There Will Be No Second Avignon: Americans Stand With Pope Leo XIV

A senior Pentagon official invoked the Avignon Papacy against Pope Leo’s ambassador — the French Crown’s campaign that ended with a pope murdered. We will protect the pope and defeat these mobsters.

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Before you read on: Pope Leo XIV has asked Americans to contact their members of Congress and demand an end to the war in Iran. Answer the pope’s call in one click at standwithpopeleo.com, an app we built to make it as easy as possible.

Dear friends,

Reading the reporting out of the Pentagon today, I kept thinking about James Comey.

In A Higher Loyalty, the former FBI director describes his first Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump as the kind of scene you recognize from The Godfather: a boss of bosses pulling a made man into the room, laying out the terms, demanding loyalty that cannot be refused.

That is what the Pentagon did to the Catholic Church in January. The anti-Catholic operatives inside the MAGA movement have been running the same play against the papacy for years now.

As I wrote about today, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon.

Colby’s message was pure mob. America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, he told Pierre. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

Then, during the same meeting, a senior U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy — a reference that should make every American’s blood run cold.

In 1303, King Philip IV of France dispatched his troops to Anagni to seize Pope Boniface VIII. The old pontiff was beaten, humiliated, and left for dead. He died weeks later from the injuries and the humiliation, and the French Crown then forced the papacy into a 70-year captivity in Avignon.

Let me make the subtext explicit: the historical episode Pentagon officials chose to hurl at the Vicar of Christ is the one that ended with a pope murdered by the state.

This afternoon, in Budapest, Vice President JD Vance was asked about the threat. He offered a familiar dodge: “I think it’s always a bad idea to offer an opinion on stories that are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so I’m not going to do that.”

In the same presser, Vance had been unable even to recall the name of Pope Leo’s ambassador to the United States — the same cardinal his own Pentagon had threatened on his administration’s behalf.

A Pentagon spokesman, asked for comment by Newsweek, shrugged. The meeting, they claimed, had been “respectful and reasonable.”

Let me say this plainly: invoking the Avignon Papacy against the Vicar of Christ is a threat against the conscience of the world. The White House does not get to bury it by feeding a dismissive line to a wire reporter.

Here is what the MAGA movement either does not understand or cannot bear to accept: the American people stand with Pope Leo XIV.

Last month, NBC News published a favorability survey of fourteen public figures, institutions, and political groups.

Pope Leo XIV finished first by a wide margin, with a net favorability of plus thirty-four points. Stephen Colbert came in second. Every other figure in American public life — presidents, parties, major institutions — trailed them both.

As I wrote at the time, Pope Leo and Colbert are the only two people Americans actually like. Our American pope — born in Chicago, formed at Villanova, shaped by decades of service among the poor of Peru — is the most popular public figure on earth. And the bullies running our Pentagon just threatened to break him.

The specific speech that triggered the Pentagon’s tantrum was Pope Leo XIV’s January State of the World address, in which he warned that “war is back in vogue” and that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

That is what the Pentagon wants silenced — a sentence powerful enough to make warlords drag a cardinal into a Pentagon conference room and raise the ghost of a murdered pope.

They tried this once before.

In the Epstein-Bannon Investigation, I have spent months documenting how a cabal connected to Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Bannon, and the far-right media machine plotted to take down Pope Francis. It is the same cabal, running an identical playbook, right down to the contempt for Gospel witness, the moment that witness interrupts the march of empire.

Francis outlasted that cabal, and — provided the American people refuse to sit this one out — Leo will do the same.

And make no mistake — we will refuse.

American Catholics will protect Pope Leo XIV.

Standing alongside us will be Christians of every other tradition who love this man’s voice for the poor and the hunted, along with Jews and Muslims and secular Americans of goodwill who recognize a moral leader when they see one.

Together, we will defend his good name, his ministry, his life, and his right as Bishop of Rome to speak the truth of the Gospel without being menaced by warlords in suits and insignia.

To the anti-Catholic and authoritarian forces in MAGA and around the world — in the Pentagon, in the White House, and in the Bannon-Epstein networks that have been gunning for Leo and his beloved predecessor Francis for a decade — I am telling you now, on behalf of this community and millions more like it: we will defeat you.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Americans — Catholics and people of every faith and none — who refuse to let the Pentagon or the White House bully the conscience of the world.

In an era when the warlords of our government treat the Bishop of Rome like a problem to be managed and dismiss the Gospel as an obstacle to empire, we are building something more stubborn than their cruelty: a movement rooted in human dignity, love for the poor, and the conviction that no empire outlasts the truth of Christ.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that refuses to bow before power. If you believe protecting Pope Leo XIV from the bullies threatening him is part of protecting what is best about both the Church and this country, I am asking you to join us.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.