First American Pope was lectured to support our war habits

And like most initiatives from this White House, it failed.

Apr 09, 2026

The goons at the White House aren’t content to torture immigrants, documented and undocumented, or to violate the Constitutional protections of US citizens.

They’ve gone to next level mobster stuff.

»» Letters from Leo can now independently confirm The Free Press report that the meeting took place — and that some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.

Other officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.]

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.” ««

Furthermore:

»»“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.««

The messenger, Eldridge Colby, is the grandson of former CIA director under Nixon/Ford, William Colby. He describes himself as a realist and co-founded a think tank that seeks to get European nations to provide their own security and he opposes our funding of the defense of Ukraine. He considers the Middle East relatively unimportant and would like Israel to handle that region. He thinks the US focus should be entirely on China and specifically preventing its takeover of Taiwan. Mostly by using diplomacy, supposedly.

Yet his lecture of the Pope was about our military dominance to do whatever the hell ‘we’ want. That doesn’t sound like a successful round of diplomacy. It sounds like what it is: bullying. And China isn’t mentioned at all.

Coupled with War Secretary Hegseth’s hope that the Middle East conflict will lead to the end times and the return of Christ, it doesn’t sound like Colby and Hegseth are even on the same page. And it underlines yet another reason our country’s founders were adamant about the separation of church and state. It’s not only wise for governing bodies to remain secular to achieve the best government actions but it also keeps churches safe from government intrusions on church missions.

That’s just part of the story. You can read the rest in Christopher Hale’s newsletter.

Meanwhile back at the War on Iraq, we were told Iran suddenly posed an imminent nuclear threat to us, as the initial reason our mentally addled president attacked the country, with the encouragement and assistance of the corrupt governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Intelligence analysts refuted that claim immediately and now, 41 days later, our mentally impaired president is ready to pull out without touching the pile of enriched uranium at all.

He and his team will continue to claim that their killings of much of the government, military and intelligence leadership of Iran accomplished something. And that they’ve destroyed Iran’s capacity to conduct missile and naval attacks. It’s like they can’t believe that in a country of 93 million people there are plenty of others ready to step into the positions held by those former leaders.

So what got accomplished was he caused massive cost increases in this country and in many other countries. He caused the Strait of Hormuz to be shut down. On top of the 40,000 Iranian citizens recently killed for protesting its government, we’ve heaped 2 or 3 thousand more dead Iranians onto their casualty list and accomplished nothing that benefited Americans or Iranians at all. And oil laden ships now have to pay a million bucks or more to get through that Strait, which will sustain a higher cost of oil than we had 6 weeks ago.

It did, however, benefit the president by diverting attention from the massive coverup of the Epstein files. All for the cost of $100 billion or more that our taxpayers will have to pay off. Are we having fun yet?

Listen to the women survivors. 1,000-plus is an enormous amount of hearsay that shouldn’t be sidelined.

Some fresh resistance music selections:

The List, by Jesse Welles