The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
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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.
That scene, broken this week by Mattia Ferraresi in an extraordinary piece of journalism for The Free Press, may be the most remarkable moment in the long and knotted history of the American republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church.
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.
“The administration tried every possible way to have the Pope in the U.S. in 2026,” one Vatican official told The Free Press.
Instead, on July 4, 2026, the first American pope will travel to Lampedusa, the Italian island where North African migrants wash ashore by the thousands. Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident.
The Pentagon meeting also clarifies the moral intensity of Leo’s public posture over the last six weeks.
After Colby’s lecture, the pope did not retreat into Vatican diplomacy. He pressed harder.
On March 1, as American bombs fell on Iran, Leo condemned the strikes outright. By Holy Week, his rhetoric had hardened into a denunciation of what he called “the imperialist occupation of the world” and a warning that God rejects the prayers “of those who wage war.”
Then, on Easter Sunday, before a quarter of a million people in St. Peter’s Square, he begged world leaders to lay down their weapons and abandon “the desire to dominate others.”
Within hours of Leo’s renewed demand for a ceasefire on Tuesday, Trump publicly walked back his most lethal Iran threat — the only time in this second presidency that outside figures have forced him into retreat.
The Pentagon thought it could intimidate the first American pope. It misread the man. Prevost is a son of the South Side of Chicago, an Augustinian friar formed in the slums of Trujillo, a canon lawyer who spent two decades in Peru defending campesinos from generals.
He has been preparing for a confrontation like this his entire priestly life, and the men who summoned his nuncio to the Pentagon will learn what generations of Latin American military regimes already learned about him. He does not bow.
What Ferraresi has documented is, indeed, a turning point in the moral history of the United States.
The American war machine is openly menacing the Catholic Church for the first time in living memory, and the Catholic Church, in the person of an American pope, has answered with the only weapon the Gospel allows: the truth, spoken plainly, in the face of empire.
A Movement for Peace in a Season of War
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics — and the countless others of goodwill — who refuse to let the United States launder its war in the language of faith, lecture the bishop of Rome about the limits of his moral authority, or trade the Sermon on the Mount for the “Donroe Doctrine.”
We believe that the Gospel is not a tool of empire, that the dignity of every human life is the only ground on which any republic can stand, and that the Catholic Church must remain the conscience of nations even when the most powerful nation on earth threatens it from inside its own war room.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are starving for something deeper than the cruelty and propaganda of this hour.
They are looking for courage, for truth, and for a faith with the spine to confront authoritarianism in a Roman collar or a red tie.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against an administration that now openly threatens the pope himself — I am asking you to join us.
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Just wow, the right man and right time. We are blessed.
This is beyond evil an action taken by a depraved administration hiding pedophiles, murders and rapist