would think this would hurt Trump much to hear an undersecretary vaguely threatened the Vatican behind closed doors when he openly threatens Canada and Greenland without much pushback already. And again this is Bari Weiss's outlet, she's pretty Trump friendly overall now.
Or there is something to the story.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/nuncios-pentagon-meeting-was-frank
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What is the name for the epistemological framework where you believe whatever is maximally hilarious?
Elonism?
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Lmaoism
So Maoism but funnier? I can get with that.
That would be Marxism with Chico-ese characteristics. Lmaoism can be best summed up as "never let the truth get in the way of a good joke".
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Nihilism?
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That’s the alien-entertainment variant of simulation theory
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Clownworld theory.
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It actually makes it exponentially more likely that it's fake in my view: if it actually happened and the administration knew, they would obviously just deny it. The fact that it seems to have caught the White House off guard, i.e. Vance not having heard of it previous to the story breaking, makes it more likely to be a fabrication since they didn't have a planned response for it.
The very interaction recounted in the article is somewhat hard to believe - why was this meeting necessary? The Pentagon wants to apply pressure on the Vatican to do what, exactly? Publicly proclaim they're abandoning the basic anti-war messaging they've held on to consistently for a century and will now be picking sides in armed conflicts? Really?
The Pentagon was issuing explicit threats of military violence against the Vatican, which is a tiny complex of buildings and gardens located inside Italy's capital, and was referencing the Avignon Papacy in doing so? Really?
This current administration is excellent at lastingly damaging relations with allies for little gain, but the idea that they would suggest using military force against a peaceful, greying religious order that both enjoys excellent standing amongst world leaders all while really not having any meaningful practical influence on world affairs seems laughable. I seriously doubt anyone in the Pentagon gives a fuck about what the Vatican says against their military operations, since they never gave a fuck in the past, nor ever felt a negative consequence coming from the Vatican for having done so.
Pope Leo has said the exact same things every Pope in recent history has said about non-defensive wars waged without a meaningful cassus belli - that they condemn them wholesale, call for ceasefires and diplomacy, and remind everyone that being a Christian means acting from love and forgiveness. Virtually nothing Pope Leo has said or done represents a shift or sharpening of that basic Church doctrine.
John Paul the IInd, essentially a proactive right-wing culture warrior Pope, immediately condemned the Iraq War and called it a crime. This is not special or particular, it's a basic requirement of being the Head of Christendom.
I agree the story sounds sketchy. The best case I can make of it is the view that since Leo is an American, he should be using the influence of the papacy and the Church to back America and American interests. That's not going to fly, but I can see why someone might try and make the effort.
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After further looking into the sources on this one, I’m gonna press a strong X button. Better Catholic journalist outlets are consistently unable to confirm the threats, and if that part was real we’d have seen it on America magazine or Commonweal(thé top liberal Catholic newspapers in the English speaking world), and it would probably be confirmed by less op-Ed focused Catholic newspapers like Catholic Herald or the Pillar. Instead reputable sources are treating it like a page five story that didn't have any threats leveled, including ones hostile to Trump.
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I see a lot of people in the conservative press attacking Pope Leo and Archbishop Coakley for their statements against the Iran war, but I've seen very few examine the elements of Just War teachings within Catholic doctrine, because the Iran War will be found wanting if you examine them in terms of what has been publicly expressed.
It’s worth noting that Archbishop Coakley was the conservative choice to lead the American bishops; he is otherwise quite friendly to the Trump admin. Similarly archbishop Broglio(who has also caught some flack for opposing the war) is firmly on the right within the episcopacy. These aren’t liberals that just hate the GOP/Trump/whatever.
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Just War is so interesting, because we have the historical record where it is interpreted as, "My clerics say the throne is rightfully mine by both our laws, therefore I will wage war to press my claim," as just, but now we quibble about, "Sure they are destroying the weapons and weapon factories of a regime that is hellbent on killing us/our allies and executing their own citizens, but do we understand and believe our leaders' justification for doing so?"
New Polity did a podcast on the Iranian war and although they were very harsh on the war I came away believing that the war was not only just but that not prosecuting it would have been a wrong. Because they were just ignorant on the basic details of the whole matter, and when you substitute in the facts the argument goes the other way.
That’s always how it’s been throughout history though. And this is no different. “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” Every claim is given at least a thin veil of justification and some justification may indeed really be present but power has always been a first principle, first and foremost. No country on Earth is going to cede territory to someone else out of superior moral arguments or by divine edict.
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Sure, we launched a coup to secure the interests of a British oil company to syphon more profits from Iran. Since paying the Iranians the agreed upon 16% of profits was apparently too much for said company despite sizeable profits over 40 years.
We then overthrew the elected government, after Iran (who were otherwise at risk of losing the country to communists) voted to nationalize their oil in protest, and we install a monarch puppet that repressed any political organizing on the ground so the only non government organized forces were devout Islamists. And when the Islamists launched a revolt and take American hostages, demanding the US hand over the former dictator we are harboring in exchange, we refuse and instead finance a direct invasion into Iran via Iraq that kills ~250 thousand Iranians over 8 years.
Our greatest ally happens to be embroiled in a conflict in Lebanon around that time so to show support we deploy Marines to Beirut, where they are then bombed by a paramilitary group Iran started funding after we financed the invasion of their country. Which puts the newly Iranian funded proxy groups on our radar as an existential threat to America, despite them being the direct consequence of an unfair intervention solely intended to rob a people of their national resources.
Somehow this all boils down to Iran being a lunatic rogue state that is hellbent on killing Americans, despite their national leader in public and formal capacity stating the exact opposite.
Well yeah. The IRGC literally talks like Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains out of GI Joe. They are behind October 7th, the Houthi's, Hezbollah, etc. They are a major source of instability and terrorism in the region (not the sole source, but one of the two big ones.)
A year ago 85% of Iranians did not support the IRGC and that was before the Basaji killed 45,000 protestors. Presumably the number is higher now. You are conflating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with the people of Iran, who largely want their 2,500-year-old monarchy back and permission to do TikTok dances without getting raped then executed.
What are the priorities of the "Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp?" You might be able to guess it, given that the I doesn't stand for Iran but for Islam. The Iranian people, the country of Iran, is not their priority. Instead, they see it as their primary purpose, "to prepare the world for the emergence of Imam of the Age.” Mahdism is their stated purpose, and Mahdism requires that they destroy the US and Israel to bring about the return of Mahdi.
If you doubt me, why do you think the Iranian internet has been mostly shut off except for members of the regime for the duration of the protests and war? The people of Iran do not support the IRGC, the IRGC does not exist for the benefit of the people of Iran.
Iran even before the war was on the verge of collapse. Even before the war, Iran was looking to relocate the capital because they mismanaged their water supply so badly. "Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves."
Droughts lead to food shortages, food shortages lead to famine, famine leads to millions of dead people. Yes, even in the 21st century.
As far as the actions the US took during the Cold War, people forget that the Soviet Union and Communism were legitimately bad and that communists were and still are existential threats. Sure, if you take all the actions the US did during the Cold War out of context of the Cold War, remove the enemy from the descriptions of events, they sound bad. You can do that for any conflict. "Did you know in the 1940s, the US and Britain invaded Normandy Beach in France and killed 10,000 people. Can you believe it? What did Vichy France do to the US to justify that treatment?"
Meanwhile, the IRGC has enough enriched uranium to make several nukes and had delivery systems that could reach Eastern Europe (as shown by that they were able to target Diego Garcia recently.) They were working rapidly on stockpiling conventional weapons to overwhelm Israel and hold them hostage the same way North Korea is able to hold Seoul hostage. Once that was complete, they could complete their nukes in peace, just like North Korea. They aren't doing this for the love of science! There's only one reason to have these expensive and risky programs and to keep increasing the range.
Yeah because GI Joe cartoon villains are imitating the Iranian leaders of the 70s.
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If catastrophizing otherization and conspiracy theories are enough to invade a nation, we can just call it a day.
The US and Israel also talk like cartoon villains. They also kill civilians en masse along with rape, torture and executions of prisoners. They also fund terrorists. If that wasn't enough, have some theological doomsday prophesy mixed in with your US military.
I don't doubt that the IRGC stands for its own interest and keeping itself in power over the interest of the Iranian people. But that goes double for the US and Israel. Considering the fates of Syria, Libya and Iraq, no one should have any faith that an intervention by the US and Israel would have a more positive result for the Iranian people than what they are suffering now. And no one believes the Iranian people have a favorable view of the US or Israeli governments or want to be ruled by them either.
