‘Most American Catholics were probably not expecting to spend the first week of Easter trying to figure out whether their government was threatening to overthrow the first American-born pope.

Yet a handful of news reports this week raised that very strange possibility. They landed just as both the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Christian influencers have been ramping up their criticism of the Trump administration over the Iran war.

Key takeaways
A report from the Free Press this week blew up tensions on the right already escalating over the US-Israeli war on Iran.
It alleged that Pentagon officials met with a top Vatican diplomat to the US and raised the memory of a dark time in the Catholic Church’s history: when French rules exercised power over the Church and the pope.
There are now competing accounts of what actually happened in that meeting, and denials by the Trump administration and the Vatican.
These reports sparked furor among Catholics and religious conservatives — adding fuel to an ideological civil war threatening the American right, and offering another example of the rift between the Vatican and the US.
This burgeoning scandal hinges on news reports that in January, the previous ambassador of the Vatican to the United States was called into an unusual meeting with Department of Defense officials at the Pentagon and dressed down. The Pentagon officials, reportedly, wanted to complain about a speech Pope Leo XIV gave in Rome that appeared to criticize American foreign policy. During the meeting, one official issued what some in the church saw as a veiled threat to the Vatican: a warning that the US wields unlimited military power, and that the pope should be conscious of that.…’ (via Vox)