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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14106 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 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.

It's the pope. How many times in recent years has the pope not spoken up against war efforts?

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?

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?

behind closed doors at the Pentagon [...] one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy

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...

The Avignon papacy was from the 14th century. That's all it means.

Ah. Weird phrasing, but fair enough, I guess.

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