Pentagon denies Trump official threatened war against the Pope

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, May 8, 2025. REUTERS/Yara Nardi

On Wednesday, reports emerged that the Trump Pentagon threatened to wage war against the Pope. The following day, however, the agency released a statement denying the claims, asserting that the meeting between Administration and Vatican officials was “respectful and reasonable.”

The denial of hostility comes in the wake of a story involving a closed-door meeting between Under Secretary Elbridge Colby and Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — in which the former told the latter, “America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

According to Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale, as tensions rose, one 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.”

Supposedly, this “bitter lecture” from the Trump Administration came in response to the president’s anger over the Pope’s January state-of-the-world address, particularly his advocacy for “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

Trump and the Pentagon took this as a challenge to the president’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” a portmanteau of “Donald” with the “Monroe Doctrine,” the latter of which historically asserted American supremacy over the Western Hemisphere.

But now, while a Pentagon statement confirms that the meeting happened, it denies the belligerent tone.

“We can confirm that Cardinal Christophe Pierre had a meeting on January 22, 2026, at the Pentagon where he and several officials had discussed current affairs,” the statement read, but went on to claim that the “characterization of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted. The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion. We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”

Whatever the content of the meeting, it was an unprecedented event, as there is no previously documented case of a Vatican official being summoned to the Pentagon.

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