Did the Pentagon Threaten the Vatican?

0:00Hello, everyone. I am JVL here with my old friend Ed Condon. We're going to do some Pope Leo talk, some JD Vance talk, some Vatican talk, some anti-Pope talk. And Ed is from my favorite Catholic news source, the pillar. You can find them on substack at thepillarcatholic.com. Is that right, Ed? That is right. Thepillarcatholic.com. I'm a founding member over there. God, I love the pillar so much. So Ed, we've had some things which are normal and some things which are not normal. The normal stuff is there is a war and the Pope is against it. This is a thing which is true basically in all times and all places with all Popes. Correct. Certainly the last couple of centuries. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, when there's a war, regardless of what we think about the war in America, the Pope is against it. This Pope and American Pope is against the war in Iran. Pope Leo has been escalating his condemnations and he's got pretty specific

1:06after Donald Trump threatened genocide and said American Catholics should call their representatives, like the representatives and say we don't want genocide. That's pretty political for a Pope, I think, right? It's certainly pretty pointed. Yeah. I think if you ask the Pope, he'd probably say, listen, genocide isn't a political issue. It's a, it's a pretty basic human rights issue. I don't mean political in a bad way. I just meant like it's, I mean, that's a level of involvement that goes beyond war is bad. Yes. And then we had word that there was a meeting at the Pentagon in which underlings from the Department of Defense is back in January after the Pope gave a speech, his state of the world speech, in which he talked about human rights dignity and talked about Venezuela. And it was a little more elliptical, but you know, he was talking about Trump. And the Pentagon people brought in a cardinal and sort of read him the

2:12riot act. Can you give me the read out on what this story is all about? So what seems to have happened is that the Pope gave his, as you say, a state of the world speech, which is, you know, every January, the Pope's give a speech to the Vatican diplomatic corps, because you know, the Holy Seas got ambassadors and receives ambassadors from hundreds of countries around the world. And gives his sort of, here's how I see things. And you know, war being bad is a, is a common theme, as you say, all times in all popes. But apparently some people in the Trump administration took some of what the Pope said to be personally directed at the administration, and specifically against what they're calling against the Don Roe doctrine. Oh, you mean sort of the, the resurrection. Hemisphere domination. Yeah. As you say, if that's what the Pope was saying, he was being especially elliptical. I've read the speech at the time. I've read it a couple of times sense. And I think you have to really squint kind of hard to say this is all about America. You know, there is a war still going on in Europe right now, with Hemisphere dominance being a sort of

3:14justifying rationale for the Russians. So I don't know that it's necessarily a correctory to say, well, this was all about America. But anyway, that apparently is how some people took it. Cardinal Kristoff Pierre, who's the apostolic noncio, or was the apostolic noncio to the United States back then, which is just as far as the government's concerned, it's the accredited ambassador of the Holy Seed of the United States. I mean, he has a sort of dual function of being the Pope's sort of pastoral point man for the Church of the United States, but he's an accredited ambassador. It was asked to come into the Pentagon where the Undersecretary for defense war, are we calling it now, I guess? It's defense. It's defense war. War is only a nickname to change it, to actually be department. They would have to pass a law. They haven't done it. And so the Undersecretary of Defense for strategy called him in. They had a meeting and this is Colby. Yes, that was Elbridge Colby, who should be noted Catholic Convert. We'll get to that in a minute. So for you, for you Catholics, who wants some little intra-Catholic stuff, we'll talk about

4:17converts versus cradle Catholics in a minute. Well, anyway, so he, he apparently took a, took a pretty harsh tone with the Vatican's ambassador, Cardinal Pierre, pushed back pretty hard on the Pope's vision for, for world peace. And I, from what I gather, I mean, you know, I read the free presses report on this and I was, I was skeptical that such a thing could have happened because I was trying to remember any occasion when the Vatican's ambassador is asked to go to the Pentagon and, and then be sort of dressed down for something the Pope has said, you would have thought that this might go a different way. There are other diplomatic channels they might choose to, choose to pursue for this, which raises, I think, a whole bunch of questions about, you know, what was the, what was the thought process here? But the meeting did happen from everything I can tell from people I've talked to and it did go this the way that the free press appears to have reported it. They had some, they had some details in there that I haven't been able to confirm for myself about someone apparently raising the Avignon papacy, which was a period of about 60 years where the French crown basically kidnapped the Pope and kept them in France. And the

