“Pentagon Threatened the Pope” is one of those headlines that would have been pretty unimaginable before the Trump presidency. But exactly that happened on Wednesday.
Per The New Republic, which cited The Free Press, relations between the U.S. and the Vatican have been deteriorating since January, despite the presence of Pope Leo, the first American in the history of the papacy. More recently, the Pope has been publicly critical of the Iran war, as well as Trump’s immigration policies.
The Trump administration summoned a Vatican diplomat to the Pentagon, and during the tense meeting a U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy. On July 4, the American pope will be in Lampedusa — he didn’t pick that date by accident. @TheFP https://t.co/uKjpJn3jet
— Mattia Ferraresi (@mattiaferraresi) April 8, 2026
“Behind closed doors, tensions have been building for months—culminating in January, when senior U.S. defense officials summoned a top Vatican diplomat to the Pentagon,” The Free Press reported. “What happened inside that room set the tone for everything that followed: Vatican officials briefed on the meeting, who spoke with The Free Press on the condition of anonymity, described it as a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants—and that the Church had better take its side.”
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The official, per TNR, even brought up some Catholic history, the Avignon papacy. This was, per TNR, “a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.” It was also, TNR reported, the first time Vatican officials have ever been invited to the Pentagon.
All of this is going on against the backdrop of Vice President JD Vance’s upcoming memoir, in which he discusses his conversion to the Catholic Church, not long before he was put on the ticket by the president in 2024.
Meanwhile, a recent address by Pope Leo, in which the pontiff stated that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” and that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading,” drew condemnation in the highest levels of the Pentagon.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