If we cared about the Iranian people, and I do, we would stop playing these games against their government, open trade, and slowly worm ourselves into their society through the soft power of prosperity.
What's left of your post is rather annoying. It makes me feel you did not read what I wrote. As an example, I mention implicitly that communism was a threat to Iran. However you write as if I didn't:
Iran had a secular nationalist in charge. The US labeled him a communist to justify the intervention but he never was and the factual basis for doing so at the time was shaky at best.
You also claim I am taking things out of context, but instead of showing where, what context I removed and how it is relevant, you make a conceptual argument for what taking things out of context looks like. What is the point of this?
Finally, for the nukes and why Iran should not have them, you don't explain why. You just float an ominous conspiracy theories in a way that reads rather mad.
Is Iran intending on nuking eastern Europe?
Again, this reads like a conspiracy theory fever dream. Israel has the largest military in the world backing it... Like... How would this even work?
To have a nuclear deterrent so the US and Israel stop bombing them? Or are they planning to nuke the entire world?
We tried that with the Red Chinese. How well has that worked out?
It worked out great, for everyone involved. Billions would be substantially poorer all around the world if not for the Chinese reaching their current position. You could not have delivered that, you profited along the way. Is ruling the planet uncontested, no matter how much of a heap of crap you make it into, really the measure of success.
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You can argue that it worked for Vietnam, although that's because Vietnam is right next to China and they need to be friendly with someone who can oppose China, and the Russians aren't available any more.
It worked for China to the extent that China got a lot more capitalist and doesn't ideologically oppose the US, but of course ideology isn't all there is.
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When is the last time the United States of America shot over ten thousand of its own unarmed citizens for protesting? When is the last time the United States of America had as part of it's legal code a requirement to rape female prisoners before execution to prevent them from having a good afterlife? In what jurisdiction can you receive torture as a sentence in the United States of America?
Execution is fine and just but only for murder and only after a fair trial.
No, that is to demonstrate how far their current delivery systems have been proven to reach, since most people don't know how far Diego Garcia is from Iran. They have been working on delivery systems to reach the US. That is the direction they are heading.
And yeah, I feel comfortable saying I want the US to be able to attack wherever it needs to, and I do not want Iran to attack me. This is only hypocrisy if you view the US government and the IRGC on equal moral footing. You seem to. I don't.
It's not a conspiracy theory that Iran has nuclear material and is working towards making nukes. This is something everyone has known and the framework everyone has been operating under for the past 20+ years.
America doesn't kill its own citizens directly. They kill other countries citizens and in far greater number than Iran. There's also plenty of death by American government inaction, such as with drug overdoses, and plenty of rapes in American prisons. And people can be freely tortured if the CIA wants to torture them.
If Iran wanted an ICBM they could presumably just make one, or buy one from the N-Koreans. The notion that there is an ongoing race against time to get to Iran before they incrementally develop a missile that can reach further and further feels like childish propaganda.
What does this even mean? Nothing of what we were talking about relates to whether or not America should be able to attack where it needs to and no, I don't want Iran to attack you either.
I never claimed that the IRGC were good for Iran. The point was very simple: Considering the fates of Syria, Libya and Iraq, no one should have any faith that an intervention by the US and Israel would have a more positive result for the Iranian people than what they are suffering now. There is no need to attack Iran, there is no 'greater good' that can come of it and the US has no definitive moral high ground or mandate to necessitate their decision to attack Iran.
You are comparing the IRGC to some American ideal like Massachusetts. In which case, I agree, USA all the way! But I'm comparing the IRGC to war torn years long military occupied Iran. Which is better for the Iranian people? Which is better for the world?
This is just not what was going on in the comment you wrote or the comment I replied with. You said Iran was stockpiling conventional weapons to take Israel hostage to buy time for themselves to make a nuclear weapon. Again, what is this? Why do you write this?
I noted that it would make sense for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent. What gain Iran would have from instigating a nuclear war against the holder of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world remains to be explained.
You may not like the US, but I would rather be arrested in the US for suspicion of killing my father than arrested in Iran for suspicion of not wearing a head covering.
I would rather be an enemy of the US than an ally of Iran. Iran has responded to attacks by bombing civilian infrastructure of previously friendly countries. Meanwhile, the US is very precisely (as far as these things go) targeting enemy combatants and the infrastructure of war.
There is a huge moral difference between the two regimes which cannot be conflated and it really does color the rest of the analysis.
I mean yes, it is clearly a purpose of Iran to stockpile conventional weapons until the point where attacking them would be too costly to consider. You do not dispute that their long term goal is to make a nuclear weapon.
You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to just think, if the first objective was achieved, how would it impact the second? It's not a conspiracy, even if absolutely no one in the regime was thinking on these terms it would still be true. If Iran had enough weapons they could hold the whole Middle East hostage and we would have no ability to intervene in their Nuclear ambitions.
And they are willing to do so as we can see with their present actions. It seems that the only fallacious thinking on my part is that they would be content to hold Israel hostage, when clearly they would also turn on the Gulf Coast as well.
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What they would gain, and what they think they would gain, are two different things.
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I’m skeptical that anyone could beat the Trump and Netanyahu administrations at sounding like cartoon villains. The IDF named its last-minute bombing campaign in Beirut “Operation Eternal Darkness”. Feel free to drop some quotes to prove me wrong though.
85% of Americans do not approve of congress. This in no way implies that Americans would rather be ruled by an executive council appointed by Xi Jinping.
If the poll was before the regime killed thousands of protesters, it was also before the IRGC successfully repelled a US/Israeli military operation aimed at subjugating the country. A big mistake the US made in Vietnam was assuming that people joined the Vietcong because they were communists. In reality people joined the Vietcong because they were fighting for Vietnamese independence.
This is a fringe view. The majority position is that Imam Mahdi will reappear first, and then he will lead the forces of Islam to liberate Palestine and defeat the West.
Unfortunately the fringe happens to be in charge of a country.
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And note that this is a general point about escheatology. Treating end-times prophecies as warnings about events that will happen in the future by manifest divine intervention (with no-one to know the day or the hour) is effectively harmless.
The dominant interpretation of Christian escheatology in Catholicism and mainline Protestantism is preterist - i.e. that most of the apocalyptic prophecies in Revelation etc. were already symbolically fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple after the 66-73 Jewish-Roman war and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine after the 132-135 Bar Khoba Rebellion, but it isn't dogma. Treating it as a symbolic roadmap for contemporary geopolitics is something that only happens in American evangelicalism, and even then it is a minority view. (The most popular escheatology in American evangelicalism is the Rapturism of the Left Behind novels, which are mainstream in the limited sense that they treat Revelation as a warning and not an instruction manual, and they predict that the prophecies will be fulfilled by manifest divine intervention and not human action)
Similarly, in Judaism the Third Temple movement (which seeks to actually act out parts of the Messiah prophecy) is fringe even within religious Zionism.
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To be fair, Iran is just one of the first countries to get hit by this. There’s a pretty good chance that you will see similar hydrological collapses in multiple other middle eastern countries, India/Pakistan, Western China, and the American Southwest.
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So what? Iranians are rational, more rational than the US or Israel. Don't launch or abet wars of aggression (extermination?) against Iranians, and you're good. Their handling of this war makes this rather clear; they are disciplined and acting very decently, despite being under existential threat. I'd trust IRGC with nukes, no problem.
Such a twisted mindset, "held hostage" when they can reach you or yours, but perfectly fine if you can reach them (and use that ability at will). It is in Iranian interest to have nuclear missiles aimed at Israeli and American cities, and in my interest as an Eastern European too, since I like my oil imports cheap.
Which is why Iran armed and trained Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel. Israel, which was on Iran's side during the Iraq-Iran war.
Or, to resist / defend against Israeli aggression. I still don't expect Iranians to be aggressive towards Europeans unless we start it, and I'm not afraid of them having nukes that can reach me. I'm mildly afraid of them not having nukes that can reach you.
I don't know anything about the period. So Israelis helped Iranians against Iraq, ok. That by itself does not imply anything beyond a transient common interest no longer relevant.
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What's the source of this story? I mean, who are the links in the chain between Christopher Hale (the blogger you link to) and the Papal Ambassador? And how many links are there? The blog post only makes a vague reference to "sources."
The reason I ask is that for many years now, there is been a pattern where (1) in real life or online, someone makes a claim which puts the Trump Administration in a bad light; (2) I scrutinize the claim; and (3) it turns out to be some combination of baseless, unsupported by any evidence, based on wild twistings of peoples' words, or simply fabricated.
