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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?
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.
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.
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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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