Wow. I knew the current administration was bad but this is something extra.
It also shows the short-sightedness of the "scholars" in the administration. Sure, the Avignon Papacy did occur, that's historical fact.
It's also a historical fact that the Catholic Church is an actually ancient power broker in the world still and they have been around for much, much longer than the United States. The Church is actually quite good at playing the long game (and I say that as someone raised firmly Protestant).
I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment. Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this. I don't feel the pinch will come in the next few years but by 2036 I think the US will wonder what happened.
Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
AI, Politics, Social Media, and indifference have all played their part. It’s not just the administration. The administration just knows how to manipulate those things.
I'd say closer to 90-100. At least since the New Deal, but probably since the times leading up to it. The America First movement in the lead up to WW2 who thought we should side with the Nazis is indistinguishable from the America First movement today, which is comprised of Nazis.
It's a sombering thought that Germans were not all nazis, their government was. Right now USA has a lot of (semi)closet nazis both in economic and political positions of power.
> Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
I was watching a video by Man carrying thing about Iran war, (he makes skit about things which are still good) and he mentioned the Cuba thing.
I am being 100% serious right now, I thought that it was just a joke of the skit. Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
As Non-American, where is my say in all of this, heck, where is the say of every american in all of this. Nearly all the americans I know/talk to is disappointed themselves in all of this. You have got to be joking about yet another conflict.
Not the military, they largely did is they were instructed and mostly backed off much of the suggested full on war crimes.
The US administration and the parachuted in TV host head of Crusades that pushed out all the thinky cautious types .. they look like prize idiots, as they always have.
Of course they look like fools, war has changed very quickly in last few years since their friend Putin fully attacked Ukraine but they’re arrogant enough to not notice. Super-sophisticated ultra-expensive weapons are really nice to have but not that useful against swarms of cheap drones.
Even if war hadn't changed, the US would still fail.
I asked someone after the 9/11 attacks about the possibility of the USA invading Iran and even back then I got a "lol no that's nuts the USA would have its arse handed to it" kind of answer. Better phrased, but basically that.
America has been in an ongoing conflict with Cuba since 1959. Trust me, American insanity know absolutely no bounds, the rest of the world needs to wake up and do something about it
> Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Iran might put a brief damper / brake on the timeline but the current US administration seems intent on seizing the moment and pushing out the Castro government once and for all. It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba, even how Fidel Castro first came to power was under the banner of pushing out that era's US-backed administration. And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
EDIT: you mentioned you're a non-American and the Americans you talk to are all upset/disappointed. If you're European especially, the Americans you're most likely to interact with are well-educated and liberal. There are parts of the country that are firmly pro-Trump, where it's completely out of the norm to have liberal / European-style values.
> It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba [...] And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
This is Mark Rubio*, and only Rubio. This admin is all about letting the people who helped put it together each have their turn at using the US as the vehicle for their personal grievances and profits. No part of this admin cares about the United States of America or its history. It's simply a tool for them, they won't have to deal with the fallout from trading it in for generational wealth that puts them above it.
Bluntly, the alternative to recovery is failure to recover. America being the sole superpower in a mono-polar world until the end of time is hardly pre-ordained
Idk which is more impressive that someone referenced the Avignon Papacy in a heat of the moment argument or that the same person who could reference that thought it was a good idea. (Not Catholic...but like...why?)
It doesn't sound like a heat-of-the-moment reference, but a very calculated one based on this line from the article:
> 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.
It sounds like some hothead idiot driven by the big orange hothead idiot prompted Claude about how to threaten the Vatican and then used its talking points on the ambassador.
So "calculated" maybe, but only because AI could come up with the answer, I have serious doubts that many of these people possess more than basic literacy much less the ability to come up with something like this. Or some CIA analyst who hates their job came up with this to mock their bosses.
Insane, stupid, and likely to ask Claude "how do i mog the Pope"
They can be both stupid and unhinged. The power they wield is worth taking seriously but that doesn't necessitate pretending that these are serious people
The president can threaten to wipe out a civilization without any meaningful repercussions. I'm calling them idiots, which they are. No doubt if they thought it wouldn't cause excessive embarrassment anxiety in the president they'd try to murder the pope.
No, they, especially one of them has EXTREME anxiety about his image, just not in the way that normal people do. He's got the psychology of an anxious child wanting to please a neglectful father. This is why TACO. And why every third word is some ridiculous boast about something nonsensical. This is insecurity driven politics and its WHY HE GOT ELECTED. Fear and insecurity electing what they imagine strength to be.
What would the stupidest, most insecure, adult child think is the pinnacle of strength? ... yup.
And the attention economy is being set up to exploit this demographic because it's the lowest common denominator and it WORKS.
Evolutionarily it's some kind of mechanism to weed out the weaknesses in a population by exaggerating them so it's easier for natural selection to weed them out? Or punishing the rest of us for not doing enough about it before it got so bad... something like that.
A lot of religious people are extremely knowledgeable about historical stuff related to their religions.
They might draw the absolutely worst conclusions from their historical knowledge and have incredibly biased takes but they’ve actually read and discussed these things which is more than you can say for your average person.
It ultimately comes from their personal identify being so intricately tied to the religious organization that they are a part of — on some level they view these historical events as their own personal history as they identify as a ‘evangelical Christian’ or ‘orthodox Jew’ more than they view themselves as a person named Dave who has a family and stuff.
At the end of the day it’s all just more Hatfield and McCoys or tribal warfare over a goat that was killed centuries ago bullshit.
I believe you are correct. The person who delivered this threat is a grandson of William Colby (ex-CIA director, ex-OSS, arch-Catholic).
Elbridge Colby is also Catholic, and some of his religious beliefs factor into his policy preferences. Groton, Harvard BA, Yale Law, hard-to-get service medals.
I’m not saying I like the guy, but his knowledge and background should not be underestimated as some nearby are doing.
Best analogy for religion I've ever heard: "A D&D game that went too far." If you've seen diehard gamers go on for hours about the minutiae of various editions of countless rulebooks, you can imagine what it's like when devout Catholics get together to talk shop.
There are subtleties to this particular pissing match that aren't immediately obvious. The Vatican is starting to rein in the Opus Dei cult-within-a-cult. After John Paul II canonized its founder in 2002 on shaky grounds, later Popes have started to think that maybe they went a little too far. Meanwhile, Opus Dei has focused on gaining more secular influence in government (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevi...).
This was definitely covered in my middle school classes (although those were 40 years ago). Standard US public school. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the Antipope, it always sounded like such a cool job name.
We also read Genesis in English classes (from a literary perspective).
Despite being a middle schooler with more than a passing interest in history I only learned about it when I started playing Crusader Kings in my adulthood.
Yeah, no, that's an insane claim to make. Obviously American education covers some information about religion in history classes, but that level of detail about catholic history is not normal curriculum for elementary, middle, or high school.
In France History is a very big part of the curriculum (almost a quarter of the time until you get to high school) and this episode is barely mentioned despite happening in our very country.
I am not talking about what American education covers nor the average American. But what people with an interest in History, who are reading history books, watching history documentaries, etc. would know. Avignon is not that deep.
It was part of the elementary school curriculum in Finland in the 90s, and it sounds like something that would have been in the traditional curriculum for earlier generations.
The Finnish term translates as "Avignon captivity" rather than the more neutral "Avignon Papacy", which could be a clue. It's easy to imagine that a traditional Protestant society would use a debacle like that to illustrate how silly those Catholics and their power struggles are and why the Reformation was necessary.
Let’s not give that same person more credit than they deserve. I’m sure they came preprepared with some LLM derived threats for when they didn’t get what they wanted from the Vatican.
Nah, I’m sure Elbridge Colby knew about this. His political views may be unpleasant (I mean, I think there is far worse in the Trump administration, but I’m not a supporter of any of them) but he’s definitely in the well read in history section of maga.
Agreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s a difference in views. It sounds quixotic in the face of embarrassing defeats of US military in the last few decades. One can read a lot of books and still be an idiot.
> 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 Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have driver's licenses."
You get three kinds of adult converts. The first kind of convert wants to marry somebody Catholic. They're joining because they love somebody. The second kind of convert was approached by missionaries that built their community a school or a well or something, and they're grateful that somebody clearly cares about them and their community.
The third type of convert, though, joins because they like the structure. They like the gravitas. They like the moral absolutes. They like the patriarchal hierarchy that doesn't let women lead. They sign up and immediately declare that Vatican 2 was a terrible mistake and that all of the popes since then have been illegitimate. JD Vance didn't join because he loved their soup kitchens.
The distinction really only matters to orthodox christians and not even them most of the time. There are a lot of churches that are in the russian tradition while not actually being part of ROCOR, which is indeed tiny though I don't believe its numbers were hurt by the ukraine war.
OCA is the second-largest jurisdiction (distantly, behind the greeks) in the US and most of its parishes could be described as "english language russian orthodox" though they are not ultimately under the patriarch of moscow. Which is close enough to what most nonorthodox mean when they say russian orthodox. The jurisdictional situation is a mess but since the churches are all in communion with each other individuals are free to not care about it and most exercise that freedom.
One of the biggest sources of gossip in my gramma's life was when the Russian church muscled out the old Kadets-descended priests and laypeople in her little Florida ROCOR church, right around the Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007.
Almost instantaneously we were up to our ears in slick guys with shiny suits making improbable real estate deals with money that just apparated from Lord Knows Where. I have a high tolerance for sketch, but Easter services rose past that threshold rapidly; there is only so much leopard print and fishnet I can take when walking around a tiny church at 2 AM.
Offtopic, but during that period, between 2007 and when gramma passed, I noticed another fascinating phenomenon. The old grannies would talk about some young gangster or other "finding their Jewish granma". I chalked it up to the usual venomous levels of Russian antisemitism[1], but a couple news stories later, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a brace of these jokers claiming Right of Return, supposedly from some Jewish relations they lost track of pre-WW2. Now, I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but if I was a Russian gangster looking to move money around, and I look at the Right of Return, and then I think to myself about how, uh, lackluster records keeping was on the Ostfront . . I mean, the idea of maybe falsifying some family records might cross my mind. And maybe, if Israel needs some cash, maybe there's a renegade political party that needs some outsiders, they won't check those records super hard, either.