This claim has the same sort of feel to it and therefore I am extremely skeptical.
Hmm let's see what I wrote again and what you quoted.
You literally had your answer right there, and even if you didn't notice that, and just read Letters from Leo up to the paywall, that post also links The Free Press article twice, and mentions it four different times up to that point.
IDK how you could have missed this.
Ok, let's.
Somehow I didn't notice that those were links. But in any event, my question essentially stands:
What is the chain between the Papal Ambassador and Mattia Ferraresi? Was it a direct interview? If not, who was between them and how many steps were there?
No need to get snippy, it's a reasonable question.
What's the chain between the Papal Ambassador and Mattia Ferraresi? Was it a direct interview? If not, who was between them and how many steps were there?
That is a different question than what you asked. Similar, but not the same. The one you had actually asked was answered simply by reading what was written multiple times.
The main information we have is in the article. Perhaps Ferraresi and the rest of the TFP team have shared more details elsewhere, but I'll leave that to you to scour their social media if you want to know.
Do you, personally, believe the event in question happened? What evidence leads you to your conclusion? Is your assessment of that evidence derived from general principles, or is this a case of any stick being sufficient to beat a dog?
Which alleged event do you think has a stronger evidentiary basis: Trump's underlings threatening the Vatican, or Biden raping Tara Reade?
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That's not true at all. My original question asked for the entire chain. Apparently information as to one link in the chain was easily available, but I asked about the ENTIRE CHAIN.
Here's what I had asked:
IDK how you could have missed this.
I've had enough experience with TDS that I'm not going to bother. The chances that it will lead to anything other than vague "sources" are just too low.
What's more important is that you don't even know yourself. In other words, this is another example of someone encountering information that's "too good to check."
Well thank you for admitting that you failed to do the bare minimum of knowledge seeking and not read the original article or this. Of course you don't know if you actively chose not to.
What's the point of a discussion if "I won't read" is the starting point?
For example you so very much did not read that you don't understand that Hale claims to have independently verified from The Free Press, so they aren't in the same chain to begin with. It's not Hale > TFP > sources, it's Hale > Hale Sources and TFP > TFP sources.
If you read LettersFromLeo, his verification comes in the preface he added after the blog post so you would also know, if you had done the bare minimum, that he hasn't gone into depth revealing his sources in that blog because the verification was done after his writeup of the TFP post.
I fixed your question for you. And the answer is simple: You bear the burden of proof, not me.
I'm a little confused. Are you claiming that LettersfromLeo supplies the chain that I originally requested?
If so, please QUOTE him where he does so. If not, please admit that he failed to do so.
Anyway, do you admit that from the outset, I requested the ENTIRE CHAIN?
And do you admit that you have failed to provide the same, instead trying to assign the burden to me to go search for it?
If you're not even willing to go read the primary source on the topic, what "burden of proof" can even be fulfilled there? You can't just go "nuh uh, I'm not gonna read it" to discount everything.
I'll give you the information I have on his verification right at the top of the article, that you seem to have not bothered reading even a little of.
Yes, he doesn't provide what sources he used here, I never said he did. What I am saying however is that if you want to know more about what they are basing it off of beyond what their respective articles include, you can go ask them. I am not a part of The Free Press and I don't have any relation to Christopher Hale of LFL, I do not have any non public info as to who or what their sources are. In fact I have less than that given I do not desire to scour all their social media pages to see if they've revealed anything there.
You started with the chain for Christopher Hale, and then switched to the chain for Ferraresi. Issue is, they are independently verified from each other, they are not the same chain to begin with, something you would know if you had clicked on the link and read the very first paragraph!
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You appear to be making assertions of fact. People ask you for your evidence behind these assertions. You say that they can look for evidence if they want to:
and they decline:
They do not appear to be declining to read. You do appear to be declining to back up your assertion beyond "these people said a thing".
These people did indeed say a thing. Do you believe them? If so, why? That is a discussion. If you believe you have good reasons to believe them, or other people have poor reasons to not believe them, than taking a position and explaining your reasoning behind it produces good discussion. Even if someone else is dismissive of your reasoning, making a solid argument is persuasive to onlookers, and this forum exists precisely to facilitate that sort of discussion.
I've asked you whether you personally believe this report, and if so, why. Do you think that question is a good basis for discussion? if not, why not?
Actually, it is The Free Press and LettersFromLeo that are making such assertions.
Well yeah, if they don't want to actually bother and go to the writers to find an answer to the question they apparently have, they don't have to. But their choice is their choice! "I don't want to" isn't the same as "therefore you must be wrong". If they want to go question it, it's not hard to shoot The Free Press team an email or something.
Bari Weiss is a pretty reliable centrist who is friendly to the Trump admin in many areas. I doubt she would be letting through blatant lies on her main journalism site right? Maybe you have different ideas on how trustworthy her and her staff are, but there's probably something behind these accusations. Else Bari Weiss and her staff are risking all the good will they've built up for a relatively minor story in the grand scheme of things. And if it was completely fake, the Vatican might denounce it too and the story would fade away into nothingness while damaging their credibility in the long term. I see no reason to believe Weiss would be doing that.
By making it "your assertions" like above, you hinge the entire credibility on me, an internet stranger. And not the established journalists who broke the story.
Sure but if they can't be bothered to even read what is there (like they missed a collective five references to the original story being from TFP), what's the point? There has to be some sort of baseline before meaningful discussion occurs. I think "read the words that are on your screen and in the link" is the bare minimum.
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Unnamed ‘sources’ aren’t uncommon or inherently unreliable in Vatican inside baseball politics. But letters from Leo is run by a former Democrat congressional candidate with the explicit goal of pushing the Catholic Church into alignment with the DNC, including dropping opposition to abortion, and more fact-oriented sources- or indeed, more high quality op Ed sources- are consistently unable to confirm the parts of this story that make it a big deal.
Of special note is the Pillar, which is easily a top five news source on internal Vatican goings-on and probably the top source written in English. They would likely be the first ones to confirm the story and so far, their stance is ‘thé meeting happened but nothing of note took place- no threats of Avignon’.
A Democratic media organ presenting a highly inflammatory allegation with salacious details without source and treating it as credible despite no one else seemingly able to verify?
Say it ain't so.
They’re not even a real media organ. It’s an advocacy blog that doesn’t normally do straightforward ‘news’.
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Without this, there essentially is no story - so the article OP posted appears to be a fabrication, which is unsurprising.
Yes, liberal Catholic journalism of record(which letters from Leo is not, it’s a rather poor attempt to tie secular political liberalism to the current pope) is treating this as a page five story.
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Next link is Mattia Ferraresi, an Italian journalist. After that it vanishes into unnamed sources. Since the Avignon Papacy is something that would be a much bigger thing at the Vatican than in the US, I rather suspect it was fabricated there.
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Interesting if true, but it makes me want to retort "Mr. Colby, reach for a history book and see how many empires that had the military power to do what they wanted in the world are still around, alongside the Catholic Church."
The Avignon papacy 'threat' makes me laugh. Ah yes, this is why the papacy has been removed to France today, and never returned to Rome! If the US government wants to be so stupid as to get involved in provoking schisms and anti-popes, it's not going to end well for them. Remind me again who is king of France right now, and who is pope? 🤣
Yeah, and the "if true" is the important part. This has all the credibility of a Catholic Steele Dossier.
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Vatican is like Israel. They have no friends, only interests.
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The Pope planning to spend the 250th anniversary of the USA in the completely irrelevant island named Lampedusa (yeah we get the pun Leo), known solely for importing Africans into Europe, reminds me why I ultimately have to hate Catholicism. This is a serious insult to an entire country over a political dispute involving a transient administration. And never would an Italian pope consider missing an important political anniversary in Italy. If Catholicism continues supporting endless migration into America and Europe then I will support any effort to shatter them into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds. There’s a generous middle-ground between “not supporting the destruction of an alien civilization” and “bringing literally infinite aliens into your country”, I don’t know how they could get this so wrong.
(Just reasoning from love thy neighbor: the Hispanic laborer who works in America has the privilege of sending home remittances with significantly greater purchasing power. Due to average salary difference adjusted for USD, cost of living difference and purchasing power difference, the Hispanic laborer could effectively make 10x more than his American counterpart. This allows him to easily support a family back home, which according to God’s design is a key factor for happiness, but the poor American laborer does not have this same privilege. Even the poor Indian who migrates here to work at a gas station has greater odds of supporting a family due to the status / wellbeing differential between here and India. We oppress our poorest neighbor by forcing him to compete with foreign workers when he makes significantly less in two key ways: (1) he often makes far less in terms of purchasing potentials re Latin America, (2) he makes far less in terms of marital potential re all foreign migrants. Same amount of stressful work, but significantly different payoff for wellbeing. Seems evil to me.)
