The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
Posted by seek_a_new@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 94 comments
Posted by seek_a_new@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 94 comments
bonfireball@reddit
The article is absolutely staggering, direct threats to the papacy combined with a lecture on how America can do whatever it wants and no one can stop them.
This combined with the renewed threats about Greenland should be a wake up call for us in Europe and the UK. The U.S is now acting as a hostile power and should no longer be treated as an ally.
BoringRedHorse@reddit
A hostile power? They're acting like an evil force set on both world domination and destroying the world. At least cartoon villains know to pick one or the other.
Micromadsen@reddit
What is funny is how the moment the indecisive orange cartoon villain is gone, everything will change drastically.
I do not envy the next president. The amount of damage that's been done both physically and diplomatic is staggering. It's gonna be pure hell to try and revert that damage and improve relations again. It might ironically be easier to double down on the war effort at that point. (Though that's obviously the cowards way.)
BigDictionEnergy@reddit
I'd have no hope of a prayer of even getting one percent of the votes, but I almost feel like running just to say the things everyone who pays attention thinks that the dem nominee will not say.
Outrageous-Unit-305@reddit
It won't change, it just won't be announced every time the president has a thought.
America's history since its inception has been one of excepionalism, expansionism, reneging on deals and "might makes right" diplomacy. I don't see why the next president would be anything new.
BigDictionEnergy@reddit
Say the sore loser /s
It does go a long way towards our support of certain other expansionist countries.
a8bmiles@reddit
"What's a treaty?"
"Oh it's one of those things we broke 368 of with our native population."
"Oh cool, so, it's like a suggestion?"
"It's better! It's a suggestion for us, but it's a rule for them!"
Otto_Von_Waffle@reddit
Might be wish casting, but the next American president main worry might be about how to save the country economy from a death spiral.
harpers25@reddit
Yeah doing terrible with S&P500 up 24% in the last year and the unemployment rate going down last month lol.
AlfredFonzo@reddit
Our money is worth 24% less, that is not a good thing. Tell me you don't understand the issue without telling me you don't understand the issue.
There are two ways for the price of a stock to increase, either the stock gains value or the dollar loses it. Guess which one is happening.
harpers25@reddit
Wrong. Inflation is at normal levels, around 3%. Stock market gains have massively outpaced inflation.
If you are referring to currency exchange rates, DXY is down less than 4% in the last year, and it's up 7% from 5 years ago.
However, Americans earning in USD, buying stock in USD, and paying their bills in USD do not adjust stock prices by currency. It makes zero sense to do so - that is a bizarre urban legend that spread like wildfire on Reddit but makes no sense economically.
AlfredFonzo@reddit
Yep a fairly normal 3%, which is why everything is rocketing up in price yearly by 10, 20, 30% YOY. I'm not sure which news agency fed you your talking points but the majority of us can still actually look at a price tag and read it and remember what the number used to be last year. I'll bet you think gas prices are great and eggs are cheaper than ever.
harpers25@reddit
Can you provide a source for any of your numbers?
My inflation number is from BLS. My S&P 500 number is from VOO on Yahoo Finance. My DXY number is also Yahoo.
Where does your data come from?
AlfredFonzo@reddit
No, you can do your own research. This has become the single most infuriating tactic that you idiots use to try and devalue any opposition. I'm not here to do your research when you say "sOuRcE?!?".
Real world prices of literally EVERYTHING that people purchase on a daily basis are rising from each day to the next. Food, gas, clothing, any and all commodities in the real actual physical world. No, not numbers coupled to fiscal vehicles, physical purchased goods. I'm glad for you that your virtual monopoly money is theoretically more valuable, so is mine, that does not change the fact that it's still worth less purchasing power in the real world. The system works that way specifically to enable the investor class to outpace inflation at the expense of fucking over the consumer class. The consumer class is seeing rampant inflation for the past 10 years and exponentiation this year.
My house is theoretically worth 3 what I purchased it for. That doesn't mean that I have 3 the value. I have the value of one house, regardless of the number attached to it.
AlfredFonzo@reddit
Aww, poor little guy had to delete his account? But he won! I was trying to give him the ribbon to pin to his wall with his collection of Internet points, why delete? He beat me fair and square.
harpers25@reddit
Huh? My account isn't deleted. You have mental problems.
harpers25@reddit
I did the research, obviously. I gave several real, specific numbers from major sources that prove my point.
You gave zero sources for anything. Your numbers massively contradict all of the real data I posted.
AlfredFonzo@reddit
You win. I am defeated.
harpers25@reddit
I mean, yes, obviously, making up fake numbers while telling the person who already posted an extensive list of sources to "do their own research" is a pretty poor performance.
