America is having its Golden Age, Iran is about to get blasted into the Stone Age… and Elbridge Colby wants to go back to the Late Middle Ages? According to a Free Press report by Mattia Ferraresi, the Under Secretary of War for Policy summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US, to a meeting in which the Avignon Papacy was invoked. (For those of you who didn’t go to Catholic school: in the 1300s the king of France had Pope Boniface VIII captured and beaten after the pope excommunicated him; a few years later the papacy moved to Avignon amid continued threats from the French crown and instability in Rome.) 

During this meeting, Pentagon officials allegedly picked apart Pope Leo XIV’s “state of the world” address. This was the speech he gave in January, in which he warned that “a zeal for war is spreading” shortly after the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. 

One Vatican official told the Free Press that the Pentagon was particularly enraged by a part of the Pope’s speech where he said that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.” This was seen as a challenge to the Donroe Doctrine. 

The Pope is not a fan of war (shocking, I know). While he........

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