The Pope has no allegiance to any specific country, since he's...the Pope. Why the fuck should he be present or make a formal appearance for America's birthday party? Do you understand what the Papacy is? I'm unsure, since you're literally expecting the Pope to express a national preference. Do you think Pope Benedict was hanging out in the German Reichstag to celebrate the anniversary of Reunification?
I'm assuming this is news to you, but Lampedusa is an infamous island since it's been a major receptacle for illegal migrant boat crossings long before the 2015 Refugee Crisis began. It was constantly in the news here in Europe for not having the logistical ability to properly house and feed the throngs of migrants arriving there. The word "Lampedusa" used to act as a byword for illegal immigration into Europe and still is an emblem of the migrant crisis, especially in Italy - leftists and the Papacy see it as an example of unjust human suffering and indignity, while right-wingers see it as a cautionary tale of mass migration. For you to call it a "completely irrelevant island" immediately classifies you as lacking the basic insight to have much of a meaningful opinion on this matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa_immigrant_reception_center
You heard that the Pope would be in Lampedusa and actually, sincerely thought he was doing so because the last three letters of the island's name spell out "usa"? This is something you actually think is true? Are you ok?
I actually agree - as a Catholic - that the Pope's knee-jerk defence of any and all immigration is wrong, misguided, and ultimately a very narrow reading of Christian doctrine on the matter. But this kind of completely braindead reasoning does us no favours.
Was Leo even invited? Is there a guest list of foreign dignitaries available? Has Charles III been invited, for one, or will Duchess Meghan do in his stead?
EDIT: Seems like Chuck and Camilla will turn up in the USA for the bash!
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Lampedusa is entirely irrelevant except for African migrants. It’s a tiny island with less than 7k inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa
Yes, exactly what I said. African economic migrants, mostly Muslim, mostly military aged males. Great priority for a Pope, to promote the destruction of Europe even as Catholicism dies in Europe.
You aren’t familiar with the history and practice of Catholic wordplay. You can start with the famous etymologies of Isidore of Seville: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae (pro-tip: the etymologies are not real). It is no coincidence that on America’s 250th anniversary, the institution which supports the replacement of Americans with Hispanic Catholics and protested their deportations, and which pretends to act as a light unto the nations, is visiting Lampedusa the African migrant island known solely for importing Africans into Europe.
Do you know how frequently popes visit this island? Do you know the last time was 13 years ago? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Leo chose to visit on the 250th anniversary of America, after spending all year crying about deportations because his dying institition requires a perpetual supply of Latin Americans (else they have to sell off their churches to the very Muslim migrants whom they supported coming in)?
I have absolutely no idea why you think the size of the local population has any bearing on the importance of Lampedusa when the island itself is considered a symbol of the Refugee/Migrant Crisis - which is of course a highly relevant issue for the West and the Third World. Furthermore, if big numbers are what determines relevancy to you in a symbolic gesture, consider that since 2023 alone, over 120.000 migrants have passed through Lampedusa on their way to Europe - it's literally the biggest migrant reception camp in Italy, a nation at the forefront of illegal migrant arrivals. As an individual migrant center, its quite literally the most relevant in Europe after Moria in Greece.
https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/62189/italy-more-than-120000-migrants-passed-through-lampedusa-since-2023#:~:text=From%20June%201%2C%202023%20until,Cross%2C%20who%20manage%20the%20center.
So is it an irrelevant island, or a springboard for the total destruction of Europe? It can't be both.
I agree with you that this immigration is bad and stopping it is an existential priority, but this kind of incoherence is pointless - either we are talking about the Papacy's stance on immigration, in which case we're probably on the same side, or we're talking about the implications of the Pope not attending America's 250th anniversary, but you can't just jump back and forth between two separate conversations.
You literally said "we get the pun, Leo" - the only way to interpret this is that you mean the "pun" is Lampedusa including the letters "usa" in its spelling. I think sincerely believing that the Pope chose this location based on this "pun" is ridiculous and unserious, since once again, Lampedusa is infamous and has been a byword for mass migration since over 20 years.
Considering that the last time a Pope visited my hometown Vienna - a historic centre of Catholic Power and the symbolic seat of Christendom's victories against the islamic Turkish invasions - was 19 years ago, I don't consider 13 years long or rare by any means.
I still don't understand why you expect the Pope to appear at a state event commemorating a national independence day. Your entire argument hinges on Pope Leo slighting Trump by not attending - when Popes just simply do not do that in the modern age. John Paul the IInd was a proactive right-wing Pope, but even his role in world politics was organised under very clear theological lines: Communist states oppressed the Church and Christians as a matter of state policy, so obviously he was completely within reason to speak out against them as the Spiritual Leader of said Christians. Pope Leo being critical of Trumps immigration policy is easily defendable by Christian doctrine, even if I could maybe come up with better counter-arguments.
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Why are you so butthurt about a guy who represents, in your own words, an irrelevant dying organistion not turning up to some one of the events that are going on for a full year? This is like a guy spending the entire evening telling his friends that he is totally over that bitch, he never thinks of her anymore, ex-who? and anyway who is this new guy she's hanging out with, does she think that loser is better than him, she'll never find anyone as good as he was, but okay there's loads of chicks who will snap him up once they know he's back on the market, just wait and see.
Let it go, mate. Let it go.
I am otherwise fond of everything Leo has said, fyi. It’s just that the migrant / deportation issues are cataclysmically bad in the longrun for what I value.
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Not really. Do you really think that a Harris-voting Catholic would feel that the pope declining celebrating the anniversary with Trump would be an insult?
If you show up in any serious meeting dressed up as a clown, it is unlikely that people will take you serious. And whining about how your clothes are merely transient and they should respect you as the person you are underneath them is not going to convince anyone.
I am an atheist, but it seems to me that modern Catholicism -- for all its faults -- still contains some nugget of the ideas of Christ, while the religion loudly preached by the Trump administration -- Hegseth first and foremost -- would work equally well if you placed Mars, Odin, or any tribal deity as the figurehead instead.
If Trump meets with the pope either 1) in a clown suit or 2) making jokes about Allah and destroying civilization. you may have a point.
It isn't "if someone called you a clown sometime, someplace in the world, people won't take you seriously".
You might not be aware of it, but Trump frequently posts on social media. I would say he comes off as unhinged. He is not wearing the clown suit, he is the clown suit the US is currently wearing.
Anyone who is pretending that his behavior is normal presidential behavior is just enabling him at this point, and I can totally see why the pope would prefer not to do that.
I agree that the Allah thing was a joke (though not an especially funny one, to my tastes), but the thing about destroying Iranian civilization was a threat. A threat which none of the other presidents in my lifetime would have made. The fact that hours later he chickened out and decided that the peace plan offered by Iran was a good enough basis for a ceasefire does not change this.
Trump behaves that way because behaving politely does no good whatsoever. It doesn't prevent attacks and it doesn't prevent people from doing all they can to snub you if you're a Republican. The Pope would not act the least bit differently if Trump were polite but kept the same policies.
If it's a threat in the way you think it is, it's a threat that was taken back in the next sentence.
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(1) This is why Americanism is a heresy (2) Those who hate the Church only have hatred, they don't have reasons. So you hate the entire theology of a Christian denomination based on geography? Yeah, that's reasonable. You would hate us anyway, because we still try not to go the route of some American home-grown denominations where the national flag gets pride of place in the sanctuary but people would fall down in fits at the very notion of a crucifix.
We are not Caesaro-papist and we do not exist merely to prop up national vanity of any empire or country. We are responsible ultimately and solely to this authority.
Your first link brings up an interesting question for me when it says the Irish controlled the Church in America. Why is this? All the Catholic Colleges in America seem to be Irish dominant. Maybe I am forgetting some colleges. I am likely solving my own question but it’s still an interesting question.
Counters: Italians controlled more cultural and educational capital in the old world.
St John’s is the only Catholic school of note that the AI is telling me is Italian dominated though still founded by the French.
