Pentagon threatened to “crush” the Pope —Trump is spoiling relations with the Vatican

The Avignon Papacy was the most humiliating chapter in Church history. The Trump administration just invoked it as a warning to Pope Leo XIV.

This is not a rumor. This is not hyperbole. This is not politics as usual.

In January of this year, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, senior Trump administration officials summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador to the United States — and delivered what multiple Vatican officials have described as a coercive, threatening lecture. One U.S. official, as tempers reportedly rose in the room, reached for a weapon from the fourteenth century.

He invoked the Avignon Papacy.

If you don’t know what that means, you need to. Because the people in that Pentagon room knew exactly what it meant — and so did the stunned Cardinal sitting across from them.

What is the Avignon Papacy — Why should it terrify?

The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) was the period when the papacy was forcibly relocated from Rome to Avignon, France — under the complete control of the French Crown. It began when King Philip IV sent armed soldiers to seize Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303. The Pope was struck, held captive, and humiliated. He died weeks later from the shock of it.

Philip then engineered the election of a French pope, Clement V, who never set foot in Rome. For 68 years, the successor of Saint Peter sat not in the Eternal City, but in a palace in southern France — a political prisoner in a gilded cage, doing the bidding of whichever French monarch held the keys.

The Catholic Church calls this era the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy.” It was the moment in history when brute military force was used to bend the Bishop of Rome — the Vicar of Christ on Earth — to the will of a secular power. It remains one of the deepest wounds in the memory of the universal Church.

When an American official invokes this history across a conference table at the Pentagon, he is not making an academic observation. He is issuing a threat. He is saying: We know how to break a pope. It’s been done before.

“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

What actually happened in that Pentagon Room

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby — himself a Catholic — summoned the Vatican’s top diplomat in America to an extraordinary closed-door meeting. There is no public record of any Vatican official ever being called to the Pentagon before in the history of the American republic. None.

Colby’s team picked apart Pope Leo XIV’s January State of the World address line by line. They were furious. What enraged them most was a single sentence from Leo’s speech: that diplomacy based on dialogue “is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

The Pentagon read that as a direct challenge to Trump’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — the administration’s assertion of unchallenged American military dominion over the Western Hemisphere. The cardinal sat through the entire lecture in silence.

Many Vatican officials who were briefed on the meeting interpreted the Pentagon’s reference to the Avignon Papacy as a direct threat to use military force against the Holy See. The shock was so severe that Pope Leo XIV cancelled his planned visit to the United States for this year.

The Pope did not blink

Pope Leo XIV — born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, the first American pope in history — did not retreat. He pressed harder.

When American bombs fell on Iran on March 1st, Leo condemned the strikes outright. By Holy Week, he was openly denouncing what he called “the imperialist occupation of the world.” On Palm Sunday, he declared that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” And on Easter Sunday, before a quarter of a million people in St. Peter’s Square, he pleaded with world leaders to lay down their weapons and abandon “the desire to dominate others.”

Within hours of that renewed ceasefire plea, Donald Trump publicly walked back his most lethal Iran threat — the only time in his second presidency that an outside figure has forced him into any form of retreat. That outside figure was the bishop of Rome.

The Pentagon thought it could intimidate the first American pope. It was wrong.

“The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration”

JD Vance — a Catholic convert — personally invited Pope Leo to the United States for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The Pope declined. Instead, on July 4th, Pope Leo XIV will be on the island of Lampedusa — the tiny island between Tunisia and Sicily where African migrants wash ashore by the thousands — the very people the Trump administration has spent years demonizing, deporting, and caging.

Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident.

The Trump administration did not merely insult the Church. It threatened her. It reached back seven centuries to the darkest chapter in papal history and waved it in front of the Pope’s own ambassador — in the building where America’s wars are planned and its bombs are authorized.

The Avignon reference was not a history lesson. It was a warning to do to Pope Leo XIV what Philip IV of France did to Boniface VIII: break him, bend him, or destroy him. An American Babylonian Captivity. In 2026.

“The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration.”

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs