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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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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.

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

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?

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.

… 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?

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.

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