I think English-speaking, unlike other European Catholic immigrants, and had an advantage by getting into power and clinging on to it in the face of organised opposition. See Tammany Hall. This meant an alliance between the clergy and the secular powers, to protect rights of the Irish against that opposition and broader anti-Catholicism in society (see Dagger John Hughes):
There was also a heavy emphasis on integrating into mainstream American society, to show that you were 'as good as the rest of them' and that was easier for the Irish since they didn't stand out like the Italians, Poles, etc. The Germans had a lot of trouble due to the First World War and were forced to integrate, such force didn't have to be applied to the Irish:
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It doesn't, and there's no reasonable basis to say that it does.
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It's all good, playboy.
We can thug it out however you want.
Like the song says:
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My understanding is that marital prospects for the median Indian guy are pretty dire, actually.
Incidentally, do you think Americans moving to lower cost of living places (which has a negative impact on the economy and housing for locals) is evil? How about American "passport bros" going to poor countries where their American dollars (and US passport) allows them to outcompete local men?
As an anecdote, I was talking to my sister the other day about some work her friend is doing. She (the friend) is studying the effects of education on social mobility among women in India, and apparently because of the increasing gender gaps in India in terms of educational attainment, it's becoming increasingly common to see new strange reverse-dowry arrangements. Because girls are so routinely outperforming boys in school, parents will for the purpose of an arranged marriage of their failson to someone else's smart daughter, pay for the foreign education of that girl in the hopes that the boy will be able to emigrate with her and work in a higher-earning (ideally western) countrey.
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A first-generation Indian will trivially find a partner back in India, this is what many first-gen Indians who move here or in Canada do.
It would be a good idea for the locals of that country to protest unless they are inevitably prevented from living in their own cities. It is not evil to to take advantage of something legal, it is evil to harm the poor in your own nation through pernicious immigration policies.
Well it’s certainly not a preferable outcome. And I imagine it harms dating in the subject country. But that’s a lot different than what we’re talking about.
Do you find gentrification harmful as well? Looking back at my recent post about Lawrenceville, in 2000 it was a working-class to lower class area with an average home sale price of around $25,000. At the same time, a house in a good suburb like Bethel Park would cost over $100,000. These days, the average sale price in Lawrenceville is over $400,000 while Bethel Park is around $300,000. Bethel Park hasn't changes much over that time period but Lawrenceville certainly has.
I think there’s an argument to be made that Portland Oregon briefly had one of the highest qualifies of life for young Americans before gentrification (and before the migration of crazy people — a separate matter). There are certainly cases where gentrification is harmful. But while we can secure the interests of the poor by simply saying “close the migrant floodgates”, handling something like gentrification within national borders is more complicated… But ideally you do want your cities to be overflowing with young adults who can afford rent and have extra time on their hands, as this promotes art / culture / etc. Are American remote workers doing this in Mexico City? Perhaps not. Maybe they insufficiently participate in the local economy.
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Housing, maybe in the short term (it's at least intuitive), but the economy? Is there any strong evidence for that?
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I like seeing the most incredibly leftist stereotypes imaginable coming from the nominal right simply by adding "foreign" or "immigrant" with it. The traditional (actual) conservative view of people like Reagan and Thatcher understood that growth is the rising tide that floats the boats for everyone, instead of constant regulation put to "protect" the poor. We oppress our poorest neighbors not by "forcing him to compete" but by sabotaging the market efficiency of our companies and slowing improvements.
It's the exact sort of thinking as an example that had blue states "protecting" taxi cab drivers from rideshare apps, slowing down the spread and hurting all the people who benefited from their use. The tradeoffs of neutered growth is that all the people who would benefit from it don't, and those people are disproportionately the poor who wouldn't have had any access before. A very poor person might have rarely ever taken a taxi long ago, the price being artificially restricted from competition (like taxi medallions) and instead end up stuck on public transit. Now it is so accessible to the poor that they're even ordering private taxis for groceries and restaurant food. It is not restriction, but growth that has allowed even the poorest Americans access.
Take this to almost anything and you see the same story. Whether it be from immigrant work, outsourcing, or automation, it helps the poor when the economy is grown. Factories allow poorer people to own cars. Developments like automated switchboards make phone bills cheaper. Laborers building homes help drive down rent (even if cities insist on restricting new homes and flooding the dam). You don't spend almost 15% of your income on clothing anymore because of growth. You've flown in a plane because of growth. You have a smartphone because of growth. You have cheap lighting in your homes because of growth. I can call a friend of mine all the way over in the UK for pennies because of growth. Do you wish to deny the poor all of this and all future things to come? If not, be pro growth and fight for efficiency in growing the economy, not temporary rent seeking "pro worker" progressiveism.
Frankly, I think the bigger problem is that the immigrants don’t share the same civic value and frequently benefit from government largesse.
So on the one hand they help destroy the fabric that makes growth possible and on the other hand a not insignificant portion take more than they give (eg Somalians)
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In real life, when you restrict the labor supply then quality of life and technology improves: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better . And when you saturate the labor pool, wages for the poorest drop: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/wage-impact-marielitos-reappraisal-0
China has genuine technological growth far exceeding ours without saturating their labor pool with new workers. Europe has little technological growth despite saturating their labor pool with new workers.
American Uber drivers would be making a killing if it weren’t for mass migration.
I’m feeling strange deja vu…have we had this argument before?
Both of those articles support the common economic wisdom that, ceteris paribus, competition lowers prices. This is not sufficient to show a quality of life improvement or to demonstrate technological advances. You lose out on specialization of labor. You have to give up coordination problems. There is less economic slack to search for more efficient investments.
China absolutely flooded its labor pool with cheap immigrants. This has been widely regarded as a bad move.
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If you're trying to make an argument for restricting the labor supply, don't pick a country with over a billion people as an example of how to do things, especially if most of those people were poor peasants a generation ago.
China has more innovation than Europe even controlling for their population. Sizably so.
I think Rov's point is that China has such a huge population to start with that even now that they're "controlling" it, they're best analogized to "what if we had a much bigger labor pool here in the US" than "what if we shrunk our labor pool too".
I’m not sure why it would work like this. If we consider it all per capita, shouldn’t China need an even larger pool of laborers given their manufacturing and mining sectors? But they’re getting away with far fewer laborers per capita while sustaining an absolutely dominant domestic industry. And their wages are continually rising across income levels!
https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/142c9t2/manufacturing_wages_in_china_have_risen/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yearly-wages-in-manufacturing/?srsltid=AfmBOooSJ4r5rbVOvysJpCOwmvC_KqezPi__XLD0kqBb7HReoqDmUww7
What you're seeing is that China was very poor and the rural areas of china were desperately poor. It's like if the US already had most of south america as states so that almost all of the economic immigration didn't count as immigration.
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Yes labor shortages in the short term can be quite beneficial to workers at the time, but what do labor shortages actually mean for the economy and the world? Things that people want or need to be done, don't get done because there's no one around to do them. People have to shift their labor away from awesome but not strictly necessary things like developing cars, phones, rocket ships, televisions, new medicine, whatever else in favor of the essentials. This means those new things don't happen (or at least happen much later), hurting everyone in the long run including the poor.
"Pro worker" leftist policies have major tradeoffs attached to them, it's not a free lunch.
China has 1.5 billion people. Despite the constant economic sabotage done by communism, the large labor supply simply brute forces through many of their issues. And that's pretty much entirely because Deng Xiaoping was like "come on guys, we can't be this stupid we need to be a little pro growth and pro business" and handicapped the communism part.
Europe is awash with "pro worker" policies that cuck their potential to grow. It's basically impossible to fire bad workers, vacation time is way longer than the US, and they tend to have better benefits. And yet as you say, they don't have growth and they're falling behind. Immigration is not the only factor important to growing out an economy and they've taken a knife to their businesses repeatedly in name of supporting the workers. This is what you're arguing for, sacrificing growth and our long term for the short term concentrated benefits.
An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
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Weren't you just arguing that labor shortages were good and made people better off? Now you're saying that it means business owners have to sell homes and cars and are at risk of homelessness.
So your argument here that things people value and want done will be less affordable?
I know a poor rural family with a smartphone for every member, clean drinking water available when they want, healthcare from Medicaid, a PS5 with a virtual reality headset (seriously, think of how insane it is that even a rather poor family has personal virtual reality now) , nice tasty food from all around the world with spices many in the past would have never tasted. Their life has luxuries that even the richest and most powerful people a few hundred years ago could only dream of, and that was only possible because of tech development. Even the Rothschild's can not compare to what a fast food worker today can access.
Like hunger in the US is basically non-existent! People don't starve to death except by choice, whereas just a few centuries ago famines were common across the world. In fact today's poor are so well off that having too many calories is significantly more common than getting too little calories. The idea that the poor are suffering from economic growth is complete and obvious hogwash. How bad is it for the poor that they and their kids survive, instead of up to 30% of them dying before their first birthdays?
