Discussion
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
jjgreen: Excommunicate the US military.
frm88: I doubt many are Catholic. J.D. Vance would be an option, tho.
joezydeco: A significant number of SCOTUS judges are Catholic. Start there, since they enabled this.
mullingitover: Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2The 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 colony of Maryland was originally suppose to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
water_badger: well, ~21% of americans are catholic
embedding-shape: "are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".
Avicebron: Idk which is more impressive that someone referenced the Avignon Papacy in a heat of the moment argument or that the same person who could reference that thought it was a good idea. (Not Catholic...but like...why?)
mapotofu: > the same person who could reference thatLet’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.
uxp100: Nah, I’m sure Elbridge Colby knew about this. His political views may be unpleasant (I mean, I think there is far worse in the Trump administration, but I’m not a supporter of any of them) but he’s definitely in the well read in history section of maga.
pavel_lishin: 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.
colechristensen: It sounds like some hothead idiot driven by the big orange hothead idiot prompted Claude about how to threaten the Vatican and then used its talking points on the ambassador.So "calculated" maybe, but only because AI could come up with the answer, I have serious doubts that many of these people possess more than basic literacy much less the ability to come up with something like this. Or some CIA analyst who hates their job came up with this to mock their bosses.
flohofwoe: Sounds like a Europa Universalis player tbh ;)
forinti: I've been saying this for years: what the world needs is a Crusade to take the Holy Land back for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.Of course I always say this in jest but I clarify this nowadays because someone might actually take it seriously.
twodave: As long as you're making fun of people twisting Christianity to suit their goals I guess this is funny. But imagine how frustrating it must be for genuine believers in a Jesus who says, "Blessed are the peacemakers," and, "Bless your enemies and do not curse them," who are now victims of both the original twisting and the future ridicule to come (not to mention those being led astray).
croes: > America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.I‘m pretty sure the god they often mentioned would see that differently.Not that anybody really believed they are true believers and just hypocrites.
whimsicalism: Anyone have non paywalled reporting? Technically I think this post is HN guideline-breaking as there is no easy bypass for substack paywalls.
jgalt212: > Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned the Holy See’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.Can the DOD do this? This seems more like the purview of State.
FrustratedMonky: Lot of Catholics are MAGA aren't they? The few I talked to recently were really anti-woke, like 'woke' is ruining the world. Very Maga.How does this land with them?
redwood: Latinos (~20% of the military) plus the very military-forward Italian and Polish American communities plus countless others... what a ridiculous statement
CapricornNoble: Don't give Secretary of War Crimes Pete Kegs-breath any ideas. He's already all-aboard the Crusade-train.
tekla: I'm confused as to why you think one of the most popular religions on Earth would not be a decent chunk of the American military.
frm88: I pledge ignorance. Yeah, sorry should have looked that up before posting. I was always under the impression, North America tended towards other faiths, like Baptism or Mormon.
sqircles: I have recently deepened my search in Christianity which started with the Catholic Church, one of few points I struggle with when it comes to Catholicism is the papacy, and the Avignon Papacy debacle and the events that followed (a la Western Schism) has quite a bit to do with that. I was a little confused by what they meant here by “threatening with the Avignon Papacy.” If anyone else is curious, I think the phrase “Babylonian Captivity” will provide better context, as it is what some contemporaries and later historians called it as it appeared that the Church had been “captured” by French political interests, with the popes being seen as too cozy to the French king and less focused on their universal spiritual role.
rebolek: > America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.Yeah, well. That aged like raw milk.
pelorat: To be fair most self-proclaimed MAGA Christians in the USA are heretics. So this is not really surprising.