And that's how mischief in history happens right there.
[1] Particularly among the generation that got chased out with the Whites, the "last boat from Kaffa". To their dying day that generation basically considered Communism to be the "fist of the Jew" smashing the old order, and they carried that grudge their entire lives. I know, oof.
I knew a guy in highschool, he was adopted from Russia by a Russian-Jewish family. He was raised Jewish. Somewhere after highschool he got dragged into dark spots of the internet. Him and a close friend of his converted to Eastern Orthodox and began dropping constant Nazi dog whistles. Explicit anti-semitism. Both were in the military, one was an Army Ranger. Their posts were reported to LE but nothing came of it.
I'm confident the Ranger would kill for fun if given the chance, and any evidence of his war crimes would be covered up.
Knew a totally different Orthodox convert. He converted in college, went to school for political science. Sucked on his cross necklace and told my sister she'd be going to hell. She thankfully broke up with him.
The Orthodox church attracts some real cretins in my experience.
I'm actually eastern orthodox and we do get a lot of this type, but plenty of them convert to catholicism as well. It seems to mostly be a matter of aesthetic preference. Not many convert to actual russian orthodox the way orthodox people mean it, because there simply are not very many ROCOR parishes in the US compared to other options.
Yes. There is a ton of Russian propaganda against the Catholic church claiming the current and last popes to be "anti-popes" and spawns of Satan, and all that, and it is exactly this progression Catholic Church-->Russian Orthodox Church which is under Putin's thumb.
This is exactly my observation. Every now and then there's an Anglo posting on Polish social media asking people questions about some obscure Catholic doctrines and getting offended after they're told that no one there cares. I guess that such people see the number "98% Catholic" on the page for Poland on Wikipedia and conclude that it must be some medieval tradcath white nationalist theocracy.
I am deeply skeptical of all converts to Catholicism and I speculate that the alt-right spaces online painted a picture of conversion as going back to the foundation of the Western civilization, or at least its idealized white nationalist picture.
Yes but Anglo-Catholic doesn’t mean an Anglo who is Catholic. It means an Anglican who is pretending to be Catholic but without acknowledging the pope’s authority.
My disillusionment with religion is mostly due to people not practicing what they preach and/or what their holy book says.
Want to make a religious leader/adult mad as a kid? Ask them why we aren't doing more for the poor like Jesus would do. Source: Me as a kid. I didn't ask in a snotty way, genuinely asked and got rebuked for it.
I often feel as if I follow the Bible closer than a number of, ostensibly, "religious" people.
What's the quote? Something like "I like your Christ, I do not like his followers"? I'm probably butchering it.
I was raised in the church, I internalized the teachings and methodologies, however voting for people who try to do those things is met with scorn. Most "religious" people would rather vote for the person talking about how much they love the Bible (or <insert holy book here>) rather than the people actually doing things inline with the Bible.
There are Catholics who argue that Francis and Leo are not real Catholics and will argue Trump is the chosen one. Some are my family members. I am as always speechless.
Yeah. Trump fits the definition of "the whore of Babylon" to a T (a sex maniac coming from New York) and not only they are unable to even imagine it, they think the exact opposite.
I hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
With my family members, it is useless for me to bring up the fact that Ratzinger/Benedict supervised the revised Catechism. They don’t believe in that categorically.
There's this weird affect of modern "trad" catholic converts. Not everyone who's an adult convert acts this way, but most converts obsessed with "trad" aesthetics seem to be.
They obsess over the law, doctrine, and history of the Catholic church. Invoking events from millennia prior, and despite converting to Catholicism by choice, will denounce the Pope for being woke or what have you, insisting it's not the true Catholic church.
It's extremely bizarre and counterintuitive. Why convert to the branch of Christianity with the elected god-king if you don't want to listen to the elected god-king?
Religious sects that have branched off is sort of an American thing from its very founding. Not sure if the New World was attractive or the Old Wold needed to rid itself of the chaos. The effect was the same.
Eh I'd expect any diplomat to have the historical knowledge to reference important Church events, especially if there's time to prepare before speaking with church representatives. It was a very significant political period in Catholic history!
Anyone in a diplomatic role is briefed and trained by domain experts. I know many of these staff assistants in DC myself. But my point is that even a novice diplomat has historical knowledge to know about Avignon
If you would expect a typical Trump political appointee, as Colby is, to have even basic historical knowledge, then you may not be paying close attention.
There is a lot to source from Christian ideals, many of which are the foundations of Western culture: human dignity, moral equality, conscience, limits on power and care for those less fortunate and weaker. Much of what is happening in the world today feels like a stark reversal of those ideals: selfishness and divisiveness manufactured to promote a narrow segment of society.
Recent news articles have indicated an increase in church attendance. This makes sense: we have lost our moral compass... Specifically in the USA... And people are searching for a new direction.
I think what actually happened is that the Enlightenment comprehensively developed the concept of natural rights and the Christians were like "well, we're not beating that with divine right of kings, better adopt it as the thing God did all along".
I have recently deepened my search in Christianity which started with the Catholic Church, one of few points I struggle with when it comes to Catholicism is the papacy, and the Avignon Papacy debacle and the events that followed (a la Western Schism) has quite a bit to do with that. I was a little confused by what they meant here by “threatening with the Avignon Papacy.” If anyone else is curious, I think the phrase “Babylonian Captivity” will provide better context, as it is what some contemporaries and later historians called it as it appeared that the Church had been “captured” by French political interests, with the popes being seen as too cozy to the French king and less focused on their universal spiritual role.
It's not 100% clear by this article what was said, and I don't have access to the source article either. But I think the parts, even if they don't mention verbatim what happened, makes it a pretty clear threat:
> 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, an unidentified 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.
I'm also not 100% sure what they mean with "invoked the Avignon Papacy", a bit like saying "Invoked the Second World War", it was an event/time period as far as I know, not something you "invoke" exactly. But even mentioning it makes it pretty clear what they're hinting at to be honest.
I had a science teacher in high school 30 years ago who was convinced that the current pope was the anti-christ spoken of in Revelation. US Christianity is very anti-Catholic. That's why Trump can talk about setting up telephone hotlines to report anti-christian sentiment, yet his administration does stuff like this. If/when Trump dies in office, VD Vance won't be able to control MAGA because Vance is Catholic, and MAGA hates him for it.
Isn't "Babylonian captivity" coming from old history? [^1]. Though it's a most delightful read, I don't give much credence to the Bible as historical testimony . However, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a historian from Oxford and a self-declared atheist historiographer of Yahweh, asserts temple spoils were taken there at some point[^2].
As a Catholic, I understood the reference to Avignon Papacy to mean the US will create a separate papacy, distinct from Leo and under the control of Trump.
There's way too much misdirected emphasis on the pope and ecclesiastical hierarchy imo. I wouldn't think too hard about it. You can be catholic and not like the pope just the same as you can be french and not like the king. Or american and not like the president. There is only one divinity on earth today and that's the holy spirit (consubstantial with the father and son), indwelling and guiding humanity on many levels
You cannot be in full communion with the Catholic Church and not submit to the papal office.
Catholics owe the Pope religious submission of intellect and will to his authentic magisterium (teaching authority) on faith and morals, even when not speaking infallibly (Lumen Gentium 25; CCC 892; Code of Canon Law, can. 752). This is a respectful adherence and presumption in favor of what he teaches officially as Pope. This does not extend to his personal opinions, private theological views, prudential judgments (e.g., on politics, economics, or administrative decisions), or liking him as a person or agreeing with everything he says or does in a non-magisterial capacity.
But to catholics, the pope is the terrestrial embodiment of the holy spirit, and as such considered infaillible. Not recognizing the pope as such is incompatible with catholicism.
Papacy is a core part of catholicism, it's not a "pick and choose buffet".
This is a common misconception. The pope is only considered as speaking infallibly by the Catholic Church when speaking ex cathedra on matter of faith and morals. This is very rare and is considered to only have happened twice in history.
Another example for you.. Rather than donate money to the church, I donate my time and talent instead. In that way it is focused 100% on my local parish. Another one, I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it. There are loads of times where the "leadership" of the church leaves something to be desired, yet the progress of gods kindgom marches on. If christianity were to "devolve" in the future to house churches again, that would not stop it. Yet, the fact that it is not a "house church" system today is not a reason not to practice your faith
> I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it.
The Church certainly disagrees with you, teaching that the visible Church is the ordinary means of salvation and full communion with Christ. (see the Precepts, CCC ~846–848)
The Church can do that, assuming you are interpreting it correctly, which is questionable. I dont know how someone online can tell me definitely whether I will be saved or not though. And Matthew 18:20
Threatening the holy father is not something I entirely expected, but when you couple that with statements like "We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying.
They may be vastly overestimating how much military power lets them do whatever they want, but it's plenty for throwing one hideous narcissist vengeance tantrum when the frustration hits.
77 Million of you, who voted him into office, are. A lot more are silent enablers. Don’t think the rest of the world is going to forget about your role in what is happening right now.
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force
The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
The glove was there for a reason: it made it a lot easier for the U.S. to get what they want.
Appeals to “transparency” are just an attempt to distract from worse outcomes.
The fatal flaw of this administration is that they care more about looks than substance. They would rather look tough and lose than look meek and win. It doesn’t even occur to them that it is possible to win while looking meek.
There was a lot of forceful diplomacy by the US. Sure, but there was also a lot of actually good diplomacy happening. Calling all of that a thin glove is underselling the good work of a lot people.
The good side of US diplomacy was one of the most positive forces in the world. Trump fully dismantled that. Not just the US aid work, but also the Pax Americana that really limited the scale of war in the world.
There were horrible missteps at the same time. The US wasn’t all good. Maybe it wasn’t even net good. But there was a significant good side, and its dismantling isn’t a small thing in the world.
