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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?
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.
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...
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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?"
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.
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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.
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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