Micromadsen@reddit
Help one, help the other. It's not like the economy is getting better if relations stay crap. But I concede your point.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Nah, the funny thing will be the sea of Pikachu faces when nothing changes.
Weird_Point_4262@reddit
What's funny is that you think that Trump is the sole force behind this and that of he's gone it will stop
Micromadsen@reddit
Not sure why you'd think that, but no I'm well aware there's many other instances at play. Many of which are already actively working against the President and his team, even amongst his own people mind you. Otherwise we'd likely already have a new world war and several nukes sent flying judging by the presidents mood swings.
elkaki123@reddit
If 0 punishment is dealt to the republican party after all this is done (at least incarcerations for the ones involved in all the crimes, but it feels like it should go farther) I just don't get how america gets the confidence in their institutions, reputation and long term reliability back. Even after everything that has happened 40 something % still supports the guy, it just goes to show the US will always be a couple of percentage points from repeating this shit, one bad economic period and it comes back
Micromadsen@reddit
I believe that ship has already sailed considering there was next to zero repercussions when they decided to invade capitol in washington.
America is a clown show believing they're the most important country in the world. Meanwhile they can barely take care of their own and has to resort to bullying other nations for no benefit or reason.
Unfortunately this circus of a country has a lot of weapons, ammunition and enough crazy people that will be patriotic for the entirely wrong reasons.
shah_reza@reddit
We still have three years of this shit, minimum
Micromadsen@reddit
Well I mean there's at least work being done to try and overthrow or at least heavily diminish the power he has. So fingers crossed it won't be three entire years of this or three years of grandpa being muzzled.
digital-didgeridoo@reddit
Is Donald Trump really the Antichrist, as everyone claim?
BendicantMias@reddit
Nah. The real Antichrist would be a lot more subtle. And smart.
ralphy1010@reddit
He's starting to feel like the black swan folks were speculating on a few years back.
jakecovert@reddit
We are a rouge country. 🥲
arishtanemi9@reddit
Tbh, it never was an ally.
girtlander@reddit
The thought that anyone in Trump's orbit would reference an obscure historical illusion like the Avignon Papacy is as improbable as them lying straight in bed.
heartbloodline8404@reddit
Someone played Kingdom Come Deliverance prior to this meeting. It’s such a stupid thought that it’s got to be distinct possibility with this regime. I miss Obama. Fuck, I miss Bush!
AmarantaRWS@reddit
If you do then you dont recognize how deep this rot goes in the US. Both of them were imperialistic and warmongering, they were just more polite about it. Trump is a representation of the true sickness that has infected the United States since it's inception. Bush, Obama, Biden, all the presidents and their policy led to this moment. Trump is not the disease. He is a symptom, and I don't think many Americans are prepared for what the cure might look like.
heartbloodline8404@reddit
I’m from here, served in the navy. Yay bro, I fucking get it. Bush sucked, Obama wasn’t perfect by any means. But they had decorum, had respect, and say what you will about their political ideologies, they showed genuine care for the American people as a whole, and respected our allies. Trump, Bibi, Putin, they are cancers not just on their people but the world as a whole. It’s all fucked up.
mebeast227@reddit
I would say they feigned respect for the American people rather than had respect. They all funneled billions+ into the war machine while our debt spiraled. Trump and Bush are not far off from their global impact and cost of lives, but once again- Bush just played it off better.
If any of them had real respect for American's they would have addressed the military industrial complex head on and made a real public statement about the state of affairs regarding our degrading infrastructure and directly blamed it on our MIC rather than cowtowing the 'bipartisan' line and finding ways to drone strike more innocent people on the other side of the globe while wiping their tears with dollar bills siphoned away from the American people.
AmarantaRWS@reddit
You said it better than I could. History is a sequence of causes and effects. Presidents do not exist in a vacuum. Trump could not exist were it not for the actions of those who came before him. People will trace it to Gingrich, to Reagan, to Nixon, to McCarthy, to Johnson, and beyond, but all of them played there part.
I recall saying quite frequently in 2019 that if Biden were nominated he would win in 2020 but it would be at the sacrifice of 2024. To quote Kamala Harris of all people, "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
AgentOrange-12@reddit
I don’t mean for this to sound like an attack because I’m genuinely curious and not an expert. I’ve seen the phrase “Americans aren’t prepared for the cure” and I’m not sure what you mean can you explain more?