We saved ~471,955 infants in just one year, many of them to poor families.
Really the only thing that is worse than the past is housing, and not by quality or size (like even the poor have indoor plumbing! The richest a few hundred years ago were still shitting in outhouses or dumping it out on the streets) mind you but by price. And that is a deliberate choice by cities and states around the country to artificially restrict the new supply of homes because even the limited resources of land is used more efficiently than ever.
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There is no denying that growth raises the ceiling. The left-wing view is that raising the ceiling is morally worthless if you do not raise the floor first.
And since the floor never changes, this means the left-wing view results in everyone in poverty forever.
“The real minimum wage is always zero.”
At age 18 when I read that it became instantly obvious to me how few people understand this. This hasn’t changed much in the interim.
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I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered. The life of the man who has nothing could be improved considerably if we ended homelessness or gave everyone a UBI; it could be considerably worsened if we outlawed all charity or legalized selling oneself into slavery. You may think that raising the floor from its current position would have negative externalities, you may even think we should lower the floor from said current position, but it's trivially false that it "never changes".
It can be altered in that it can be made worse that the natural floor by instituting torture camps or something similar. But as many cities have demonstrated, some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor.
Perhaps some, but not all of them. Even if you believe that no significant percentage of modern America's homeless could be meaningfully helped, it's surely undeniable that other places and eras have had much more prevalent homelessness than just that fringe of irrecoverables. The situation of the average unemployable pauper in 2026 America is vastly superior to that of the average unemployable pauper in Dickensian London, and I'm willing to call that raising the floor.
But I think even that is a stretch. Certainly a lot of modern homeless people are wretches who are not realistically going to live decently on their own again. But how did they get this way? Widespread access to hard drugs seems to be a massive slice of the pie. Succeed in massively curtailing access to such drugs (via whichever policy you think is most likely to succeed) and you've already "raised the floor" in a very significant way - however unemployable and disadvantaged you are, you'll be massively less likely to end up as a shambling brain-rotted junkie. It's not a natural inevitability that if you're homeless you'll become a debilitated addict. That's by no means the only way I can think of to help those extreme cases, but I wanted something stark and obvious and not redistributive in nature, or requiring any level of cooperation from the homeless themselves.
If we can't raise the floor for some people, that still means that we can't raise the floor, because that's what it means to be a floor--it's the lowest person.
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Unfortunately, while absolutely true, this is a tough message for politicians to sell. (There's a reason we haven't had another Reagan or Thatcher.) People take it for granted that they have all this stuff that barely even existed 50 years ago, as if this is just the way the arrow of time works. It's a lot easier to promise gibs to people who see that their neighbour has something they don't.
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Americans generally do have the option of sending their families to live in Mexico and sending them remittances.
This would at least require a visa for longer stays, and it looks like permanent residency isn't impossible, but probably isn't affordable to "Americans generally".
My point is that if Mexicans receiving remittances were living high on the hog due to wage and cost of living differentials, as OP suggests, then meeting solvency requirements for immigration should be a piece of cake. The fact that this might not be possible is evidence that they're not.
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Do you seriously think the quality of life for a lower class American is the same in Mexico as it would be for a lower class Mexican who grew up there, speaks the language, has a large extended family there, and associates it with all the nostalgic qualities which make one’s homeland appealing?
Those are social advantages, but yes, an American in Mexico would have more or less the same buying power and quality of life as a local. That's why many less affluent Americans' retirement plan is to move to a poor country.
Buying power mostly yes, quality of life obviously not.
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There are many Americans (including those of non-Mexican descent) who retire in Mexican resort towns, sure. That’s a very different visa class and lifestyle to working a regular job in Mexico.
The same is true even with less economic inequality in Europe. Spain is full of English and German retirees, but barring a few senior corporate executives at Inditex or Santander the only non-Spanish speaking English and Germans who work there are a small number of low pay service workers whose jobs are catering to their own nationality’s tourists and retirees.
We're not talking about people working in Mexico. We're talking about people not working in Mexico and being sent remittances from people working in the US.
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No, but people move around all the time to improve their economic status, including to places where they don't speak the language, have extended families,nor have nostalgia for from growing up there. If these kinds of migrants were getting as good a deal as the OP thinks they are, more people would go in the opposite direction.
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If this story is true, did Colby think that the cardinal is not aware of the military abilities of Russia and China?
We do not even need to go there, obviously America does not even have the power to do what it wants with Iran.
Or perhaps more accurately, while it might have the military power, it lacks the power to stop the negative consequences and the will to suffer through them.
I mean, I could easily murder my neighbor. Most humans are utterly unprepared to defend themselves from assassination attempts in their daily life. But even if I thought that this was a great outcome, it would not be the end of the story, but there would be adverse consequences for me. I might hate my hypothetical neighbor enough that I was willing to dedicate a week or months to planning their death, but I would lack the will to go to prison for a few decades as a consequence.
Likewise with the US and Iran. The US has the military power to occupy Iran, obviously. If 300M Americans woke up tomorrow with the firm belief that occupying Iran was their topmost priority, before their lives, family, career, investments, human rights, community, other geostrategic issues and so forth, there is no doubt that the US military would succeed.
But that is not the reality we live in, where whatever happens in Iran ranks well below the gas price for most Americans. In this reality, the US military does not have effective power to do what they want with Iran, as the last weeks have shown.
An invasion of China is something where I am doubtful if the US could pull it off even if they were utterly convinced that it must happen no matter the costs.
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Given that those “abilities” are fairly anaemic, any knowledge that the cardinal has would increase Colby’s credibility.
Whatever their conventional military abilities are, the US cannot do whatever it wants in the territories of Russia and China without a high chance of getting nuked. Thus the US does not have the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
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No one, not even Xi Jinping himself, knows what the military capabilities of China are. They're completely untested, but it'd be a serious miscalculation to assume that that means they're a buffed up Iran.
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This is incredibly based. A USG-sanctioned breakaway hierarchy might be our only shot at getting real Catholicism back. Once we've conceded that "Eternal Rome" means something different from, "the guy currently running The Vatican," then there is absolutely no reason that "Eternal Rome" can't be located in Dillwyn Virginia.
In historical reality, the threat of government-backed antipopes was the last line of defense against Rome's temporal power. The Avignon Papacy was a direct reaction to the papal bull Unam Sanctam, which is still on the books, and which declares the papacy as strictly superior to temporal rulers. Technically, the pope could order JD Vance to end the war, under penalty of excommunication and eternal damnation.
Spoken like a true
hereticschismatic.When was the last time that an antipope acquired any real momentum? Nowadays, independent Catholics are just filed alongside the Protestants.
Ironically, he's overlooking the PNCC(an actually American breakaway hierarchy that's been around for 150ish years) to talk about French fundamentalists.
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Aside from basic decency and taste, perhaps.
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Schisms have happened before and might happen again. However, I doubt that most of the Catholics, American or otherwise share your frustration with the Vatican.
The closest thing to what you propose might be the Anglican Church. But the British Royals made much more reliable partners than the USG. For one thing, they are not customarily replaced every four years or so by one of the opposite side of the culture wars. For another, they did not have a constitutional obligation not to interfere with religion.
While you are right that Rome is probably not essential to Catholicism -- if it were hit by a meteor, I doubt that Catholics would just declare their religion over and accept damnation -- it does make an excellent Schelling point. It is also part of their brand: there are a zillion Churches which were inspired by Jesus, but only one can credibly claim to be the church Peter founded in Rome (though five more claime to be the one he founded in Antioch).
Catholics are generally the ones who do not schism every Tuesday. This joke would just not work for them. Generally, there are Catholics who hate Vatican II but still remain in the RCC, and there are a few fringe groups who hated it enough to quit the Church and make their own,
with blackjack and hookers. But the sedevacantists and conclavists are a tiny minority. There are 1.3 billon Catholics and generously a few hundred thousand sedevacantists if WP is to be believed. Sometimes a few of them have a conclave and elect this or that guy as a pope, and I don't think that simply having the blessing of Trump would convince even the other renegades to accept that claim.What's WP? Because that's a very high estimate for sedevacantists.
Wikipedia.
And yes, I was going for their high estimate (hundreds of thousands) to make my point that there are many orders of magnitude more Catholics than that without getting accused of cherry-picking the numbers to fit my argument.
For all know, they might also be less than 10k in total.
