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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.

> 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.

I pasted the article into ChatGPT[1] for a synopsis and it confidently informed me that Francis is Pope, there's no Donroe Doctrine, no Department of War, and this is all just some kind of strange non-canon fanfic. What a relief!

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69d7e794-aa7c-832d-a0ec-5afa21aff4...

So but T is unbiased. He threatens the Holy See and the holy khamenei.

Just another day.

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.

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.

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?

Fun Fact - Elbridge Colby is a Catholic, maybe time for excommunication?

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."

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!

From what I’ve seen religions derive from basic human virtues and not the other way around.

What have the Roman’s ever done for us?

Republicans have talked like this for a long time, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

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".

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.

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

If you like Catholicism but struggle with the papacy, have you considered Eastern Orthodoxy?

> “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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

That would be following established rules. Such a thing is not the habit of the current administration.

I doubt many are Catholic. J.D. Vance would be an option, tho.

That wouldn't be punishment to Hegseth, he seems pretty clear that he's more supportive of his Protestants than his Catholics.

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.

A true Straussian would never have spoken so clearly

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.

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?

Perhaps somehow related to founding protestants fleeing catholic persecution. It’s the sort of thing that will leave the world blind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.