AmarantaRWS@reddit
It's a fair question. I think that people aren't prepared for the scale for starters. There are over 10k ICE agents, all of whom deserve to be prosecuted in my opinion. The scale of the trials needed just to deal with that one issue would need to make the nuremberg trials look like an episode of judge Judy.
In addition, the only way we earn any of the world's trust back is full demagafication, which involves what amounts to an ideological purge, and that is something that I even still have concerns with, mainly because if it can be done to them it can be done to us, but history doesn't follow the path I want, so that's a moot point. Beyond that, I don't think even that would be enough, because American exceptionalism and imperialism has been bipartisan for nearly the entire existence of this country. Obviously maga will not go peacefully, nor will the rest of the ruling class, and in fact it is unlikely they will give up their current power peacefully. We do not have the manpower to carry out such a large scale campaign of arrest and conviction even if they were to all come peacefully. Many Americans are still of the "we can disagree and still get along" mentality, which shows that they do not recognize the depth of this issue.
Finally, we would probably need a complete restructuring of our government, which again can't really be done because a significant portion of the country genuinely, absolutely believes in their weird evangelical bastardization of Christianity, to the point where they are willing to both kill and die for it.
I expect that we won't do what I think would be necessary to mitigate this disaster and regain any sort of standing. I think that my ideal scenario out of the scenarios I think likely is balkanization with the hope that where I live is in one of the more civilized new nations.
BilingSmob444@reddit
Who wants to bet that Stephen Miller sits up late thinking about thwarting the Pope
RandomCommenter432@reddit
Maybe Stephen Miller is the one who sent Vance to the last Pope....
novium258@reddit
It's the weirdo tradcaths, the white nationalist evangelical converts who fetishize Catholicism as some primitive medieval ideology, and they love that kind of deep cut medieval bullshit because that's what they imagine Catholicism to be. It's all cosplay to them. It's the equivalent of the Nazi Nordic neopagans.
elkaki123@reddit
It's the Catholic converts, seriously those guys always manage to get the weirdest views around the papacy and will always cite stuff that as an ex Catholic I barely ever heard about and I never saw once in mass or in my Catholic school.
wezl0@reddit
No one in this thread is talking about this part:
"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."
Huh???? Someone grabbed a fucking Halberd during this meeting???
Ill_Chicken550@reddit
Is America the new HRE? I mean we have a:
Blarg_III@reddit
I think the fourteenth-century weapon being referred to is the Avignon Papacy itself.
Kranken_DeHogge@reddit
seems like Hegseth-coded behavior
make2020hindsight@reddit
What?
OkValuable454@reddit
yes, at least from Panama to Groenland, that's what they are trying since a year (Gulf of American annexation of Canada and Groenland, colonization of Venezuela, threats on the Colombian president) etc etc
BoringRedHorse@reddit
They can't seriously be calling it the 'Donroe' doctrine, can they?
MyPasswordIsMyCat@reddit
It came from Trump himself. There are clips of him smugly saying it's the "Donroe Doctrine" like he's a damn 8-year-old who thinks he came up with the best thing ever.
BoringRedHorse@reddit
"It's just that you have a lot of really good ideas sir".
Ditnoka@reddit
They have been yes. And not just like ironically haha way of it. With 100% seriousness.
orbjo@reddit
We are weeks from him chiselling his own face on the heads of “Mount Trumpmore”
dingusfett@reddit
He'll off hand say he's so great people are saying they wish he could be on all four faces of Mount Rushmore, shortly after this it'll be conveniently blown up by "Iran" so he can rebuild it as a monument to himself.
Drug_fueled_sarcasm@reddit
The natives would be please by this. Fuck mt rushmore
phedinhinleninpark@reddit
Iranians blowing up mount Rushmore would be just too poetic.
FinibusBonorum@reddit
Don't give him any ideas...
KronusTempus@reddit
I’m fairly certain that was his plan after his ~~regime change~~ democratic uprising™ in Cuba and liberation® of Greenland
RighteousIndigjason@reddit
It's just part and parcel of Trump rebranding all of America into one of his shitty properties.
Tausney@reddit
"Blessed is he that bombeth the shit out of everyone, for they will have no immigrants."
CommieSlayer1389@reddit
What's next, the Treaty of Trumpdesillas?
moonski@reddit
Whilst I haven't heard of the "donor" doctrine their rhetoirc around the time of Greenland threats about "this is our hemisphere" is very much in line with monroe, so it's no surprise.
Tiddlyplinks@reddit
Awfully big for their britches concidering the Catholic Church has been around almost ten times as long as America, and at this rate will be around long after.
notarobat@reddit
America hates Catholics
bobrobor@reddit
Not America, the people who control America.
