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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14956 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.

A USG-sanctioned breakaway hierarchy might be our only shot at getting real Catholicism back.

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.

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