So in the midst of this perfectly normal week we are having, which started out with the President of the United States threatening a massive bombing campaign against a sovereign foreign nation—the same president who was lauded at the White House last week by some right wing religious lunatics for his Christ-like qualities—and then raising the stakes and threatening to nuke that same country, and then TACO’ing out at the last minute, on Wednesday we learned this startling bit of news:
On Monday, The Free Press reported that in the wake of the Pope’s annual address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in January, in which he criticized states seeking conflict around the globe, the Department of Defense invited Cardinal Christophe Pierre for a meeting. At the time, Pierre was serving as Pope Leo’s personal envoy to the United States.
The Pentagon requesting a meeting with a Vatican official is “unprecedented,” according to the report.
According to Vatican and U.S. officials who were briefed on the meeting and spoke to the publication, the Pentagon criticized the Pope’s statements in January, interpreting them as hostile attacks on Trump’s policies.
I just can’t imagine a president ever doing this but I can definitely imagine this president doing it. But it gets weirder:
As tensions escalated, one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority. The Department of Defense and the Nunciature did not respond to requests for comment.
There was some online discussion that the Avignon reference was about a coming schism setting up competing popes, but that makes no sense since everyone in the administration is stupid and unsubtle. And then more details emerged showing it was clearly a military threat against the Vatican–a tacky mob shakedown scenario: “You got a nice Vatican here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
It appears that the person behind the meeting was Elbridge Colby. Evidently he’s been fucking things up for a while now. It turns out that Colby, like Vance, is an adult convert to Catholicism, when, mixed with Christian Nationalism, is a huge red flag. Vance supported Colby through his nomination process, which itself raised its own set of red flags when Vance personally introduced him at his nomination hearing.
Not only did Vance introduce Colby at the hearing, he later went after Mitch McConnell for voting against Colby:
In fact, Vance had posted a good bit in defense of Colby, repeatedly stressing their friendship. Which makes his response here suspect:
JD VANCE: With no disrespect to the cardinal, I don't know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre isREPORTER: He's the ambassador to the Holy Sea and USVANCE: Okay, I've met him before. Sorry. I just didn't remember the name. I've never seen this reporting. I'd like to talk to him.
First, Vance is the biggest political/social climber in DC. He has remade his entire political ideology and made a fake Appalachian identity for himself to pose as a MAGAt so he could snag the VP slot. Second, he is a weirdo adult convert to Catholicism who had already made himself known to Pope Francis’ Vatican when he tried to rewrite the Catechism to support the Trump administration’s abuse of immigrants by attacking the US Catholic church’s immigrant and refugee resettlement programs and claimed that it was OK to abuse immigrants according to Catholic theology.
This prompted a direct response from Pope Francis, first with his comments in letter to US bishops where he was clearly referring to Vance’s false statements. Then Pope Francis summoned Vance to the Vatican in April 2025 (Vance and his family were in Italy to celebrate Easter) to meet with Cardinal Pietro Paolin to make sure Vance knew where he and the Trump administration had gone wrong:
Those concerns were reflected in the Vatican statement, which said the talks were cordial and that the Vatican expressed satisfaction with the administration’s commitment to protecting freedom of religion and conscience.
“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” the statement said.
“Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”
The reference to “serene collaboration” appeared to refer to Vance’s accusation that the US conference of Catholic bishops was resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to obtain federal funding. Top US cardinals have pushed back strongly against the claim.
OK, so I didn’t know that that had happened. Now add that to how mad the White House was over Pope Leo’s January State of the World address which obliquely but clearly criticized the administration’s domestic and foreign policy, and then fold in Vance’s own presidential aspirations which no doubt colored his desire to become a Catholic, and we have a perpetrator, a motive, and an accessory: Vance, his presidential ambitions, and Colby.
There is no way that Vance didn’t know that Colby had summoned the (previous) papal nuncio because there is no way that a social climber like Vance didn’t try to ingratiate himself with Cardinal Pierre the second he got to DC as a senator, so of course he recognized the name immediately. And knowing that Vance got summoned to the Vatican for a talk, it makes perfect sense that he’d try to reverse the scenario and summon the Vatican. Now he couldn’t summon Cardinal Pierre to the White House but he could use his buddy “Bridge” as the go-between.
Of course the administration is denying any of it happened the way the Vatican said it did. But the Vatican just confirmed that it did. Hopefully this torches Vance’s 2028 presidential run. If it does, we should give a medal to whomever leaked it to the press.
I’ll leave you with this: