NEW: A stunning new report claims that the Pentagon summoned Pope Leo XIV’s top American diplomat and threatened him after the U.S.-born pontiff gave his January state-of-the-world address. Leo used the address to denounce a world ruled by “a diplomacy based on force” and “zeal for war.”
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.
CREDIT: LETTERS FROM LEO