I fully agree that only Congress can change the official title of the Department of Defense to Department of War, but the vast majority of Americans are so authority-slavish that they just accept the administration wiping its ass with the Constitution.
"Elbridge Andrew Colby (born December 30, 1979) is an American national security policy professional who is the under secretary of defense for policy since April 9, 2025."
I can't speak my mind openly because it would be fedposting. However, something must be done about this group of outlaws that has assumed power in the US.
What is tiresome is how sincerely these people insist on being able to make everyone act according to their will, while simultaneously displaying weakness, incompetence, and extreme pettiness. Trying to threaten people into respecting them. The lack of class is just so unsightly.
There was a time when this kind of thing would fly. When the one in charge is a giant orange child-man who can't keep a consistent thought across a single sentence, it makes it clear that the whole thing is narcissistic theatre. It doesn't surprise me that his underlings would try to emulate it, and do a bad job in the process.
I don't like being a part of the reactionary 'orange man bad' crew, but this is really shockingly bizarre. It's not the kind of behaviour you expect from a real leader of a real superpower. And it does make you think - perhaps there's something to be said about the USA not being nearly the power that it once was, and maybe this is what it looks like after you crest the apex of power.
WW3 is shaping up to be a theocratic holy war struggle between Christianity, Judaism, Islam ... and all of us secular folks have to suffer for their ignorance and intolerance.
Strangely enough (or maybe to be expected), I'd say that at least on the Christian and Jewish sides, it's led by people who have no sincere belief in the respective religions, but hijack it for their personal power. Reminds me of Germany in WWII where Christian symbolism with "Positive Christianity" was used until it was no longer useful then they went full pagan (gottgläubig and other movements) because the sincere Christians opposed them. This administration is as likely to quote Jesus with "love thy enemy" as Germany was in 1942.
>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.”
They don’t disagree that they conduct diplomacy based on force. They disagree that they should instead promote dialogue and seek consensus among all parties.
Worth noting: the source of this claim is anonymous, and so far the framing of the statement feels a little more radical than maybe what was said in the meeting.
I don't think the current admin knows what the US stands to gain from antagonizing the EU, China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, catholics, atheists, muslims, etc etc etc the list goes on - either.
While it sounds like the discussion was "tense" according to Vatican officials, it was blatantly mischaracterized in TFA, and nobody on either side recalls the Avignon papacy being mentioned or referred to.
"are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".
People can identify as Christians without being "practicing" Christians. It's a very loose concept that varies heavily based on countries, denominations of Christianity and many other factors
There's likely a large group in the middle - IDs as, but not regular practitioners of, who would absolutely not like being excommunicated despite their lack of practice.
For this purpose identify is enough - as anyone who identifies will be horrified even if they otherwise don't care about the church. Many non-Catholics (including non-Christians) are also horrified even though they otherwise don't care about what the pope says at all.
I don't think supporters of the current US president would be horrified. They already support his anti-christian behavior, and seem more interested in being part of that group than they are in the religion itself.
More likely he would just assert that the Pope isn't actually the Pope, and thus any excommunications are void, and his supporters would roll with it. Some of them already believe this. Any words, true or false, which make them feel better to believe. That's religion, right? He is their true religion.
100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.
At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.
I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
If you take this argument that general, then I would say Islam is also one of the most popular religions on earth but well, very lowly reprecented in the US army (below 0.4 percent)
I pledge ignorance. Yeah, sorry should have looked that up before posting. I was always under the impression, North America tended towards other faiths, like Baptism or Mormon.
My guess is the vast majority of those are Hispanic Americans who have been Catholic since birth, and not part of the modern far-right Catholic conversion movement (like Vance).
Trump got 48 percent of Hispanic American vote in 2024, a historic high for the GOP. The anti women and anti immigrant parts (in spite of what appears to be cognitive dissonance) of the GOP platform are very popular in that community from what I have seen.
Wait until you find out how many Latinos aren't catholic. (Yes, it's a lot, probably most, but in some LATAM countries Catholics are now outnumbered by evangelicals).
Latinos (~20% of the military) plus the very military-forward Italian and Polish American communities plus countless others... what a ridiculous statement
This is similar to Joseph Stalin who famously asked, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" to dismiss the Vatican's political and military influence.
Papal visits to the United States have fairly long intervals to begin with. Wikipedia reports 10 trips between 1965 and 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_visits_to_the_United_Sta...). Given the relative rarity of visits, not having planned a trip during any given presidency would even be normal. It doesn't surprise me at all.
That's still a good question, though. Do any of them have anything more substantial than 'anonymous' sources, or even their own anonymous sources not linked to the breaking article's?
I am generally suspicious when anonymous sources quoted these days, but I am rather more suspicious of reports that only come from a single source and get repeated in multiple outlets more or less immediately.
I know there is some amount of synchronicity induced by syndicated news feed outlets like AP, but like many single source/anonymous stories, this reads to me like some 'suggested copy' was sent out to some reporters or outlets ahead of time.
Anonymous sources are important for the integrity of reporting, but it must also be recognized that they are essentially non-authenticatable information.
Very good piece essentially confirming my reporting for @TheFP, in which — I should emphasize — I did not mention any actual military threat to the Vatican and simply reported a tense meeting that included, in passing, an unsavory mention of the Avignon Papacy.
Setting aside only the military intervention bit, which my original link didn't have in the first place, but confirms the Avignon statement and the 'terse' nature of the dialogue. Together with the cancellation I can infer some high tension going on. Your second link basically repeats what all the official statements published, reframing events in politically appropriate speech.
We will see. The cancellation is official though, the visit to Lampedusa on July 4th instead of the US has been confirmed.
Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2
The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
And it isn't an old attitude. I remember documentaries stating that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Catholicism was something that could have cost him his election.
> The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The past that MAGA refers to is imaginary. It's "the good old days", whatever that evokes in any individual, with however selective that individual's memory is or however incomplete that individual's knowledge of history is.
It's like the Brexit referendum - Britons voted on "the status quo is bad, would you like something better than the status quo?" and a slim majority of them voted yes. They didn't agree on exactly how things should be negotiated to be better, just that they could imagine something better than the current state.
"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.
Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.
It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.
“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.
That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.
I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin.
The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently.
If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?
I think the point is that it's a (temporary) coalition of the factions that joined together in order to get a leader elected, a leader which is in fact not religious at all and can not be considered to be a member of any of the factions. That temporary coalition will fall apart once faction members are given power in various domains, and then can enact their own faction's preferences, which involve harming other factions.
I know the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy of MAGA/GOP strategists works somewhat at burying relevant information, but improve your searching skills a bit and this is just one example of what you'll find:
Pentagon To Host Good Friday Service Just For Protestants, Not Catholics
Because they figure those two will flip to their side if forced to make a choice. Note for example that Pete Hegseth made an explicit choice to exclude Catholic worship from the Pentagon chapel this past Good Friday.
It’s worth noting that while Catholics who ally themselves with evangelical protestants try to persuade themselves otherwise, many (most?) evangelical protestants view Catholics as not-actually-Christian pagans who need to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior to avoid the actual flames of hell. It’s a phenomenon not unlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
Yes, the stupidity and shortsightedness of American Catholic integralists like Vermuele is stunning to me. If America does ever become a Christian theocracy, it's going to be a Protestant theocracy. It wouldn't be an altar-and-throne continental monarchy, it would be more like Cromwell's England, where "Papists" were considered enemies of the state. Do these guys not remember that Jack Chick wrote just as many comics villainizing Catholics as he did atheists? That's how evangelicals actually think, once any temporary alliances of convenience have accomplished their goals.
It’s going to be Evangelical. Some variety of megachurch prosperity teaching that faults the poor with some kind of republican ideology.
That’s why anyone that believes in separation of religion and state should tell these folks anytime they push for Christianity in schools, just tell them: ok but it needs to be the true Christianity- Jehovah Witnesses- then they will shut up. They hate Jehovah witnesses, then Mormons, then Catholics, …
It stuns me that Republican Mormons think that Evangelicals like them for anything but their political assistance. As soon as Evangelicals remove the non-Christians, their tent will get smaller, just like you're saying.
I have Mormon family that thinks that they're welcome in the Evangelical tent (they'll even visit the Ark Experience!), but Evangelicals hate Mormons just like they hate gays, liberals, trans people, atheists, etc. It's just that Mormons (for now) vote the way that Evangelicals want.
At this point, it's going to be some sort of post-Christian, culturally Christian social media influencer-driven, conspiracy theory-laden melange that incorporates everything from Tartarian giants to simulation hypothesis to Flat Earth. Q Gospel indeed.
The Puritans, what we generally mean when we say 'founding protestants,' weren't fleeing persecution from Catholics.
In fact, they weren't fleeing persecution at all! They were living in the (relatively) religiously tolerant Netherlands. They left the Netherlands because they weren't succeeding in business there. They came to North America essentially as economic migrants.
I think the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for about 10 years, in a refugee town run by Catholics. But they were a minority on the Mayflower. I don’t think any spoke Dutch.
I guess this is what happens when you get a government composed of ignorant assholes. These times are challenging for those of us who believe in democracy.
I would care more about the plight of the pope if it the church was not still covering for nonces and other malfeasance. I do not view them as arbiters of morality.
In my Catholic circle, there are broad views on different policies. There are both political affiliations and lack of affiliation. For example, the official Catholic position is pro-life and pro-migration/pro-immigrant/mercy toward migrants. There's strong patriotism too. Doesn't fit cleanly into left vs right US politics at this time.
I think a true Orthodox/Catholic political orientation would be socially very conservative (without being hateful) and fiscally very liberal (giving/sharing as much as possible). This sort of party doesn't really exist, but it's almost entirely antithetical to MAGA, which caters to the rich and focuses on power, vengeance, and grievance politics.
Not a Catholic, but a Christian, and I think Christians in general are in a very difficult position in the US, which has not historically been the case. Today any party-line vote is a vote against one Christian core belief or another.