5:22implication seems to have been, get on sides or we're going to move Leo to Martha's Vineyard or something? I don't know. Um, but, you know, they installed their own Pope, was there an anti-Pope raised? Well, there's, I, I don't know that there was an anti-Pope raised, but certainly there was the spectre of the Avignon papacy. And I, you know, it's, it's so bizarre. You, in any other time in history, you'd be like, this, this can't be what happened. But again, I, I've been calling a lot of people and I haven't found anyone said, no, this didn't happen on the contrary. It, this seems to be what's gone on. That's amazing on so many levels. Uh, one of which being that, again, it's not actually called the Department of War. It is the Department of Defense. But they want to call themselves the Department of War. This is like a bunch thing. And so it is a little weird for the people who are like, no, we're going to talk about our war lethality, least that war. To then get upset when someone else is like, I don't know, all this war talk over

6:23there. I mean, Jesus seems to have wanted us to not do the war like love. Like, what kind, get X-Nay on the war talk. And, uh, and then they get upset at that. It's a little weird, isn't it? It's very strange. And again, to have that be the response to that particular speech that the Pope gave, which, you know, like we said, did not read to me is especially pointed at any one administration anywhere in the world and could certainly be right across a couple of different regions. It's a very weird thing to have focused on given some other stuff that, you know, Pope's occasionally say, including this one that are far more specific. So, uh, Elbridge Colby does this. We then have JD Vance, who is currently in a hungry campaigning for, literally campaigning for the Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán, which is a whole other thing. And he is asked about this meeting and he gives the, I have no idea who that cardinal is. Line, right? Reporting by the free press is that they told him that the American military has

7:24a lot of might and they can do whatever they want and the church should get on its side. Does that message sound correct to you? Is that something you would sign off on? So, one, I, I, with no disrespect to the cardinal, I don't know who Cardinal Christophe here is. Oh, okay, okay. I've met him before. Sorry, I just didn't remember the name. I've never seen this reporting. I'd like to actually talk to Cardinal Christophe here and, frankly, to our people to figure out what actually happened. I think it's always a bad idea to offer an opinion on stories that are unconfirmed and uncoroperated, so I'm not going to do that. He has met Cardinal Pierre a couple of times. I've been in the room when he met Cardinal Pierre for at least one event. So, I guess, I guess Cardinal Pierre didn't leave much of an impression. Maybe I don't know, but, you know, I, maybe he did just have trouble placing the name. You, you could be forgiven for not necessarily recalling the name of the Vatican's ambassador when you're answering a question on the tarmac, I guess. Maybe Jetlag, who could say? It becomes a

8:26little hard when you are Catholic and you're the vice president, you're defending like the genocide stuff. No? I would think so. Well, for Vance, it seems like it's problematic and uncomfortable in all kinds of ways. There's facing, you know, the Pope and the bishops in the United States saying, we really don't like the words coming out of the mouth or the social media feed of the president on this sort of stuff as a Catholic for Vance. But also, I mean, he is as far as I can gather, you know, not on the side of, you know, military interventionism. He's already in a minority in the president's inner circle talking about the sort of stuff and seems to be having to go along with things that aren't his way of view in the world. Stop talking about that on background. Well, I mean, what else can you do? I suppose if you're the vice president, you can't come right out and say, you know, I think this is a terrible idea if you want to drink it. Well, you could. You can only not do that if you desperately want to be president more than anything else.

9:30You cannot say what you think only if you are not willing to give up on your ambition. Well, Robbie vice president, if you're willing to do that. Fair enough, fair enough. Not all American bishops are super upset about the war. Robert Barron, a bishop, seems to have been at the White House with Paula White and a bunch of other pagan-ish kind of people and not objective to it recently. Bishop Barron is an interesting figure in the American Catholic Church. In as much as he is this giant media figure, as well as being a local bishop in Minnesota. And he's obviously a member of President Trump's Religious Freedom Commission. And you see this with the US bishops across all kinds of administrations where there's stuff that they oppose serenuously coming out of the mission. And at the same time, they don't want to say no to being given a chance to get in the door and make a case. And I think Bishop Barron ends up catching a lot more attention and pushback

10:33for trying to tread a middle line than any other bishop almost would because he is so exposed in terms of the media. He's cutting YouTube videos. He's doing interviews with people all the time. And so he attracts a lot more focus and criticism for that. And so I think he's finding it very hard to sort of follow what is a not unusual playbook for American bishops, which is, look, we want to say we don't like what we don't like. We still want to have the chance to talk when we can talk. And I mean, if you look at what Pope Leo has said about everything coming out of the White House and the war and Iran and things like that, he's very targeted in what he condemns. He doesn't like war. He wants peace. He doesn't single out the US administration necessarily and say, these people are terrible. I hate the way the country is going or anything like that. When he does get specific, he gets specific for a reason, like saying, calling for predicting civilizational death is a red line. That's unacceptable. That seemed to be. But again, it's narrow in the criticism in a way that

11:34doesn't shut the door on being able to have conversations further on. You don't see even the Pope when he's being specific, boxing himself out of being able to engage later on. And he was the first one out of the gate to praise the, do we have a ceasefire? We're still calling it a cease fire. I don't know. But when a ceasefire was announced, hate the sin, love the center. There's a lot of that. And I think also Leo was very clear in his being strongly encouraged and supportive when a ceasefire was announced on Tuesday. He's willing to go specific both to criticize and to praise when he thinks he can do either. So you wrote about one of the near-term consequences of this is that the, hopefully, I was not coming to America this year. No, he's there. He's in some hope. Talk to me a little bit. I mean, how serious was the hope that he was going to make a trip to the US? Was it sure that he was going to?

