We've now reached the point where Trump has his henchmen threaten the Pope⤵️
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
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.
There is no public record of any Vatican official ever taking a meeting at the Pentagon, and certainly none of a senior U.S. official threatening the Vicar of Christ on Earth with the prospect of an American Babylonian Captivity.
The reporting also confirms — with fresh sources and new color — what I first reported in February: that the Vatican declined the Trump-Vance White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
Ferraresi obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.
What enraged them most was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere.
The cardinal sat through the lecture in silence. The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.
Ferraresi’s reporting also adds vital color to the collapse of the 250th anniversary visit. JD Vance personally extended the invitation in May 2025, just two weeks after Leo’s election in the conclave.
According to a senior Vatican official quoted in the piece, the Holy See initially considered the request, then postponed it indefinitely because of foreign policy disagreements, the rising opposition of American bishops to the Trump-Vance mass deportation regime, and a refusal to become a partisan trophy in the 2026 midterms.
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https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/the-pentagon-threa...