Abortion is a central issue to Catholics and as a result Catholics often vote republican. Not sure how many would consider themselves MAGA, though. Also curious to see how this issue lands with the group. The party that votes pro-life is now bullying the pope demanding he redefine Catholic doctrine to support whatever wars the US decides to wage.
I guess it's obvious from the outside, maybe not so much from the inside, but it's clear they're massaging the MAGA masses to establish the new pope as someone who isn't a real pope, so probably won't matter much, since this approach is already underway.
Probably the same way a lot of Trump supporters when they see him or his administration saying dumb stuff. They think he doesn't really _mean_ that. It's hyperbole or just for giggles, or a negotiation tactic. They filter what he says, for 2 reasons. Some it's so insane they can't really believe a president would actually do that, and anyway he's always saying something and doing another thing.
Is it complaining to ask for a workaround and point out HN guidelines?
> It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.
I am earnestly curious to read a recounting of what was said by the Trump official.
If the people ruling the US nowadays ever read the Bible they would likely reject the word of Jesus as woke bullshit. And if they do read the book, they likely only care about the bits related to the end of the world, and are hellbent (hah) in speeding it up.
Catholics now have to decide if they will continue to support the pro-life party even as the Trump administration demands the pope redefine the catechism of the Catholic Church at Trump's whim.
Pro Life party? The one that just killed thousands of people in an unprovoked attack and then threatened millions more but only held off because high gas prices might lose them some support at home?
I am certainly not defending or supporting that title. Republicans are generally in favor of stricter abortion laws and catholics generally prioritize abortion over any other issue. So many catholics vote republican, but now that comes at the risk of distorting the actual catechism of the church. A challenging moral question for catholics.
Non Christian here, I feel like How I feel can be accurately summarized by this poem
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist ...[0]
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
What this feels is just an escalation. There are some devout catholics who might've voted for Trump and his antics, perhaps feeling for a christian identity.
I definitely feel like there was something similar to that poem where they first came for W,X and Y people and people didn't speak out now its Z people and no one is left to speak.
It's easy within humanity to hate a particular outside group and sometimes that becomes the basis of the inside group. I wish to say that Humanity has multiple problems, we can try to make a better world by co-operation and hope that we learn from this dark chapter in history from the last year or two.
I don't wish to blame anyone because blaming leads to nowhere, Sadly, we haven't learn from the past atrocities thus we are within the present but I just hope that with open-ness we can learn from the past, we can learn from the present and I hope that we can only leave a better future for the next generation to come.
It's hard to give hope right now in reality but I hope to give others what I am lacking right now myself at times. all these things are truly for petty reasons. I expect better from humanity but perhaps this is an weird form of equilibrium but we are humans and we can think for ourselves and change things and build a better future for all of us hopefully.
We can do better, and I hope so that we will. Have a nice day to all.
I know that Hacker News can be for anything "hackers find interesting," but I really hope it doesn't become yet another political doomland. There are so many other places to go to raise your anxiety - I'd rather this remain a space for things that are positively interesting.
TFA provides insight into what’s going on behind the scenes, and has sparked an interesting discussion. It’s not the nonsense you get on /r/politics, where everyone behaves as though they’re auditioning for the writers’ room on one of those late night chat shows.
Just to give you an idea of how much this forum has degenerated, you got downvoted for expressing a respectful opinion. I got -4 for cracking a joke. This forum is full of intolerant digital Karens. Some guy tried evaluating me based on my Karma. Many people on here literally don't realize that this forum is not real life. They forget a world outside this website exists. It's wild.
Wow. I knew the current administration was bad but this is something extra.
It also shows the short-sightedness of the "scholars" in the administration. Sure, the Avignon Papacy did occur, that's historical fact.
It's also a historical fact that the Catholic Church is an actually ancient power broker in the world still and they have been around for much, much longer than the United States. The Church is actually quite good at playing the long game (and I say that as someone raised firmly Protestant).
I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment. Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this. I don't feel the pinch will come in the next few years but by 2036 I think the US will wonder what happened.
Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
AI, Politics, Social Media, and indifference have all played their part. It’s not just the administration. The administration just knows how to manipulate those things.
I would reluctantly have to agree. The current administration is the culmination of something like 30 years of effort.
I'd say closer to 90-100. At least since the New Deal, but probably since the times leading up to it. The America First movement in the lead up to WW2 who thought we should side with the Nazis is indistinguishable from the America First movement today, which is comprised of Nazis.
It's a sombering thought that Germans were not all nazis, their government was. Right now USA has a lot of (semi)closet nazis both in economic and political positions of power.
It's just business as usual for the empire really. Trump just dropped the mask
> Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
I was watching a video by Man carrying thing about Iran war, (he makes skit about things which are still good) and he mentioned the Cuba thing.
I am being 100% serious right now, I thought that it was just a joke of the skit. Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
As Non-American, where is my say in all of this, heck, where is the say of every american in all of this. Nearly all the americans I know/talk to is disappointed themselves in all of this. You have got to be joking about yet another conflict.
> After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
I find it hilarious that one of the conditions of the ceasefire is that the straight opens. It was open prior to the war. Great negotiation. Wow.
That's how ceasefires work. One of the conditions of a ceasefire is that they cease firing. There was no firing prior to the war.
Where does the tax on shipping fit into this?
The US administration and military look like fools.
Not the military, they largely did is they were instructed and mostly backed off much of the suggested full on war crimes.
The US administration and the parachuted in TV host head of Crusades that pushed out all the thinky cautious types .. they look like prize idiots, as they always have.
Of course they look like fools, war has changed very quickly in last few years since their friend Putin fully attacked Ukraine but they’re arrogant enough to not notice. Super-sophisticated ultra-expensive weapons are really nice to have but not that useful against swarms of cheap drones.
Even if war hadn't changed, the US would still fail.
I asked someone after the 9/11 attacks about the possibility of the USA invading Iran and even back then I got a "lol no that's nuts the USA would have its arse handed to it" kind of answer. Better phrased, but basically that.
There was no war prior to Trump deciding to embarrass himself
America has been in an ongoing conflict with Cuba since 1959. Trust me, American insanity know absolutely no bounds, the rest of the world needs to wake up and do something about it
I still prefer American insanity to Russia or China flavours.
I would prefer that we stop putting the criminally insane in charge of WMDs, armies, and entire nations.
Remember this claim in ten years
> Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Iran might put a brief damper / brake on the timeline but the current US administration seems intent on seizing the moment and pushing out the Castro government once and for all. It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba, even how Fidel Castro first came to power was under the banner of pushing out that era's US-backed administration. And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
EDIT: you mentioned you're a non-American and the Americans you talk to are all upset/disappointed. If you're European especially, the Americans you're most likely to interact with are well-educated and liberal. There are parts of the country that are firmly pro-Trump, where it's completely out of the norm to have liberal / European-style values.
> It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba [...] And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
This is Mark Rubio*, and only Rubio. This admin is all about letting the people who helped put it together each have their turn at using the US as the vehicle for their personal grievances and profits. No part of this admin cares about the United States of America or its history. It's simply a tool for them, they won't have to deal with the fallout from trading it in for generational wealth that puts them above it.
*The NYT has many pieces on this
> I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment.
From the get go it looked like an engineered "Suez Crisis", on the inside and out. Nobody with real power is that dumb.
> Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this.
Hard or not, there's no alternative to recovery.
Bluntly, the alternative to recovery is failure to recover. America being the sole superpower in a mono-polar world until the end of time is hardly pre-ordained
So but T is unbiased. He threatens the Holy See and the holy khamenei.
Just another day.
Every day is a new WTF? moment, but that's the point.
They keep pushing and pushing until the unthinkable is the new normal.
POTUS F' bombing on Easter? Sure, why not.
> So but T is unbiased. He threatens the Holy See and the holy khamenei.
Reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hSEwy8ZORc (Herbert Moon blames the Jewish British Catholic Homosexual elite for the undead plague.)
Idk which is more impressive that someone referenced the Avignon Papacy in a heat of the moment argument or that the same person who could reference that thought it was a good idea. (Not Catholic...but like...why?)
It doesn't sound like a heat-of-the-moment reference, but a very calculated one based on this line from the article:
> 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.
It sounds like some hothead idiot driven by the big orange hothead idiot prompted Claude about how to threaten the Vatican and then used its talking points on the ambassador.
So "calculated" maybe, but only because AI could come up with the answer, I have serious doubts that many of these people possess more than basic literacy much less the ability to come up with something like this. Or some CIA analyst who hates their job came up with this to mock their bosses.
Not taking these people seriously is how we got here. Please stop making that mistake. These people are insane.
Insane, stupid, and likely to ask Claude "how do i mog the Pope"
They can be both stupid and unhinged. The power they wield is worth taking seriously but that doesn't necessitate pretending that these are serious people
The president can threaten to wipe out a civilization without any meaningful repercussions. I'm calling them idiots, which they are. No doubt if they thought it wouldn't cause excessive embarrassment anxiety in the president they'd try to murder the pope.
They are idiots with nuclear weapons and a complete lock on all three branches of government.
They are also immune to embarrassment.
>They are also immune to embarrassment.
No, they, especially one of them has EXTREME anxiety about his image, just not in the way that normal people do. He's got the psychology of an anxious child wanting to please a neglectful father. This is why TACO. And why every third word is some ridiculous boast about something nonsensical. This is insecurity driven politics and its WHY HE GOT ELECTED. Fear and insecurity electing what they imagine strength to be.
What would the stupidest, most insecure, adult child think is the pinnacle of strength? ... yup.
And the attention economy is being set up to exploit this demographic because it's the lowest common denominator and it WORKS.
Evolutionarily it's some kind of mechanism to weed out the weaknesses in a population by exaggerating them so it's easier for natural selection to weed them out? Or punishing the rest of us for not doing enough about it before it got so bad... something like that.
You’d be surprised.
A lot of religious people are extremely knowledgeable about historical stuff related to their religions.
They might draw the absolutely worst conclusions from their historical knowledge and have incredibly biased takes but they’ve actually read and discussed these things which is more than you can say for your average person.