12:34It was never sure that he was going to. But in the first weeks after he was elected still less than a year ago now, you had Vance and Rubio go to the Vatican and they formally extended an invitation. We'd love to have you. Every country wants their hometown pope to come home. And if you've got a big anniversary, like the 250th in the United States, it'd be great to have you all that. I think that since then, you have seen what was a hope, not necessarily a well-founded hope, but a real hope, disappear pretty quickly. And I think it's not so much the war in Iran, although that certainly put a nail in the coffin if needed it. But it was the immigration enforcement actions. It's second half of last year, which again, the US bishops, the pope was not cool. That was very specific in his criticisms of the immigration enforcement. And you know, again, you can read a lot of headlines saying, oh, Leo blasted the administration's immigration policies and all this sort of stuff. But you know, the pope wasn't championing open borders.

13:35The pope wasn't saying you can't enforce immigration law. But what he was saying was, you know, family separation and detention, arbitrary detention, suspension of due process, these are the things that we can't be having. And the US bishops were, if anything, even more strongly opposed to it and issued joint statements. Yeah, they were further out. And in issuing joint statements as a conference with a level of unanimity, you frankly just don't see from them hardly ever. And I think that's what really probably brought it in finally as he's not going to become and at least not for the 250th. Yeah. So as we just sort of look forward, I mean, it is a weird moment having an American pope in the midst of America also having a kind of unprecedented authoritarian attempt ongoing and also like this, you know, president to issues genocide threats, even if only as a means to make the best deals because it's the art of the deals and he's so strong with these things. Does it feel a little weird to you to have like we're navigating all

14:41this here at home and also the guy sitting in the throne sitting on the throne St. Peter is American. It's weird, but I'm really glad of it. It's, you know, I had anticipated this as what we'd be getting when Leo came out on the balcony last year. But I think it's, you could call it providentially, you could call it calculated, think about how you like that we have a pope who can who can hear and speak in an American cadence that no other pope has been able to, you know, Pope Francis got asked about American politics and Donald Trump all the time and said a whole bunch of different things. And you know, jump all the second was no stranger to intervening in geopolitical discussions and, you know, was probably the most out there voice against the invasion of Iraq back in the day. But to have a pope who understands and is able to speak about American politics and political life in a way that is I think more nuanced than any other pope could

15:41reflexively be is helpful. I think Leo's the first bipartisan pope we've seen in a long time because he just has a more instinctive understanding for how Americans listen to stuff when they're thinking about politics. Last thing. This is a, I'm sure you've heard this joke, but this is this is an old joke from back in 2022 and Twitter and this, this goes to the cradle Catholic versus convert Catholic divide. This will be utterly unintelligual to anybody who's not Catholic. From a gravy at a gravy in 2022. Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like, I think we're supposed to give this food to poor people and every adult convert is like, the archon of constant tonoples of pistol and the pentacostene rights of the Eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have drivers licenses. That's not like this isn't actually true, like universally, but it's true enough to be very funny. It's certainly reflective of something that we're seeing in American political

16:44life, which is that Catholicism has always had an outsized presence in American political discourse. Back in the day, you could see these guys like John Banner, things like that. Catholics have always punched above their weight in terms of their national numbers and also their presence in either of the two political parties. You get cultural currents within that. Right now we're seeing a lot of people in a round of Trump administration who have, I think it's fair to say, read their way into the faith to a large extent. And yes. But I mean, I think that's fair. And sometimes that can be very interesting and sometimes it can lead to strange cul-de-sacs and weird branches of thought. But I mean, that's kind of the thing about the Catholic intellectual tradition. Is it so vast? You can you can you can get lost in some side streets fairly easily. And you can and you can have conversations out of context. I think a lot more easily than you can if you're dealing with a smaller, more narrow intellectual tradition. All right, guys, hit like,

17:48hit subscribe and follow the channel. And if you want more of this stuff, go follow Ed. Go over to pillarcatholic.com. Go follow them. They've got the best reporting on all this stuff. You'll find anywhere. Everybody else will be back soon with more probably bad news because it's always bad news. Good luck, America.