Trump and Vance v. The Pope

So it turns out that the Trump administration not only threatens most of the nations of the world, immigrants to this country, members of the American press, United States senators and members of the House of Representatives, federal employees...well, this could get to be a long list... it also threatens the Pope.

The Pope!

According to The New Repubic, building on a story first broken by The Free Press, "Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech [in early January], Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture."

Colby told Cardinal Pierre that “the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” Then another unnamed official brought up the subject of Avignon, where the French state installed its preferred rival pope in the 1300s, and, according to a newsletter called Letters from Leo, reached for a medieval weapon.

It seems Colby, a Catholic, was upset by Pope Leo's warning that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

Colby told the National Catholic Register that he is "certainly a committed and serious Catholic." Such behavior hardly sounds like it, though, but should not be surprising given the brand of "Catholic" espoused by Vance and a number of like-minded academics and pundits who are part of the so-called "trad-Catholic" movement and fancy themselves "warriors" engaged in a holy war.

Trad Catholics seek “integralism,” the subordination of the state to spiritual power. (In the Catholic journal Crisis, writer Jessica Kramer, a convert from evangelical Protestantism who also contributes to conservative publications like The Federalist, insisted integralism was the future of conservatism.) These radicals believe that there is no basis for a separation between church and state, that taxpayers should pay for Catholic education via school vouchers, and that violence, lies, and hate are legitimate tools for instituting such a government.

“I think our people hate the right people,” J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism famously said. He praised Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people. He dismissed mainline Protestantism – Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians – as “a center left social club.”

“Fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” Sohrab Ahmari, another convert to Catholicism and former op-ed page editor of the New York Post, raged.

Ahmari thinks “conservative Christians can’t afford” luxuries like “civility.” “Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values…. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy.”

Charles LiMandri is an attorney based in San Diego County. He serves as special counsel to the Thomas More Society, named after the scourge of English protestants who burned translations of the Bible, and who was later beheaded by Henry VIII. The Thomas More Society has sponsored the Amistad Project, which mounted legal challenges to the 2020 election based on lies about how it was “stolen.” The society paid LiMandri’s Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund over $1 million in 2019, and paid his law firm $894,217 in 2020.

LiMandri made a name for himself in San Diego by attacking his (and my) alma mater, the University of San Diego, for permitting LGBTQ events. He has characterized mere exposure to such events as “anti-Catholic indoctrination and persecution.” His website about the issue carries slogans such as “there are no liberal Catholics and no conservative Catholics. There are Catholics and there are heretics,” and “Catholics are born for combat! I am a SOLDIER OF CHRIST THE KING under the command of ARCHANGEL MICHAEL…”

When Vance announced his conversion to Catholicism, he chose a journal called The Lamp, which publishes “consistent, undiluted Catholic orthodoxy.” The Lamp’s founders take inspiration from Pope Gregory XVI’s Mirari vos. Issued about fifty years after the ratification of the United States Constitution Mirari vos condemns America’s foundational ideas.

“Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute,” Gregory wrote. The church, he complained, “is subjected to human reason.” Kingdoms stand, he argued, only by the “restraints of religion.” Human reason must be subservient to natural law, he declared, appealing to the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas.

Natural law stood outside of man-made, or positivist, law. Civil law should never contradict natural law. Liberty of conscience was an “absurd and erroneous proposition.”

“Experience shows,” Gregory wrote, “even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.”

This is why Vance stood beside Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban this week and put the full power of the Trump administration behind Orban's re-election effort. Vance is incompatible with the founding values of the United States, and it appears U.S. officials like Colby are, too.

Much has changed in the Catholic church over the past couple of decades. There has long been a push-pull among Catholic leadership, and Catholics themselves between the peace-and-social conscious stream and the might-and-glory-through political-power stream. At the moment, thanks to Popes Francis and now Leo, the former runs the show. Guys like Colby and Vance hate that. They want an America that adheres to their view and they're willing to threaten the pope to get it.