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1907 novel, Lord of the World, where Rome is wiped out by the secular World Government (at the bidding of the Antichrist, though he's not known as such):
And you are right that it is not the end:
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It all depends what is meant by "real" Catholicism. Right now, the comments on here seem to be agitating for the flag in the sanctuary type church.
If you want "the main concerns of the Real Catholic Church ™" to be "national politics of the USA", sure, go ahead. But that ain't the Universal Church.
Sure but it also seems the established Church telos isn’t Christ but some vaguely fashionable leftist social project.
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Saint Liebowitz, pray for us.
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You do not seem to understand either how Catholicism works or how the United States government does. The Pope does not have the ability to just order random Catholics to do whatever he wants for the very obvious reason that 1. religions schism all the time so people would just schism over that and 2. Vance if he really wanted to bomb Iran would just metaphorically say fuck off like he does about plenty of other topics already, and papal infallibility is extremely limited. But even if he did, it would be meaningless as the VP position does not hold power in that way.
You talk of wanting "real Catholicism" back and yet don't even understand what you are criticizing to begin with. As the other comment pointed out, you also don't even know where SSPX headquarters even are, the thing you're apparently supporting. Your understanding of Catholicism seems to be that of a tourist attracted to the vibes rather than genuine knowledge.
This is a pretty weak response. The Pope can't threaten to excommunicate Vance because Vance has the option to leave on his own? The whole point of the threat is that Catholics believe they will be damned to eternal hellfire if they leave the church, willingly or otherwise. You can't 'just schism' if you're a believing Catholic. Now, the threat perhaps doesn't hold weight with some Catholics because they don't actually believe in their religion (Biden being one example) but Vance doesn't seem to fit that description.
The threat of the Pope excommunicating a leader is a real and legitimate one. The stronger argument against it is simply that it hasn't been used in modern history.
But he wouldn't do that, and also we can tell from the lives of the 1.5 billion Catholics in the world that very few seem to actually view their religion as "follow the pope's every orders or burn in hell" consider how often they do ignore the Pope.
Yet that is what the comment is advocating for, to join a schism. If you're going off the basis that schisms are ok and good and would be supported by Vance, then there's little reason to worry he would obey the Pope if Leo tried to boss him around. Vance himself of course also already ignores many Catholic teachings so it is not as if it would be surprising for him to ignore this one.
Realistically here, Vance is more likely to push for an end to war due to his pro Russia views and connections than Pope Leo's influence.
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As if the SSPX has a history of playing ball with secular governments wanting political cover for whatever mindless anti-Catholic thing(the SSPX still believes in just war theory because it is Catholic doctrine) the secular government wants to do. Or as if the current(or any forseeable future) US government actually wants to give the kinds of concessions the SSPX would demand in return for being state-sanctioned(and end to the Iran war being one of them). Indeed, their willingness to suffer legal consequences for doing politically incorrect shit is probably part of why the Vatican is relatively conciliatory towards their loose-canon antics; it's simply useful to have a ready supply of priests willing to receive converts in Islamic theocracies and hold funerals for Nazi war criminals so the official hierarchy can keep its hands clean.
Their headquarters is also not located in Virginia(it is, literally, located in Rome- and their motherhouse is in Switzerland). They are a Francophone(and France is still a plurality of membership) fundamentalist organization which expects to outlast everyone who disagrees with them and so sees no need to compromise for temporal advantage.
No he can't. JD Vance does not have the ability to end the war. The pope can yell all he wants, sure, but there's no possibility of a vice president personally ending the war. That's not how the government works.
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… which incidentally is exactly why people were worried about JFK becoming the first Catholic president back in the day: would he refuse orders from Rome if his immortal soul were on the line?
This argument was already dumb propaganda back when it first emerged - historically, no one is more on bad terms with a Pope and tassels with him more predictably than a Catholic Monarch. The Pope is not Jesus Christ and papal infallibility is an extremely narrow domain with few actual applications. The entire institution of Gallicanism in France should be enough to prove that a Catholic head of State has enormous leeway in dealing with Papal authority.
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I always found this ridiculous. If you trip over a European history book and land face first on a random page your eyes will fall on a paragraph about a Catholic monarch with the title "Defender of the Faith" whose imperial regalia is festooned with crosses who rules a Catholic confessional state flagrantly ignoring direct papal orders and doing whatever he finds politically, socially, or sexually expedient. The pope is not nearly the boogeyman-puppetmaster he's made out to be. But I expect most educated people know that and are making these accusations in bad faith.
Every Catholic monarch of a Catholic state is Catholic by definition. If you’re the next Crown Prince of Liechtenstein, a devoutly (and officially) Catholic country ruled by a Catholic monarch, you can’t really abandon Catholicism, which both your people believe in and which forms the spiritual justification for your rule. If you’re an atheist you can break the rules but you have to keep your beliefs to yourself.
A religious Catholic by choice in a non-Catholic land is already signalling much more devotion to Rome and to the Pope than someone who doesn’t really have a choice. They are more likely to actually believe. The threat of eternal damnation carries more weight.
The history of Catholic political influence post-1970 suggests there is exactly one very weakly enforced red line for Catholic monarchs, and that's abortion. The princes of Liechtenstein otherwise do whatever they want(as do the princes of Monaco, the government of Andorra, etc). While there's a few Catholic organizations that formally require their members to do more than that in order to remain members in good standing(the Knights of Columbus can technically expel a member for missing mass, even if in practice nobody's taking attendance), Catholic monarchs don't have to be members of them- this isn't mormonism which regularly checks the practices of members. The six minima for religious practice are firmly on the honor system and you can't get excommunicated for just not doing them.
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Like how the rulers of devoutly catholic England, Sweden, Denmark, etc, couldn't? Rulers have abandoned the faith of their subjects since the time of the second oldest religion.
You’re making my point. The leaders of those countries are still nominally members of the state church (or indeed head of it).
Now imagine, say, the president of Germany announces he’s converting to the Anglican Church. That’s interesting. That’s unusual. That suggests a much more genuine belief than King Charles formally being an Anglican.
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That's interesting. I'm not an expert in the topic, but my reading it seems to me that there is a rich history of political leaders ignoring the Catholic hierarchy's orders. Maybe political leaders, historically, even ignored its orders more often than they followed them, though I really don't know.
Catholics are not allowed to ignore the pope. A Catholic potus has an obligation to obey the pope or they are not Catholic. I’ve always said Jews have the same issue with Israel and their tribe.
The pre-eminent Catholic school in Americas motto is literal God-Country-Notre Dame.
That being said Catholic and Jews have already conquered this country and the Wasp are dead so the old evangelicals have already made their choice to back the Catholics.
Billions of Catholics ignore the pope's directives every day. You may feel this is some sort of contradiction of the religion, but you are grossly, vastly outvoted.
Insert Ex Cathedra explanation here
You are correct it needs to be taken only when he’s speaking “infallible”. When he’s speaking like on Iran then it’s just under advisement. My point stands though at “certain” times a Catholic POTUS obligation would be to what Rome says over domestic popular opinion. On his Iran speaking it would need to be taken under advisement and their own moral judgement.
My opinion is military target strikes are mostly fine. Targeting the electric grid probably not ok.
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Protestantism always struck me as a dead end theologically. Sola Scriptura ultimately leads to complete doctrinal anarchy. Scripture according to ‘whose’ interpretation? Mine? Yours? Church tradition? It’s a complete misnomer to reject Sacred Tradition because it provides the historical framework of interpretation for reading the Bible.
Do you think that all texts lead to anarchy? The text has an objective meaning aside from the interpretation thereof: the correct stance would be scripture according to the sense genuinely latent in the text.
You may object: but we may disagree on what that sense is. Okay, true. There are disagreements within every religion. Sufficiently bad errors may warrant ecclesiastical or civil (were we to live in a state that still took an interest in such things) censure.
All that said, I'm fine with some degree of looking at tradition and so on.
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I'd be happy to go into more discussion on this, but just as a first point, Protestants don't reject Sacred Tradition, they simply give it a lower status than Scripture itself. This is how the Bible tells us to treat Scripture. 2 Tim 3:16 - Scripture is God-breathed, i.e. it has a unique ontological status. Or Proverbs 30:5-6 - "Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar." Likewise we are given the positive example of the Bereans, who "searched Scripture to see if these things were so" in Acts 17:11 - in other words, they judged the teachings of men by testing them against the Scriptures. This should be an obvious principle.
