An anti-Catholic current is becoming evident in the Trump administration with the papal nuncio being called to the Pentagon.
by Vinicius
A meeting recently took place at the Pentagon between the papal nuncio, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and a senior Pentagon official. That the nuncio should have been summoned to the Pentagon at all was bizarre, especially at a time where Rome has explicitly condemned Donald Trump’s threats to “kill” Iranian civilisation. Both Pope Leo and the Church around the world have consistently attacked the war in Iran.
Cardinal Pierre was reportedly told, “America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world… The Catholic Church had better take its side.” The nuncio was reminded of what had happened to the papacy during the Avignon “captivity”. The Pentagon soon asserted that the reports were distorted, but did not deny the specifics of the words used, “Avignon”, in particular, not being denied. The Vatican eventually declared the reports were unfounded but also declined to deny specifics.
The nuncio has made no comment on the matter. The reported threat is unmistakeable, and claimed a precedent: The Pope (and therefore the entire Church) was at the mercy of civil power, which could subdue it and control it, as had once happened for two generations at Avignon.
Radical Protestantism in the White House
The reported encounter, though hard to believe, comes at a time when United States actions and the words of its President have broken with all precedent. The Pentagon event also came four days after Timothy Broglio, Archbishop of the US Military Services, said that it was “morally acceptable” for soldiers to disobey an immoral order. Trump, on the other hand, has talked about the death penalty for such soldiers, and his government was outraged by the Church taking a stance on the war and its conduct. Archbishop Broglio has refused to comment on the Pentagon meeting with the nuncio.
Regardless of the details of the exchange at the Pentagon, the atmosphere in Washington has rapidly been turning anti-Catholic. Vice-President Vance, who claimed not to know who the nuncio was, but said he would try to “find out” what had happened, is obviously not doing much to defend the Church there. It emerges that this year, for the first time, the Pentagon chapel refused to allow a Catholic liturgy for Good Friday, while celebrating a Protestant one instead.
Most telling of all is the influence of Defence Secretary, Peter Hegseth. He is a member of the virulently anti-Catholic sect led by Douglas Wilson, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Wilson has now built a church around the corner form the White House, and his sect controls 500 schools around the country. He has been leading monthly religious services at the Pentagon. Wilson is against public
proclamation of Catholic belief, which he puts in the same category as Islamic manifestations, “unchristian”. He wants to ban processions of Our Lady and the Blessed Sacrament.
Hegseth’s anti-Catholic sect speaks of Christian nationalism, but it’s clear that the template for the ideal US society is that of the aggressive and militantly Protestant United States of the nineteenth century, which grew at the expense of its Catholic neighbours. The messianic tone adopted in Trump’s outbursts recently, reflecting the mindset of many of those gathering around him, is not a harbinger of peace or justice for the world. But, if it is true that history is often doomed to repeat itself as farce, what is in store for the US is not a new golden age of expansion, but speedy decline and irrelevance. Once again, the pressing need for the Christian West is to liberate itself from the Enlightenment in its conservative form. The Trump phenomenon would not exist without it.
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
Leave a Reply