Pope Leo XIV
By Zack Linly, NewsOne
On a regular basis, members of the Trump administration, especially President Donald Trump himself, prove they are not the champions of free speech that they purport themselves to be, and now their glaring constitutional hypocrisy has Pentagon officials threatening the Vatican and Pope Leo XIV — who is no fan of the president — just because the pope joined most of the world in criticizing Trump’s disastrous war on Iran.
According to a detailed report by the Free Press, on Easter Sunday, while Trump was threatening to bomb Iran’s bridges and power plants and unleash “Hell” on the nation, Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost, delivered his State of the World speech, during which he urged world leaders to lay down their weapons, choose peace and relieve themselves of the “desire to dominate other.” The global leader of the Catholic Church also condemned “the imperialist occupation of the world” and warned that God rejects the prayers “of those who wage war” — which seems to be a direct rebuke of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been hosting a monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, and has been praying to his god that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”
So, according to the Free Press, Leo’s speech angered some officials at the Pentagon, resulting in Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, being summoned to a closed-door Pentagon meeting, where he received a stern lecture from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who reportedly told Pierre: “The United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
Besides the fact that these so-called Christian leaders of a so-called Christian nation are out here threatening to unleash the U.S. military on the world’s highest authority on all things Christ, just because the pope said things that are Christ-like, we really should be more concerned that Trump officials keep boasting about how they can do anything they want because they have the most powerful military.
Remember when Trump was talking about “running” Venezuela and taking over Greenland, and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller defended those remarks by beating his little bird chest and declaring, “We are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country,” and “we’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower” as if he himself had ever served even a day in the U.S. mlitary.
MAGA minions keep defending the Trump administration against allegations that it’s an authoritarian regime, and the administration just keeps undermining that defense by vocally vindicating its accusers.
The truth is that Trump and his band of stooges — who have been given way more power than incompetent, imbecilic sycophants like them should ever have — have been scrambling and struggling to control the narrative around which side is “winning” regarding the conflict in Iran, and they’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with endless criticism, both globally and domestically, and the growing consensus that this war and the administration’s lack of competent leadership makes the nation look weak.
Trump is even out here threatening news outlets for reporting statements of “victory” made by Iranian leadership that have also been reported by Iranian media, which brings us to a reminder that the Pentagon recently tried to ban every mainstream news outlet from reporting on it after all of those outlets refused to bend to its new policy that reporters cannot obtain or solicit any information that hasn’t been pre-approved by the Department of Defense. Thankfully, a federal judge stepped in and essentially told Hegseth and other Pentagon officials that they were out of their freedom-of-the-press-defying minds.