Relations between the U.S. and the Catholic Church have not been the same since January, when senior U.S. defense officials shared an abrasive message with a Vatican official.
Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.
“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
Because for true Romans the Vatican will always represent the last bit of the temporal power that Popes exercised on the population for centuries and that keeps being exercised de facto true the corruption and continuous ingerence of the Catholic Church in Italian political affairs, local and national.
Not that they are better or worse than all other priests of any confession or religion, but the Catholic Church is the one we have a quite fresh memory of.