It ultimately comes from their personal identify being so intricately tied to the religious organization that they are a part of — on some level they view these historical events as their own personal history as they identify as a ‘evangelical Christian’ or ‘orthodox Jew’ more than they view themselves as a person named Dave who has a family and stuff.
At the end of the day it’s all just more Hatfield and McCoys or tribal warfare over a goat that was killed centuries ago bullshit.
I believe you are correct. The person who delivered this threat is a grandson of William Colby (ex-CIA director, ex-OSS, arch-Catholic).
Elbridge Colby is also Catholic, and some of his religious beliefs factor into his policy preferences. Groton, Harvard BA, Yale Law, hard-to-get service medals.
I’m not saying I like the guy, but his knowledge and background should not be underestimated as some nearby are doing.
Best analogy for religion I've ever heard: "A D&D game that went too far." If you've seen diehard gamers go on for hours about the minutiae of various editions of countless rulebooks, you can imagine what it's like when devout Catholics get together to talk shop.
There are subtleties to this particular pissing match that aren't immediately obvious. The Vatican is starting to rein in the Opus Dei cult-within-a-cult. After John Paul II canonized its founder in 2002 on shaky grounds, later Popes have started to think that maybe they went a little too far. Meanwhile, Opus Dei has focused on gaining more secular influence in government (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevi...).
CollegeHumor (now Dropout) made a sketch covering this "Religious People are Nerds"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucHxl9QwbX8
Any middle schooler with a passing interest in history is aware of the Avignon papacy. Jumping to “AI” is a bit much.
> Jumping to “AI” is a bit much.
Do you remember the tariffs list debacle? One line of thought is that AI generated that fiasco.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/did-donald...
The average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.
And quartz of course!
(Reference for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/2501/)
This is hilarious. You think middle school students know about the Avignon papacy? They don't even know about the Ford presidency.
This was definitely covered in my middle school classes (although those were 40 years ago). Standard US public school. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the Antipope, it always sounded like such a cool job name.
We also read Genesis in English classes (from a literary perspective).
I think you are missing the key qualifier with a passing interest in history. I absolutely knew of the avignon papacy in middle school.
I have more than a passing interest in history and this is the first I heard of the Avignon Papacy, which I of course never heard of in middle school.
Despite being a middle schooler with more than a passing interest in history I only learned about it when I started playing Crusader Kings in my adulthood.
Yeah, no, that's an insane claim to make. Obviously American education covers some information about religion in history classes, but that level of detail about catholic history is not normal curriculum for elementary, middle, or high school.
Can confirm - I had an excellent, Christian School education through Middle School, and even we didn't hear about that.
In France History is a very big part of the curriculum (almost a quarter of the time until you get to high school) and this episode is barely mentioned despite happening in our very country.
I am not talking about what American education covers nor the average American. But what people with an interest in History, who are reading history books, watching history documentaries, etc. would know. Avignon is not that deep.
You literally started: "Any middle schooler...", and now you claim you aren't discussing education?
Read the next 4 words past that. Middle schooler refers to an age group as well.
No - I had a bunch of history and did not encounter that.
Even in France I'm willing to bet the majority of people outside of Avignon have no idea about it.
Any history major with interest in medieval Europe, yes, any middle schooler? No way.
It was part of the elementary school curriculum in Finland in the 90s, and it sounds like something that would have been in the traditional curriculum for earlier generations.
The Finnish term translates as "Avignon captivity" rather than the more neutral "Avignon Papacy", which could be a clue. It's easy to imagine that a traditional Protestant society would use a debacle like that to illustrate how silly those Catholics and their power struggles are and why the Reformation was necessary.
No, they really aren't. But I wouldn't put it past "trad" types.
Where did you go to middle school lol
Avignon probably.
Sounds like a Europa Universalis player tbh ;)
> the same person who could reference that
Let’s not give that same person more credit than they deserve. I’m sure they came preprepared with some LLM derived threats for when they didn’t get what they wanted from the Vatican.
Nah, I’m sure Elbridge Colby knew about this. His political views may be unpleasant (I mean, I think there is far worse in the Trump administration, but I’m not a supporter of any of them) but he’s definitely in the well read in history section of maga.
Agreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s a difference in views. It sounds quixotic in the face of embarrassing defeats of US military in the last few decades. One can read a lot of books and still be an idiot.
He is also Catholic himself.
It is literally this tweet from a few years ago:
> 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 Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have driver's licenses."
You get three kinds of adult converts. The first kind of convert wants to marry somebody Catholic. They're joining because they love somebody. The second kind of convert was approached by missionaries that built their community a school or a well or something, and they're grateful that somebody clearly cares about them and their community.
The third type of convert, though, joins because they like the structure. They like the gravitas. They like the moral absolutes. They like the patriarchal hierarchy that doesn't let women lead. They sign up and immediately declare that Vatican 2 was a terrible mistake and that all of the popes since then have been illegitimate. JD Vance didn't join because he loved their soup kitchens.
The third group ends up joining the Russian Orthodox church.
I imagine that's the case in a lot of Europe but the Russian Orthodox Church doesn't really exist in the US, especially post-Ukraine war.
The distinction really only matters to orthodox christians and not even them most of the time. There are a lot of churches that are in the russian tradition while not actually being part of ROCOR, which is indeed tiny though I don't believe its numbers were hurt by the ukraine war.
OCA is the second-largest jurisdiction (distantly, behind the greeks) in the US and most of its parishes could be described as "english language russian orthodox" though they are not ultimately under the patriarch of moscow. Which is close enough to what most nonorthodox mean when they say russian orthodox. The jurisdictional situation is a mess but since the churches are all in communion with each other individuals are free to not care about it and most exercise that freedom.
One of the biggest sources of gossip in my gramma's life was when the Russian church muscled out the old Kadets-descended priests and laypeople in her little Florida ROCOR church, right around the Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007.
Almost instantaneously we were up to our ears in slick guys with shiny suits making improbable real estate deals with money that just apparated from Lord Knows Where. I have a high tolerance for sketch, but Easter services rose past that threshold rapidly; there is only so much leopard print and fishnet I can take when walking around a tiny church at 2 AM.
Offtopic, but during that period, between 2007 and when gramma passed, I noticed another fascinating phenomenon. The old grannies would talk about some young gangster or other "finding their Jewish granma". I chalked it up to the usual venomous levels of Russian antisemitism[1], but a couple news stories later, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a brace of these jokers claiming Right of Return, supposedly from some Jewish relations they lost track of pre-WW2. Now, I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but if I was a Russian gangster looking to move money around, and I look at the Right of Return, and then I think to myself about how, uh, lackluster records keeping was on the Ostfront . . I mean, the idea of maybe falsifying some family records might cross my mind. And maybe, if Israel needs some cash, maybe there's a renegade political party that needs some outsiders, they won't check those records super hard, either.
And that's how mischief in history happens right there.
[1] Particularly among the generation that got chased out with the Whites, the "last boat from Kaffa". To their dying day that generation basically considered Communism to be the "fist of the Jew" smashing the old order, and they carried that grudge their entire lives. I know, oof.
Only the super-dedicated ones.
I knew a guy in highschool, he was adopted from Russia by a Russian-Jewish family. He was raised Jewish. Somewhere after highschool he got dragged into dark spots of the internet. Him and a close friend of his converted to Eastern Orthodox and began dropping constant Nazi dog whistles. Explicit anti-semitism. Both were in the military, one was an Army Ranger. Their posts were reported to LE but nothing came of it.
I'm confident the Ranger would kill for fun if given the chance, and any evidence of his war crimes would be covered up.
Knew a totally different Orthodox convert. He converted in college, went to school for political science. Sucked on his cross necklace and told my sister she'd be going to hell. She thankfully broke up with him.
The Orthodox church attracts some real cretins in my experience.
Many people who switch religions are not completely tacked down around the edges.
And like all religions it's filled with wonderful people, in this thread we are complaining about converts :)
Oh I'm sure people born into it view it very differently from the converts. Same thing with Catholicism.
By "attracts", I was insinuating people not already in the church, aka converts.
I'm actually eastern orthodox and we do get a lot of this type, but plenty of them convert to catholicism as well. It seems to mostly be a matter of aesthetic preference. Not many convert to actual russian orthodox the way orthodox people mean it, because there simply are not very many ROCOR parishes in the US compared to other options.
Yes. There is a ton of Russian propaganda against the Catholic church claiming the current and last popes to be "anti-popes" and spawns of Satan, and all that, and it is exactly this progression Catholic Church-->Russian Orthodox Church which is under Putin's thumb.
This is exactly my observation. Every now and then there's an Anglo posting on Polish social media asking people questions about some obscure Catholic doctrines and getting offended after they're told that no one there cares. I guess that such people see the number "98% Catholic" on the page for Poland on Wikipedia and conclude that it must be some medieval tradcath white nationalist theocracy.
I am deeply skeptical of all converts to Catholicism and I speculate that the alt-right spaces online painted a picture of conversion as going back to the foundation of the Western civilization, or at least its idealized white nationalist picture.
> Anglo
Please, write US-American. These people are not coming from any other place.
British "anglo-catholics" exist, and are weird in a different way.
Yes but Anglo-Catholic doesn’t mean an Anglo who is Catholic. It means an Anglican who is pretending to be Catholic but without acknowledging the pope’s authority.
Oh no, half of the accounts I see doing this shit end up being British
My disillusionment with religion is mostly due to people not practicing what they preach and/or what their holy book says.
Want to make a religious leader/adult mad as a kid? Ask them why we aren't doing more for the poor like Jesus would do. Source: Me as a kid. I didn't ask in a snotty way, genuinely asked and got rebuked for it.
I often feel as if I follow the Bible closer than a number of, ostensibly, "religious" people.
What's the quote? Something like "I like your Christ, I do not like his followers"? I'm probably butchering it.
I was raised in the church, I internalized the teachings and methodologies, however voting for people who try to do those things is met with scorn. Most "religious" people would rather vote for the person talking about how much they love the Bible (or <insert holy book here>) rather than the people actually doing things inline with the Bible.