CGMthrowaway: The DoW regularly engages foreign ambassadors on defense matters eg military cooperation, NATO issues, basing, security policy, etcAny exec branch dept can communicate directly with foreign diplomats, and ambassadors are accredited to the USA as a whole, not exclusively to State
embedding-shape: 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.
lukan: Indeed.https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrg8zkz8d0oTrump is the real pope obviously.
amarcheschi: A non expedit towards American Christians would be so fun before electionshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Expedit
giraffe_lady: 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."
empath75: Real catholics only think about the church on Easter, Christmas, baptisms, weddings and funerals.
water_badger: 100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
redwood: A Straussian comment. Not unexpected sadly.
newer_vienna: A true Straussian would never have spoken so clearly
sonotathrowaway: Wait until you find out how many Latino people serve in the military.
ks2048: Wait until you find out how many Latinos aren't catholic. (Yes, it's a lot, probably most, but in some LATAM countries Catholics are now outnumbered by evangelicals).
yoyohello13: You may be joking, but Hegseth unironically believes this. A fact that should scare everyone.
krapp: It isn't just Hegseth by any means. GWB calling for a new "Crusade" at the rubble of the WTC after 9/11 wasn't an error. The integration of evangelical Christianity, the Republican Party and the military industrial complex is deep. In its soul, the US is a Christian theocracy which has been struggling to free itself from the shackles of secular republicanism (in the government sense, not the party sense) ever since its founding.Pete Hegseth's beliefs aren't even unusual for much of the country, he just isn't canny enough to play the game his predecessors did and not say the quiet part out loud.
lxgr: Then again, it's also against HN guidelines to complain about paywalls...
I-M-S: Biden was Catholic, yet not even him sponsoring a genocide was enough to warrant an excommunication.
CobrastanJorji: He was denied communion on one occasion, though it was for his stance on abortion (he didn't support making it a crime).
anonu: There is a lot to source from Christian ideals, many of which are the foundations of Western culture: human dignity, moral equality, conscience, limits on power and care for those less fortunate and weaker. Much of what is happening in the world today feels like a stark reversal of those ideals: selfishness and divisiveness manufactured to promote a narrow segment of society.Recent news articles have indicated an increase in church attendance. This makes sense: we have lost our moral compass... Specifically in the USA... And people are searching for a new direction.
embedding-shape: 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.
kubb: What is tiresome is how sincerely these people insist on being able to make everyone act according to their will, while simultaneously displaying weakness, incompetence, and extreme pettiness. Trying to threaten people into respecting them. The lack of class is just so unsightly.
stratocumulus0: This is exactly my observation. Every now and then there's an Anglo posting on Polish social media asking people questions about some obscure Catholic doctrines and getting offended after they're told that no one there cares. I guess that such people see the number "98% Catholic" on the page for Poland on Wikipedia and conclude that it must be some medieval tradcath white nationalist theocracy.I am deeply skeptical of all converts to Catholicism and I speculate that the alt-right spaces online painted a picture of conversion as going back to the foundation of the Western civilization, or at least its idealized white nationalist picture.
creddit: "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.
ecshafer: Any middle schooler with a passing interest in history is aware of the Avignon papacy. Jumping to “AI” is a bit much.
triceratops: Despite being a middle schooler with more than a passing interest in history I only learned about it when I started playing Crusader Kings in my adulthood.
hamdingers: The average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two fedlspars.
littlestymaar: And quartz of course!
littlestymaar: (Reference for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/2501/)
Analemma_: 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.
robin_reala: If?
lastofthemojito: > 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.
rhcom2: He is also Catholic himself.
drumhead: Threatening the holy father is not something I entirely expected, but when you couple that with statements like "We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying.
CGMthrowaway: 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
sqircles: I appreciate your comment and I understand. My struggles are not about whether or not I like the man who is in the seat.
tty456: This administration is 100% acting in a way that it never plans to leave.