MuadLib@reddit
That's not true. America has been anti-catholic since settling . It got better lately but it's definitely not exclusive to the elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_States
gummytoejam@reddit
How do you explain a President being Catholic?
Tiddlyplinks@reddit
Catholic president score card: One of them got assassinated and the other is haaaaaated by the red hat cult.
MuadLib@reddit
That's you right there.
ralphy1010@reddit
We have a VP who is catholic these days, it's certainly not like it was when Kennedy was running for president anymore.
MuadLib@reddit
Thankfully. Sill not a phenomenon restricted to the elites.
ralphy1010@reddit
I dunno, I grew up in a very protestant part of the country yet there were catholic churches around. Many of them are pushing 200 years old at this point.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s I don't recall there being any sort of disdain for Catholics and they were basically seen as just another of the various Christian sects that had churches around the area.
So while there was certainly dislike for catholics going back over time these days it's virtually none existent in the mind of the average american. Even less so in the cities where you tend to find greater numbers of catholics due to Irish/Italian/Hispanic immigrants having settled in the urban areas.
notarobat@reddit
Yeah, America
Scrapple_Joe@reddit
The amount of Republicans who say that Catholics aren't Christians is staggering tbh. It's very thinly veiled racism.
Fancy_Professor_1023@reddit
Are Catholics a "race" now?
Scrapple_Joe@reddit
No but Latin Americans tend to be Catholic.
Same with Irish and Italians when anti Catholic fervor was at a peak back in the day.
Not knowing history must be hard for you huh?
gummytoejam@reddit
Then how do you explain hispanics walking around in broad day light in clear view of law enforcement, openly speaking Spanish in public places, going to and fro attending their business, not being harassed?
Scrapple_Joe@reddit
Not what anyone was talking about to begin with and famously we recently had a court case allowing ICE to use people looking Hispanic and speaking Spanish as a reason to detain them. Kavanagh stops are now happening all across the country.
So you came up with a premise that has nothing to do with what we were talking about. You apparently didn't understand the conversation about how people were using Catholic as a proxy for ethnicities. Then to top it all off your premise is not only incorrect but there was a supreme Court case about it.
You've gotta be a troll, no one is this dumb.
MyPasswordIsMyCat@reddit
To the KKK, they are. These aren't smart people. Anti-Catholicism is a core tenet of American racism and has been since before the nation was founded. Most of the colonies were made up of protestants who hated Catholicism, and they carried forward a strong hatred for Catholic nations and their citizens.
Thus there was prejudice against Irish, Italians, Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans... these were Catholic populations. And racists don't care about the details of race vs ethnicity vs religion. Even if the Catholics are white, they hate them.
roguealex@reddit
No, but some ethnicities are predominantly Catholic and being Catholic was used as an attack point with Italian and Irish immigrants, in top of the anti Italian and Irish rhetoric. And now a lot of the Latinos are Catholics, so that association of being racist towards predominantly Catholic groups stands
gummytoejam@reddit
TIL Catholicism is a race.
Aenjeprekemaluci@reddit
Republicans are often hardline evangelicals and not even mainline Protestant. For them Catholicism is the symbol of Latin Americans and subordination of US towards another leader.
Cienea_Laevis@reddit
Nah, its just Protestant being Protestants.
Scrapple_Joe@reddit
Methinks they doth Protestant too much
wojtekpolska@reddit
they are a nation of heretics.
scientology, super rich pastors scamming people, the whole stuff with mormons, etc etc.
EvidenceBasedSwamp@reddit
they can try this. they'll lose new york and jersey. Lots of irish and italians here.
D4nCh0@reddit
Pope Leo to sanction 1st Crusade against USA, over Pentagon threats of Papal split
Prematurid@reddit
Last year I wrote a rather lengthy comment on an analysis about the US behaviour in Europe and regarding NATO, where (to summarize) I ended up concluding that it appears the US has become a liability/adversary instead of an asset/ally.
That comment has aged like fine wine.
BendicantMias@reddit
Fun Fact: The White House actually posted this last year - https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1918502592335724809
Yes, that's Donald Trump as Pope. If he was aware of Warhammer 40k, I bet it'd be him as the God-Emperor..
Flavius_16@reddit
Can someone copy/paste the entire article? Their website is buggy and I can't claim their free article.
Seriously why must I provide an e-mail and install a stupid app just to read an article.
T-Fez@reddit
Here you go. It's the full article but without the recent edit. Thankfully that's still readable in the locked article.
https://archive.is/H3cfR
Flavius_16@reddit
You're a savior. Thank you.