"Feed the poor... unless it will raise my taxes"
> What's the quote? Something like "I like your Christ, I do not like his followers"? I'm probably butchering it.
The common phrasing is "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Snopes says it is unproven as a quote from Gandhi. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-gandhi-say-this-about-...
But false quotes get passed around a lot because people agree with them. I also happen to agree with this particular one.
Real catholics only think about the church on Easter, Christmas, baptisms, weddings and funerals.
...and when it suits them.
Only when it suits them.
Fun Fact - Elbridge Colby is a Catholic, maybe time for excommunication?
There are Catholics who argue that Francis and Leo are not real Catholics and will argue Trump is the chosen one. Some are my family members. I am as always speechless.
Yeah. Trump fits the definition of "the whore of Babylon" to a T (a sex maniac coming from New York) and not only they are unable to even imagine it, they think the exact opposite.
I hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
With my family members, it is useless for me to bring up the fact that Ratzinger/Benedict supervised the revised Catechism. They don’t believe in that categorically.
There's this weird affect of modern "trad" catholic converts. Not everyone who's an adult convert acts this way, but most converts obsessed with "trad" aesthetics seem to be.
They obsess over the law, doctrine, and history of the Catholic church. Invoking events from millennia prior, and despite converting to Catholicism by choice, will denounce the Pope for being woke or what have you, insisting it's not the true Catholic church.
It's extremely bizarre and counterintuitive. Why convert to the branch of Christianity with the elected god-king if you don't want to listen to the elected god-king?
Religious sects that have branched off is sort of an American thing from its very founding. Not sure if the New World was attractive or the Old Wold needed to rid itself of the chaos. The effect was the same.
A Brit once told me (jokingly) that they celebrate Thanksgiving, too - it was when they got rid of the Puritans.
Eh I'd expect any diplomat to have the historical knowledge to reference important Church events, especially if there's time to prepare before speaking with church representatives. It was a very significant political period in Catholic history!
You expect this administration to rely on domain experts?
Can you give some examples of this?
Anyone in a diplomatic role is briefed and trained by domain experts. I know many of these staff assistants in DC myself. But my point is that even a novice diplomat has historical knowledge to know about Avignon
If you would expect a typical Trump political appointee, as Colby is, to have even basic historical knowledge, then you may not be paying close attention.
Colby went to Harvard and Yale, and worked at State. Of course he knows history. Would be like claiming a Stanford guy doesn't know programming
Like maybe this guy? https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-tech...
Or this guy? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/18/jared-...
There is a lot to source from Christian ideals, many of which are the foundations of Western culture: human dignity, moral equality, conscience, limits on power and care for those less fortunate and weaker. Much of what is happening in the world today feels like a stark reversal of those ideals: selfishness and divisiveness manufactured to promote a narrow segment of society.
Recent news articles have indicated an increase in church attendance. This makes sense: we have lost our moral compass... Specifically in the USA... And people are searching for a new direction.
From what I’ve seen religions derive from basic human virtues and not the other way around.
and?
I think what actually happened is that the Enlightenment comprehensively developed the concept of natural rights and the Christians were like "well, we're not beating that with divine right of kings, better adopt it as the thing God did all along".
The absolute, immutable, eternal and unchanging nature of God somehow changes with the times. Even in scripture. Odd, that.
What have the Roman’s ever done for us?
> America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
Yeah, well. That aged like raw milk.
Republicans have talked like this for a long time, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
I have recently deepened my search in Christianity which started with the Catholic Church, one of few points I struggle with when it comes to Catholicism is the papacy, and the Avignon Papacy debacle and the events that followed (a la Western Schism) has quite a bit to do with that. I was a little confused by what they meant here by “threatening with the Avignon Papacy.” If anyone else is curious, I think the phrase “Babylonian Captivity” will provide better context, as it is what some contemporaries and later historians called it as it appeared that the Church had been “captured” by French political interests, with the popes being seen as too cozy to the French king and less focused on their universal spiritual role.
It's not 100% clear by this article what was said, and I don't have access to the source article either. But I think the parts, even if they don't mention verbatim what happened, makes it a pretty clear threat:
> 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, an unidentified 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.
I'm also not 100% sure what they mean with "invoked the Avignon Papacy", a bit like saying "Invoked the Second World War", it was an event/time period as far as I know, not something you "invoke" exactly. But even mentioning it makes it pretty clear what they're hinting at to be honest.
I think they meant "evoked", for which Merriam Webster has
So they kidnap him like they did with the president of Venezuela? I don't understand how they think this is going to play out well.
I had a science teacher in high school 30 years ago who was convinced that the current pope was the anti-christ spoken of in Revelation. US Christianity is very anti-Catholic. That's why Trump can talk about setting up telephone hotlines to report anti-christian sentiment, yet his administration does stuff like this. If/when Trump dies in office, VD Vance won't be able to control MAGA because Vance is Catholic, and MAGA hates him for it.
Isn't "Babylonian captivity" coming from old history? [^1]. Though it's a most delightful read, I don't give much credence to the Bible as historical testimony . However, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a historian from Oxford and a self-declared atheist historiographer of Yahweh, asserts temple spoils were taken there at some point[^2].
[^1] https://biblehub.com/q/Why_were_temple_items_taken_to_Babylo...
[^2] Francesca Stavrakopoulou. "God, an anatomy".
As a Catholic, I understood the reference to Avignon Papacy to mean the US will create a separate papacy, distinct from Leo and under the control of Trump.
To complement the next Dalai Lama to be chosen by Xi Jinping.
Putin already owns one, and King Charles III is one. C'mon, everybody is doing it!
There's way too much misdirected emphasis on the pope and ecclesiastical hierarchy imo. I wouldn't think too hard about it. You can be catholic and not like the pope just the same as you can be french and not like the king. Or american and not like the president. There is only one divinity on earth today and that's the holy spirit (consubstantial with the father and son), indwelling and guiding humanity on many levels
> You can be catholic and not like the pope
I come from a Protestant background, so I view Catholicism as just Protestants with a pope. What does it mean to be catholic but without a pope?
You cannot be in full communion with the Catholic Church and not submit to the papal office.
Catholics owe the Pope religious submission of intellect and will to his authentic magisterium (teaching authority) on faith and morals, even when not speaking infallibly (Lumen Gentium 25; CCC 892; Code of Canon Law, can. 752). This is a respectful adherence and presumption in favor of what he teaches officially as Pope. This does not extend to his personal opinions, private theological views, prudential judgments (e.g., on politics, economics, or administrative decisions), or liking him as a person or agreeing with everything he says or does in a non-magisterial capacity.
Vance can take this one.
> You can be catholic and not like the pope
You can be christian and not like the pope.
But to catholics, the pope is the terrestrial embodiment of the holy spirit, and as such considered infaillible. Not recognizing the pope as such is incompatible with catholicism.
Papacy is a core part of catholicism, it's not a "pick and choose buffet".
> and as such considered infaillible
This is a common misconception. The pope is only considered as speaking infallibly by the Catholic Church when speaking ex cathedra on matter of faith and morals. This is very rare and is considered to only have happened twice in history.
I didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out, very interesting!
I appreciate your comment and I understand. My struggles are not about whether or not I like the man who is in the seat.
Another example for you.. Rather than donate money to the church, I donate my time and talent instead. In that way it is focused 100% on my local parish. Another one, I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it. There are loads of times where the "leadership" of the church leaves something to be desired, yet the progress of gods kindgom marches on. If christianity were to "devolve" in the future to house churches again, that would not stop it. Yet, the fact that it is not a "house church" system today is not a reason not to practice your faith
> I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it.
The Church certainly disagrees with you, teaching that the visible Church is the ordinary means of salvation and full communion with Christ. (see the Precepts, CCC ~846–848)
The Church can do that, assuming you are interpreting it correctly, which is questionable. I dont know how someone online can tell me definitely whether I will be saved or not though. And Matthew 18:20
>You can be catholic and not like the pope
Quick, read the Nicene creed aloud right now...
Sure
> you can be french and not like the king
Famously the French got rid of theirs, several times. Maybe not the best example.
Let me try again:
You can be French and not like cheese.
Wait, no, it doesn't work.
> can be french and not like the king.
I don’t think you can? You know how that worked out? It’s the OG ‘No Kings’.
If you like Catholicism but struggle with the papacy, have you considered Eastern Orthodoxy?
Within Eastern Orthodoxy, I struggle with 2+ hour long services. :)
Jokes aside, there are only a couple in my area and they are ripe with tribalism and hard to approach. Appreciate your recommendation, though.
Threatening the holy father is not something I entirely expected, but when you couple that with statements like "We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying.
> “We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying
And it turns out they don’t have the power to do what they like. The US is terrifying, but it’s military looks weaker.
They may be vastly overestimating how much military power lets them do whatever they want, but it's plenty for throwing one hideous narcissist vengeance tantrum when the frustration hits.
Exactly. As we have just seen.
And the ease with which Trump is manipulated by those with skills in that area is horrifying. Eg Netanyahu, Putin.
A non expedit towards American Christians would be so fun before elections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Expedit
This administration is 100% acting in a way that it never plans to leave.
US really is on a crusade to burn every bridge they can find
They are, literally too. These crusaders bombed out a bridge, double tapped the first responders and referenced their god etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaj_B1_bridge_attack
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Well, one of us is anyway. Sadly, he's sitting in the top office.
77 Million of you, who voted him into office, are. A lot more are silent enablers. Don’t think the rest of the world is going to forget about your role in what is happening right now.
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force
The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
The glove was there for a reason: it made it a lot easier for the U.S. to get what they want.
Appeals to “transparency” are just an attempt to distract from worse outcomes.
The fatal flaw of this administration is that they care more about looks than substance. They would rather look tough and lose than look meek and win. It doesn’t even occur to them that it is possible to win while looking meek.
There was a lot of forceful diplomacy by the US. Sure, but there was also a lot of actually good diplomacy happening. Calling all of that a thin glove is underselling the good work of a lot people.