Teever: You’d be surprised.A lot of religious people are extremely knowledgeable about historical stuff related to their religions.They might draw the absolutely worst conclusions from their historical knowledge and have incredibly biased takes but they’ve actually read and discussed these things which is more than you can say for your average person.It ultimately comes from their personal identify being so intricately tied to the religious organization that they are a part of — on some level they view these historical events as their own personal history as they identify as a ‘evangelical Christian’ or ‘orthodox Jew’ more than they view themselves as a person named Dave who has a family and stuff.At the end of the day it’s all just more Hatfield and McCoys or tribal warfare over a goat that was killed centuries ago bullshit.
littlestymaar: Even in France I'm willing to bet the majority of people outside of Avignon have no idea about it.Any history major with interest in medieval Europe, yes, any middle schooler? No way.
trashface: 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?
ChrisArchitect: Non-paywalled coverage earlier: https://newrepublic.com/post/208820/pentagon-threatened-pope... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704570)
snayan: Where did you go to middle school lol
geerlingguy: Worth noting: the source of this claim is anonymous, and so far the framing of the statement feels a little more radical than maybe what was said in the meeting.Other news publications are trying to get the full story: https://x.com/jdflynn/status/2042076430406672829?s=46&t=u6IW...I wouldn't put anything past the current admin, but I don't know what the US could stand to gain from directly antagonizing the Vatican.
iguessthislldo: So they kidnap him like they did with the president of Venezuela? I don't understand how they think this is going to play out well.
ticulatedspline: I love this:>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.>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.”they then proceed to insinuate use of force.
bregma: That would be following established rules. Such a thing is not the habit of the current administration.
skywhopper: Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.
layer8: It’s still much preferable to them being strong and competent in subduing everyone to submit to their will.
whimsicalism: Is it complaining to ask for a workaround and point out HN guidelines?> It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.I am earnestly curious to read a recounting of what was said by the Trump official.
ncr100: No - I had a bunch of history and did not encounter that.
yladiz: Why are they referring to Elbridge Colby as the Under Secretary of War for Policy? That’s not his title.
slater: "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
bsimpson: I know that Hacker News can be for anything "hackers find interesting," but I really hope it doesn't become yet another political doomland. There are so many other places to go to raise your anxiety - I'd rather this remain a space for things that are positively interesting.
b3ing: It’s going to be Evangelical. Some variety of megachurch prosperity teaching that faults the poor with some kind of republican ideology.That’s why anyone that believes in separation of religion and state should tell these folks anytime they push for Christianity in schools, just tell them: ok but it needs to be the true Christianity- Jehovah Witnesses- then they will shut up. They hate Jehovah witnesses, then Mormons, then Catholics, …
jakeydus: It stuns me that Republican Mormons think that Evangelicals like them for anything but their political assistance. As soon as Evangelicals remove the non-Christians, their tent will get smaller, just like you're saying.I have Mormon family that thinks that they're welcome in the Evangelical tent (they'll even visit the Ark Experience!), but Evangelicals hate Mormons just like they hate gays, liberals, trans people, atheists, etc. It's just that Mormons (for now) vote the way that Evangelicals want.
tallanvor: Yeah, no, that's an insane claim to make. Obviously American education covers some information about religion in history classes, but that level of detail about catholic history is not normal curriculum for elementary, middle, or high school.
xp84: Can confirm - I had an excellent, Christian School education through Middle School, and even we didn't hear about that.
nsxwolf: Sounds like sensationalized hearsay and I’ve been burned so many times by the media reporting on Catholicism I’m not paying this one any mind.
nprz: Catholics now have to decide if they will continue to support the pro-life party even as the Trump administration demands the pope redefine the catechism of the Catholic Church at Trump's whim.
iso1631: 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?
layer8: 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.
cjs_ac: 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.
ourmandave: Makes you pine for the good old days when it was just QAnon and Pizza Gate.Now we're fast tracking the Rapture.Assuming that doesn't work out for them, who are they going to follow when the Chosen One doesn't get a 3rd term?