Those who hold Sacred Tradition to be on the same level of authority as Scripture are the ones with a burden of proof. And it's quite a tough burden to reach when you actually look at the historical context of Church teachings, with such fun items as multiple co-existing Popes writing against each other, or dueling 'ecumenical' councils that came to opposite conclusions (see e.g. the Council of Hieria vs Nicea 2). Catholics also had to invent the concept of 'Development of Doctrine' to cover the fact that their Sacred Tradition has clearly and significantly changed over time.
Depends on the Protestant. I grew up in a non-denominational Protestant church which absolutely would've rejected the idea of tradition having any sort of authority (which is the bit that makes it sacred). Their belief was that only the Bible had any authority over the Church.
That is, in fairness, not the Catholic teaching. Sacred Tradition is held to be authoritative, but with less authority than the divinely-inspired Scripture (so if there were ever to be a conflict between the two, Scripture wins).
I think you'll find this is not the case. Catholics hold Sacred Tradition and Scripture to be equal authorities, as they are both divinely inspired. What you have described is quite literally Sola Scriptura. If Catholics believed this there would be no disagreement over this issue.
The confusion here is what constitutes tradition and authority. If that church's pastor told an adherent, say, 'you can't live with your fiancée before marriage or you will have to leave this church' - that would be authoritative over the adherent, based on that pastor's interpretation of scripture, which is what 'tradition' means. But it would not be as authoritative as Scripture. If someone could demonstrate from Scripture that this tradition/teaching were false, the paster would presumably need to recant it. That's what the Reformation was all about, identifying traditions that contradicted Scripture and trying to fix them.
In other words, the paster would disagree over which traditions are authoritative, and how much authority they hold. He would agree that any traditions of men should be held up to the standard of Scripture, and if Scripture contradicts the tradition then it must be discarded. But things as simple as holding a service with worship music and Bible teaching are not in Scripture - they are traditions that do not contradict Scripture.
If on the other hand you mean that your church rejected 'Sacred Tradition' in the sense of 'the specific traditions of the Roman Catholic Church' then, uh, no duh.
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From what I've seen, the answer is 'yes'. And if the differences are too great, you just split the church. That's how you end up with small villages with three churches. And some of the really devout people don't go to church at all. They know it all themselves anyway.
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Trump went so far as to say that he was planning to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran. Of course the pope spoke out against him. It requires no behind closed doors activities to explain his willingness to be vocal about this war.
A majority of popes would have considered this an unequivocal good. Indeed, several of them have tried to do it themselves.
Just like the current pope's dislike of genocide is due to him being a product of his time, past pope's hypothetical willingness to condone genocide is due to them being products of their time.
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Citation needed.
I think it is possible that a majority of popes would be fine with Iran being Christianized at sword point, but then again, the RCC was badly corrupted by power for most of its history. You might likewise find them to hold other ideas which we consider horrible (like supporting the death penalty for heretics, or serfdom, or the subjugation of women) or laughably wrong (like 'man was not meant to fly').
I am sure you can find some particular genocidal ones who would glee at the thought of nuking their opponents without even trying to convert them first. But in general, Church doctrine would hold that anyone should get the 'chance' to be saved through accepting Christ and his Church, and glassing cities is for God, not man.
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This would be news to most historians. Could you name me one?
Urban II, Eugene II, Gregory VIII, Innocent III, Honorius III, Gregory IX, Innocent IV…
You maybe, maybe have a case with Urban II, given that he does say
But he's referring to the Seljuk Turks, who were, as the name implies, Turkic by extraction even if they assimilated Persian culture over time akin to the Yuan dynasty in China. And you'll notice that the First Crusade was not in fact an attempt to wipe out Persian civilization, nor even sold as one.
I'm going to need an affirmative case made for any of the other popes to take those claims seriously.
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Which of these called a crusade against the Khwarazmian Empire?
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Presumably all the ones in and around the Crusades? I think the above comment was silly but I imagine there were many popes who wanted to (medieval equivalent) glass the middle east.
I severely doubt any Popes in any historical Era would have approved of "extinguishing an entire civilisation", since it would condemn dozens of millions of souls to Hell or purgatory without having had a chance of conversion.
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Are the Knight’s Templar currently bombing Iran? What’s going on today isn’t a religious war.
That would be be funny
I was just responding to the historical pope thing, felt like chiming in
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It's the pope. How many times in recent years has the pope not spoken up against war efforts?
I mean, usually when the administration responds that they're going to look into a situation, that means that the message that's been reported is not what the administration approves of. At least publicly. So this would have to be something where they told Colby to threaten the Vatican, but unlike Canada and Greenland, wanted it kept on the down low? Seems implausible, but I've been wrong before.
It's conceivably possible that Colby overreached, or used heated rhetoric that others in the administration would not have signed off on.
I'm skeptical that the administration would have explicitly decided to try to threaten or bully the Vatican, but it would be pretty believable than Colby was told to be as persuasive and forceful as possible, and that in line with the generally bullying, thuggish culture of the Trump White House, that turned into a threat. Someone like Vance could discover that and sincerely feel appalled.
I am dubious of the story, but "Elbridge Colby" is such a beautifully stereotypical WASP name (and looking him up, he's got the pedigree: New England family roots, went to Harvard and Yale, etc.), I nearly hope he was idiot enough to try it 😂 Nativism Redux!
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Apparently he also grabbed a 14th century weapon?
Seriously, 14th century is awful specific for a weapon's time period, unless it was one of the Swiss Guard's halberds, which, ballsy move there to try to threaten the Pope's envoy with one of his own guardsmen's weapons. Although even then, I think that'd have been 16th century...
Yeah, Swiss guard are early 16th century. Founded in 1506 (so it's their 520th anniversary this year, mark that down on the calendar along with the US semiquincentennial or 250th anniversary), new recruits sworn in every 6th May on the anniversary of the Sack of Rome in 1527, a mere 499 years ago, as memorialised by Sabaton.
If JD can swing an invite for good ol' Elbridge, he could attend the ceremony in May before the July US celebration? 🤣
(As a European, it is kinda cute to watch US guys like Elbridge stomping their feet and throwing their weight about with threats to an entity that survived Diocletian and Napoleon and Hitler. Like, the Swiss Guard last stand is twice as old as your nation's official foundation, my friend, and they're not our oldest part!).
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The Avignon papacy was from the 14th century. That's all it means.
Ah. Weird phrasing, but fair enough, I guess.
If it makes you feel better, I also thought the article was claiming he literally threatened the envoy with a crossbow or something.
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Yes the papacy is typically against war, but Leo seems particularly passionate about this recent one.
What is implausible about threats being made behind closed doors? If anything the Trump admin being openly aggressive against Canada and Greenland is the weird thing. But ok let's say this was done entirely without the top brass, it seems concerning that our under secretaries are apparently going around and threatening our allies and no one above in the chain of command knew about it/cared until it became public.
How would they have known? It's not like he's going up to them after the meeting and saying "Oh, by the way JD, just so you know I told the Pope's ambassador we'd go Avignon on his ass, you cool with that?"
Seeing as how JD killed off the last pope, Elbridge is not gonna impress him with mere threats 😂
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It doesn't seem like it was just Colby considering "and his colleagues". Did none of them think to report that they might have accidently threatened the Vatican with military force? Either Colby did a great job convincing the others that this was planned and to not report anything about it, the colleagues agreed with him (making it multiple admin officials who went with the threat) or it was ignored/supported by the upper brass.
But even if it was just him and he hid it, not a great sign when high up officials are covering up their mistakes instead of reporting them.
Or the avignon threats never happened.
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There are two reasons for this- pope Francis was seen as overly conciliatory towards the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine(not totally without reason), and for internal Vatican political reasons this was a major mark against him, so Leo feels the need to make up for lost ground. And also Israel is bombing Christians in Lebanon; yes there's probably no way to invade Lebanon without doing this but the Vatican's perspective is perhaps more on the side of 'well they don't actually technically need to fight this war, now do they?' than about dispassionately measuring collateral damage.
Francis was a Franciscan, Leo is an Augustinian. Different orders, different charisms.
Pope Francis was a Jesuit…
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Technically Francis was a Jesuit, although he saw St Francis of Assisi as a role model and frequently talked like an pietistic Franciscan. Based on the stereotypes the various Orders had back in the day, I would expect a Franciscan to resort to the kind of soft-headed pacifism that generally makes you a useful idiot for the aggressor, an Augustinian to intelligently but not necessarily productively apply Just War theory, and a Jesuit to make a political calculation based on what they thought the interests of the Church were.
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This is the most maga pope ever. Maybe not on explicit agreement, but culturally completely. The popes brother is literally the ranting Facebook maga type and if I get bored maybe I will edit and go find posts.
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