The good side of US diplomacy was one of the most positive forces in the world. Trump fully dismantled that. Not just the US aid work, but also the Pax Americana that really limited the scale of war in the world.
There were horrible missteps at the same time. The US wasn’t all good. Maybe it wasn’t even net good. But there was a significant good side, and its dismantling isn’t a small thing in the world.
To be fair most self-proclaimed MAGA Christians in the USA are heretics. So this is not really surprising.
Why are they referring to Elbridge Colby as the Under Secretary of War for Policy? That’s not his title.
https://www.war.gov/About/Biographies/Biography/article/1230...
I fully agree that only Congress can change the official title of the Department of Defense to Department of War, but the vast majority of Americans are so authority-slavish that they just accept the administration wiping its ass with the Constitution.
"Elbridge Andrew Colby (born December 30, 1979) is an American national security policy professional who is the under secretary of defense for policy since April 9, 2025."
probably just a mix-up re: "war" department
This administration seems so emotionally fragile that they threaten anyone who disagrees… often completely unnecessarily…
I can't speak my mind openly because it would be fedposting. However, something must be done about this group of outlaws that has assumed power in the US.
I'm not sure why this is on Hacker News, and I'm even less sure why the papacy is so important to MAGA right now.
In any case, perhaps we will soon see the return of Catholic persecution in the U.S. due to "conflicting" loyalties between Pope and country...
This is the administration claiming to fight middle-eastern theocracies ))
What is tiresome is how sincerely these people insist on being able to make everyone act according to their will, while simultaneously displaying weakness, incompetence, and extreme pettiness. Trying to threaten people into respecting them. The lack of class is just so unsightly.
There was a time when this kind of thing would fly. When the one in charge is a giant orange child-man who can't keep a consistent thought across a single sentence, it makes it clear that the whole thing is narcissistic theatre. It doesn't surprise me that his underlings would try to emulate it, and do a bad job in the process.
I don't like being a part of the reactionary 'orange man bad' crew, but this is really shockingly bizarre. It's not the kind of behaviour you expect from a real leader of a real superpower. And it does make you think - perhaps there's something to be said about the USA not being nearly the power that it once was, and maybe this is what it looks like after you crest the apex of power.
It’s still much preferable to them being strong and competent in subduing everyone to their will.
That comes later.
WW3 is shaping up to be a theocratic holy war struggle between Christianity, Judaism, Islam ... and all of us secular folks have to suffer for their ignorance and intolerance.
Strangely enough (or maybe to be expected), I'd say that at least on the Christian and Jewish sides, it's led by people who have no sincere belief in the respective religions, but hijack it for their personal power. Reminds me of Germany in WWII where Christian symbolism with "Positive Christianity" was used until it was no longer useful then they went full pagan (gottgläubig and other movements) because the sincere Christians opposed them. This administration is as likely to quote Jesus with "love thy enemy" as Germany was in 1942.
>on the Christian and Jewish sides, it's led by people who have no sincere belief in the respective religions, but hijack it for their personal power.
Have you read the Old Testament? It's full of war.
A fan of niche medieval history might have threatened the pope with an Outrage of Anagni, much cooler reference than Avignon
The Pope would probably just counterspell it. He's a Cleric but given his position he might have multiclassed high enough in Wizard or Paladin by now.
Threatening to send the pope back to chicago is one strategy for sure..
I love this:
>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.”
they then proceed to insinuate use of force.
They don’t disagree that they conduct diplomacy based on force. They disagree that they should instead promote dialogue and seek consensus among all parties.
Worth noting: the source of this claim is anonymous, and so far the framing of the statement feels a little more radical than maybe what was said in the meeting.
Other news publications are trying to get the full story: https://x.com/jdflynn/status/2042076430406672829?s=46&t=u6IW...
I wouldn't put anything past the current admin, but I don't know what the US could stand to gain from directly antagonizing the Vatican.
I don't think the current admin knows what the US stands to gain from antagonizing the EU, China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, catholics, atheists, muslims, etc etc etc the list goes on - either.
Just adding this from a more trustworthy news source: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/nuncios-pentagon-meeting-wa...
While it sounds like the discussion was "tense" according to Vatican officials, it was blatantly mischaracterized in TFA, and nobody on either side recalls the Avignon papacy being mentioned or referred to.
> Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned the Holy See’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.
Can the DOD do this? This seems more like the purview of State.
The DoW regularly engages foreign ambassadors on defense matters eg military cooperation, NATO issues, basing, security policy, etc
Any exec branch dept can communicate directly with foreign diplomats, and ambassadors are accredited to the USA as a whole, not exclusively to State
> Any exec branch dept can communicate directly with foreign diplomats,
Fair enough, but summoning an ambassador is not a regular form of communication, and well out of the purview of DOD.
That would be following established rules. Such a thing is not the habit of the current administration.
Excommunicate the US military.
I doubt many are Catholic. J.D. Vance would be an option, tho.
A significant number of SCOTUS judges are Catholic. Start there, since they enabled this.
well, ~21% of americans are catholic
"are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".
People can identify as Christians without being "practicing" Christians. It's a very loose concept that varies heavily based on countries, denominations of Christianity and many other factors
There's likely a large group in the middle - IDs as, but not regular practitioners of, who would absolutely not like being excommunicated despite their lack of practice.
For this purpose identify is enough - as anyone who identifies will be horrified even if they otherwise don't care about the church. Many non-Catholics (including non-Christians) are also horrified even though they otherwise don't care about what the pope says at all.
I don't think supporters of the current US president would be horrified. They already support his anti-christian behavior, and seem more interested in being part of that group than they are in the religion itself.
More likely he would just assert that the Pope isn't actually the Pope, and thus any excommunications are void, and his supporters would roll with it. Some of them already believe this. Any words, true or false, which make them feel better to believe. That's religion, right? He is their true religion.
Sure, but that is at most 25% of Americans. The rest are conditional in some way if they even support him at all.
There is nothing more catholic than not practicing catholicism.
100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.
At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.
I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
I'm confused as to why you think one of the most popular religions on Earth would not be a decent chunk of the American military.
If you take this argument that general, then I would say Islam is also one of the most popular religions on earth but well, very lowly reprecented in the US army (below 0.4 percent)
https://soldiersangels.org/the-diversity-of-our-service-memb...
History is why catholics are at 20%. Which is a significant force and a dangerous game to alienate them.
I pledge ignorance. Yeah, sorry should have looked that up before posting. I was always under the impression, North America tended towards other faiths, like Baptism or Mormon.
Don't know about the leadership, but a quick googling tells me about 25% of the US military identify as Catholic. That's not nothing...
My guess is the vast majority of those are Hispanic Americans who have been Catholic since birth, and not part of the modern far-right Catholic conversion movement (like Vance).
Trump got 48 percent of Hispanic American vote in 2024, a historic high for the GOP. The anti women and anti immigrant parts (in spite of what appears to be cognitive dissonance) of the GOP platform are very popular in that community from what I have seen.
MAGA antipope is only a matter of time
Trump for pope! I hear he's going to be looking to do something new in a few years.
Wait until you find out how many Latino people serve in the military.
Wait until you find out how many Latinos aren't catholic. (Yes, it's a lot, probably most, but in some LATAM countries Catholics are now outnumbered by evangelicals).
Biden was Catholic, yet not even him sponsoring a genocide was enough to warrant an excommunication.
He was denied communion on one occasion, though it was for his stance on abortion (he didn't support making it a crime).
Latinos (~20% of the military) plus the very military-forward Italian and Polish American communities plus countless others... what a ridiculous statement
The papacy prefers to excommunicate rulers, the idea being that their subjects will turn against them.
That wouldn't be punishment to Hegseth, he seems pretty clear that he's more supportive of his Protestants than his Catholics.
Makes you pine for the good old days when it was just QAnon and Pizza Gate.
Now we're fast tracking the Rapture.
Assuming that doesn't work out for them, who are they going to follow when the Chosen One doesn't get a 3rd term?
"The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" - Joseph Stalin
This is similar to Joseph Stalin who famously asked, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" to dismiss the Vatican's political and military influence.
The U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See is on record saying this is a fabrication?
https://xcancel.com/BrianBurchUSA/status/2042307511504519366
I'm going to put this in the "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" bin.
If it is a fabrication, why did the pope cancel his visit to the US or at least - as some news outlets put it - may not visit... - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Papal visits to the United States have fairly long intervals to begin with. Wikipedia reports 10 trips between 1965 and 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_visits_to_the_United_Sta...). Given the relative rarity of visits, not having planned a trip during any given presidency would even be normal. It doesn't surprise me at all.
That's still a good question, though. Do any of them have anything more substantial than 'anonymous' sources, or even their own anonymous sources not linked to the breaking article's?
I am generally suspicious when anonymous sources quoted these days, but I am rather more suspicious of reports that only come from a single source and get repeated in multiple outlets more or less immediately.
I know there is some amount of synchronicity induced by syndicated news feed outlets like AP, but like many single source/anonymous stories, this reads to me like some 'suggested copy' was sent out to some reporters or outlets ahead of time.
Anonymous sources are important for the integrity of reporting, but it must also be recognized that they are essentially non-authenticatable information.
The author of the secondary source I see most mainstream sources quoting (Mattia Ferraresi) has also come out and said people are stretching and misrepresenting what he wrote: https://xcancel.com/mattiaferraresi/status/20424925662396866...
There is at least one outlet that appears to have asked the both Pentagon and the Church what was up and both parties told them the meeting was overstated as well: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/nuncios-pentagon-meeting-wa...
Your link to the tweet by Ferraresi reads:
Very good piece essentially confirming my reporting for @TheFP, in which — I should emphasize — I did not mention any actual military threat to the Vatican and simply reported a tense meeting that included, in passing, an unsavory mention of the Avignon Papacy.
Setting aside only the military intervention bit, which my original link didn't have in the first place, but confirms the Avignon statement and the 'terse' nature of the dialogue. Together with the cancellation I can infer some high tension going on. Your second link basically repeats what all the official statements published, reframing events in politically appropriate speech.