CobrastanJorji: You get three kinds of adult converts. The first kind of convert wants to marry somebody Catholic. They're joining because they love somebody. The second kind of convert was approached by missionaries that built their community a school or a well or something, and they're grateful that somebody clearly cares about them and their community.The third type of convert, though, joins because they like the structure. They like the gravitas. They like the moral absolutes. They like the patriarchal hierarchy that doesn't let women lead. They sign up and immediately declare that Vatican 2 was a terrible mistake and that all of the popes since then have been illegitimate. JD Vance didn't join because he loved their soup kitchens.
axus: The third group ends up joining the Russian Orthodox church.
SubiculumCode: Yes. There is a ton of Russian propaganda against the Catholic church claiming the current and last popes to be "anti-popes" and spawns of Satan, and all that, and it is exactly this progression Catholic Church-->Russian Orthodox Church which is under Putin's thumb.
Apocryphon: At this point, it's going to be some sort of post-Christian, culturally Christian social media influencer-driven, conspiracy theory-laden melange that incorporates everything from Tartarian giants to simulation hypothesis to Flat Earth. Q Gospel indeed.
Arodex: It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-histor...
_doctor_love: Wow. I knew the current administration was bad but this is something extra.It also shows the short-sightedness of the "scholars" in the administration. Sure, the Avignon Papacy did occur, that's historical fact.It's also a historical fact that the Catholic Church is an actually ancient power broker in the world still and they have been around for much, much longer than the United States. The Church is actually quite good at playing the long game (and I say that as someone raised firmly Protestant).I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment. Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this. I don't feel the pinch will come in the next few years but by 2036 I think the US will wonder what happened.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.
orochimaaru: So but T is unbiased. He threatens the Holy See and the holy khamenei.Just another day.
MSFT_Edging: 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?
dhosek: Because they figure those two will flip to their side if forced to make a choice. Note for example that Pete Hegseth made an explicit choice to exclude Catholic worship from the Pentagon chapel this past Good Friday.
layer8: I find it positively interesting that pope Leo’s outspokenness is apparently considered such a threat by the Pentagon.
reactordev: 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.
_doctor_love: I would reluctantly have to agree. The current administration is the culmination of something like 30 years of effort.
nprz: I am certainly not defending or supporting that title. Republicans are generally in favor of stricter abortion laws and catholics generally prioritize abortion over any other issue. So many catholics vote republican, but now that comes at the risk of distorting the actual catechism of the church. A challenging moral question for catholics.
blitzar: Go ahead do it. Make Trump the pope while you are at it, we all need a good laugh.
Imustaskforhelp: > 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.
_doctor_love: > Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Iran might put a brief damper / brake on the timeline but the current US administration seems intent on seizing the moment and pushing out the Castro government once and for all. It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba, even how Fidel Castro first came to power was under the banner of pushing out that era's US-backed administration. And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.EDIT: you mentioned you're a non-American and the Americans you talk to are all upset/disappointed. If you're European especially, the Americans you're most likely to interact with are well-educated and liberal. There are parts of the country that are firmly pro-Trump, where it's completely out of the norm to have liberal / European-style values.
lostlogin: > After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.I find it hilarious that one of the conditions of the ceasefire is that the straight opens. It was open prior to the war. Great negotiation. Wow.
lostlogin: Religious sects that have branched off is sort of an American thing from its very founding. Not sure if the New World was attractive or the Old Wold needed to rid itself of the chaos. The effect was the same.
Aurornis: That's how ceasefires work. One of the conditions of a ceasefire is that they cease firing. There was no firing prior to the war.
newer_vienna: 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!
benzible: If you would expect a typical Trump political appointee, as Colby is, to have even basic historical knowledge, then you may not be paying close attention.
duxup: This administration seems so emotionally fragile that they threaten anyone who disagrees… often completely unnecessarily…
fhdkweig: I had a science teacher in high school 30 years ago who was convinced that the current pope was the anti-christ spoken of in Revelation. US Christianity is very anti-Catholic. That's why Trump can talk about setting up telephone hotlines to report anti-christian sentiment, yet his administration does stuff like this. If/when Trump dies in office, VD Vance won't be able to control MAGA because Vance is Catholic, and MAGA hates him for it.
