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[UPDATE at 4:33 PM EDT: Letters from Leo can now independently confirm The Free Press report that the meeting took place — and that some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.

Other officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.]

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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, one 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.
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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.”

The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere.

https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/the-pentagon-threatened-pope-leo