We will see. The cancellation is official though, the visit to Lampedusa on July 4th instead of the US has been confirmed.
A Straussian comment. Not unexpected sadly.
A true Straussian would never have spoken so clearly
Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2
The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
And it isn't an old attitude. I remember documentaries stating that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Catholicism was something that could have cost him his election.
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2024/05/07/cbc-...
> The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The past that MAGA refers to is imaginary. It's "the good old days", whatever that evokes in any individual, with however selective that individual's memory is or however incomplete that individual's knowledge of history is.
It's like the Brexit referendum - Britons voted on "the status quo is bad, would you like something better than the status quo?" and a slim majority of them voted yes. They didn't agree on exactly how things should be negotiated to be better, just that they could imagine something better than the current state.
"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.
Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.
It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.
“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-histor...
That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"
I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.
I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin.
The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently.
If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?
I think the point is that it's a (temporary) coalition of the factions that joined together in order to get a leader elected, a leader which is in fact not religious at all and can not be considered to be a member of any of the factions. That temporary coalition will fall apart once faction members are given power in various domains, and then can enact their own faction's preferences, which involve harming other factions.
I know the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy of MAGA/GOP strategists works somewhat at burying relevant information, but improve your searching skills a bit and this is just one example of what you'll find:
Pentagon To Host Good Friday Service Just For Protestants, Not Catholics
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/news-live-updates_n_69ca6616e...
That's easy, the circular firing squad points outward until you've shot everyone else.
I think that assuming religion is relevant is wrong. Their moral bankruptcy was what got them their jobs, their religion is secondary and irrelevant.
Because they figure those two will flip to their side if forced to make a choice. Note for example that Pete Hegseth made an explicit choice to exclude Catholic worship from the Pentagon chapel this past Good Friday.
It’s worth noting that while Catholics who ally themselves with evangelical protestants try to persuade themselves otherwise, many (most?) evangelical protestants view Catholics as not-actually-Christian pagans who need to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior to avoid the actual flames of hell. It’s a phenomenon not unlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
Trump doesn't care if somebody is a Catholic. Many of the people around Trump do.
Yes, the stupidity and shortsightedness of American Catholic integralists like Vermuele is stunning to me. If America does ever become a Christian theocracy, it's going to be a Protestant theocracy. It wouldn't be an altar-and-throne continental monarchy, it would be more like Cromwell's England, where "Papists" were considered enemies of the state. Do these guys not remember that Jack Chick wrote just as many comics villainizing Catholics as he did atheists? That's how evangelicals actually think, once any temporary alliances of convenience have accomplished their goals.
It’s going to be Evangelical. Some variety of megachurch prosperity teaching that faults the poor with some kind of republican ideology.
That’s why anyone that believes in separation of religion and state should tell these folks anytime they push for Christianity in schools, just tell them: ok but it needs to be the true Christianity- Jehovah Witnesses- then they will shut up. They hate Jehovah witnesses, then Mormons, then Catholics, …
It stuns me that Republican Mormons think that Evangelicals like them for anything but their political assistance. As soon as Evangelicals remove the non-Christians, their tent will get smaller, just like you're saying.
I have Mormon family that thinks that they're welcome in the Evangelical tent (they'll even visit the Ark Experience!), but Evangelicals hate Mormons just like they hate gays, liberals, trans people, atheists, etc. It's just that Mormons (for now) vote the way that Evangelicals want.
At this point, it's going to be some sort of post-Christian, culturally Christian social media influencer-driven, conspiracy theory-laden melange that incorporates everything from Tartarian giants to simulation hypothesis to Flat Earth. Q Gospel indeed.
Another member of the "Leopards eating people's face (but surely they won't be eating MY face)" party.
If?
Perhaps somehow related to founding protestants fleeing catholic persecution. It’s the sort of thing that will leave the world blind.
The Puritans, what we generally mean when we say 'founding protestants,' weren't fleeing persecution from Catholics.
In fact, they weren't fleeing persecution at all! They were living in the (relatively) religiously tolerant Netherlands. They left the Netherlands because they weren't succeeding in business there. They came to North America essentially as economic migrants.
I think the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for about 10 years, in a refugee town run by Catholics. But they were a minority on the Mayflower. I don’t think any spoke Dutch.
I guess this is what happens when you get a government composed of ignorant assholes. These times are challenging for those of us who believe in democracy.
New antipope when?
Sounds like sensationalized hearsay and I’ve been burned so many times by the media reporting on Catholicism I’m not paying this one any mind.
I would care more about the plight of the pope if it the church was not still covering for nonces and other malfeasance. I do not view them as arbiters of morality.
Go ahead do it. Make Trump the pope while you are at it, we all need a good laugh.
This confirms Trump's suspicion that he isn't getting into heaven.
Lot of Catholics are MAGA aren't they? The few I talked to recently were really anti-woke, like 'woke' is ruining the world. Very Maga.
How does this land with them?
In my Catholic circle, there are broad views on different policies. There are both political affiliations and lack of affiliation. For example, the official Catholic position is pro-life and pro-migration/pro-immigrant/mercy toward migrants. There's strong patriotism too. Doesn't fit cleanly into left vs right US politics at this time.
I think a true Orthodox/Catholic political orientation would be socially very conservative (without being hateful) and fiscally very liberal (giving/sharing as much as possible). This sort of party doesn't really exist, but it's almost entirely antithetical to MAGA, which caters to the rich and focuses on power, vengeance, and grievance politics.
Not a Catholic, but a Christian, and I think Christians in general are in a very difficult position in the US, which has not historically been the case. Today any party-line vote is a vote against one Christian core belief or another.
Abortion is a central issue to Catholics and as a result Catholics often vote republican. Not sure how many would consider themselves MAGA, though. Also curious to see how this issue lands with the group. The party that votes pro-life is now bullying the pope demanding he redefine Catholic doctrine to support whatever wars the US decides to wage.
I guess it's obvious from the outside, maybe not so much from the inside, but it's clear they're massaging the MAGA masses to establish the new pope as someone who isn't a real pope, so probably won't matter much, since this approach is already underway.
Indeed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrg8zkz8d0o
Trump is the real pope obviously.
Probably the same way a lot of Trump supporters when they see him or his administration saying dumb stuff. They think he doesn't really _mean_ that. It's hyperbole or just for giggles, or a negotiation tactic. They filter what he says, for 2 reasons. Some it's so insane they can't really believe a president would actually do that, and anyway he's always saying something and doing another thing.
Anyone have non paywalled reporting? Technically I think this post is HN guideline-breaking as there is no easy bypass for substack paywalls.
It's now all over the press, like here: https://www.newsweek.com/avignon-papacy-explained-what-repor...
The pope has cancelled his visit to the U.S. because of this incident and Vance is investigating it.
Then again, it's also against HN guidelines to complain about paywalls...
Is it complaining to ask for a workaround and point out HN guidelines?
> It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.
I am earnestly curious to read a recounting of what was said by the Trump official.
> America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
I‘m pretty sure the god they often mentioned would see that differently.
Not that anybody really believed they are true believers and just hypocrites.
Non-paywalled coverage earlier: https://newrepublic.com/post/208820/pentagon-threatened-pope... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704570)
Any surprise there?
If the people ruling the US nowadays ever read the Bible they would likely reject the word of Jesus as woke bullshit. And if they do read the book, they likely only care about the bits related to the end of the world, and are hellbent (hah) in speeding it up.
Catholics now have to decide if they will continue to support the pro-life party even as the Trump administration demands the pope redefine the catechism of the Catholic Church at Trump's whim.
Pro Life party? The one that just killed thousands of people in an unprovoked attack and then threatened millions more but only held off because high gas prices might lose them some support at home?
I am certainly not defending or supporting that title. Republicans are generally in favor of stricter abortion laws and catholics generally prioritize abortion over any other issue. So many catholics vote republican, but now that comes at the risk of distorting the actual catechism of the church. A challenging moral question for catholics.
Non Christian here, I feel like How I feel can be accurately summarized by this poem
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist ...[0]
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
What this feels is just an escalation. There are some devout catholics who might've voted for Trump and his antics, perhaps feeling for a christian identity.
I definitely feel like there was something similar to that poem where they first came for W,X and Y people and people didn't speak out now its Z people and no one is left to speak.
It's easy within humanity to hate a particular outside group and sometimes that becomes the basis of the inside group. I wish to say that Humanity has multiple problems, we can try to make a better world by co-operation and hope that we learn from this dark chapter in history from the last year or two.
I don't wish to blame anyone because blaming leads to nowhere, Sadly, we haven't learn from the past atrocities thus we are within the present but I just hope that with open-ness we can learn from the past, we can learn from the present and I hope that we can only leave a better future for the next generation to come.
It's hard to give hope right now in reality but I hope to give others what I am lacking right now myself at times. all these things are truly for petty reasons. I expect better from humanity but perhaps this is an weird form of equilibrium but we are humans and we can think for ourselves and change things and build a better future for all of us hopefully.
We can do better, and I hope so that we will. Have a nice day to all.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came (The poem continues but I am trimming it for context of this message)
I think what's most clear to me about the Papacy and the Pentagon is that neither of them actually believes scripture.
I know that Hacker News can be for anything "hackers find interesting," but I really hope it doesn't become yet another political doomland. There are so many other places to go to raise your anxiety - I'd rather this remain a space for things that are positively interesting.
I find it positively interesting that pope Leo’s outspokenness is apparently considered such a threat by the Pentagon.
TFA provides insight into what’s going on behind the scenes, and has sparked an interesting discussion. It’s not the nonsense you get on /r/politics, where everyone behaves as though they’re auditioning for the writers’ room on one of those late night chat shows.
Just to give you an idea of how much this forum has degenerated, you got downvoted for expressing a respectful opinion. I got -4 for cracking a joke. This forum is full of intolerant digital Karens. Some guy tried evaluating me based on my Karma. Many people on here literally don't realize that this forum is not real life. They forget a world outside this website exists. It's wild.