MSFT_Edging: Only the super-dedicated ones.I knew a guy in highschool, he was adopted from Russia by a Russian-Jewish family. He was raised Jewish. Somewhere after highschool he got dragged into dark spots of the internet. Him and a close friend of his converted to Eastern Orthodox and began dropping constant Nazi dog whistles. Explicit anti-semitism. Both were in the military, one was an Army Ranger. Their posts were reported to LE but nothing came of it.I'm confident the Ranger would kill for fun if given the chance, and any evidence of his war crimes would be covered up.Knew a totally different Orthodox convert. He converted in college, went to school for political science. Sucked on his cross necklace and told my sister she'd be going to hell. She thankfully broke up with him.The Orthodox church attracts some real cretins in my experience.
axus: And like all religions it's filled with wonderful people, in this thread we are complaining about converts :)
MSFT_Edging: Oh I'm sure people born into it view it very differently from the converts. Same thing with Catholicism.By "attracts", I was insinuating people not already in the church, aka converts.
lostlogin: You expect this administration to rely on domain experts?Can you give some examples of this?
Ylpertnodi: ...and when it suits them.
lostlogin: Only when it suits them.
rawgabbit: [delayed]
CamperBob2: Best analogy for religion I've ever heard: "A D&D game that went too far." If you've seen diehard gamers go on for hours about the minutiae of various editions of countless rulebooks, you can imagine what it's like when devout Catholics get together to talk shop.
drumhead: Fun Fact - Elbridge Colby is a Catholic, maybe time for excommunication?
rawgabbit: There are Catholics who argue that Francis and Leo are not real Catholics and will argue Trump is the chosen one. Some are my family members. I am as always speechless.
hydrogen7800: I hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
rawgabbit: [delayed]
lostlogin: Where does the tax on shipping fit into this?The US administration and military look like fools.
LocalH: I can't speak my mind openly because it would be fedposting. However, something must be done about this group of outlaws that has assumed power in the US.
fhdkweig: > You can be catholic and not like the popeI come from a Protestant background, so I view Catholicism as just Protestants with a pope. What does it mean to be catholic but without a pope?
sqircles: You cannot be in full communion with the Catholic Church and not submit to the papal office.Catholics owe the Pope religious submission of intellect and will to his authentic magisterium (teaching authority) on faith and morals, even when not speaking infallibly (Lumen Gentium 25; CCC 892; Code of Canon Law, can. 752). This is a respectful adherence and presumption in favor of what he teaches officially as Pope. This does not extend to his personal opinions, private theological views, prudential judgments (e.g., on politics, economics, or administrative decisions), or liking him as a person or agreeing with everything he says or does in a non-magisterial capacity.
ecshafer: I am not talking about what American education covers nor the average American. But what people with an interest in History, who are reading history books, watching history documentaries, etc. would know. Avignon is not that deep.
IAmBroom: You literally started: "Any middle schooler...", and now you claim you aren't discussing education?
CamperBob2: That comes later.
CGMthrowaway: Another example for you.. Rather than donate money to the church, I donate my time and talent instead. In that way it is focused 100% on my local parish. Another one, I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it. There are loads of times where the "leadership" of the church leaves something to be desired, yet the progress of gods kindgom marches on. If christianity were to "devolve" in the future to house churches again, that would not stop it. Yet, the fact that it is not a "house church" system today is not a reason not to practice your faith
sqircles: > I develop my relationship with god in a way that is helped by worship through the church, but is not dependent on it.The Church certainly disagrees with you, teaching that the visible Church is the ordinary means of salvation and full communion with Christ. (see the Precepts, CCC ~846–848)
mr_toad: The papacy prefers to excommunicate rulers, the idea being that their subjects will turn against them.
