Pope Doubles Down on Message That Made Pentagon Threaten Him

The message is nothing unusual out of the Vatican, except for its timing. Earlier this week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had threatened an ambassador from the Holy See in January, days after the pope made similar antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.That month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby reportedly summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere of the occasion was anything but friendly: Pentagon officials openly threatened the religious ambassador, asserting that the Catholic Church needed to get behind the Trump administration’s global whims due to America’s military prowess.One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century when the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death, and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo canceled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported independent journalist Christopher Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”The Vatican also rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.This is the pope’s second clear snub to Trump just this week. Leo met with Obama adviser David Axelrod Thursday morning, a major step toward getting the pope and the forty-fourth president in a room together. Trump has yet to meet the pope.