Did the Trump administration threaten the pope?

Most American Catholics were probably not expecting to spend the first week of Easter trying to figure out whether their government was threatening to overthrow the first American-born pope.

Yet a handful of news reports this week raised that very strange possibility. They landed just as both the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Christian influencers have been ramping up their criticism of the Trump administration over the Iran war.

This burgeoning scandal hinges on news reports that in January, the previous ambassador of the Vatican to the United States was called into an unusual meeting with Department of Defense officials at the Pentagon and dressed down. The Pentagon officials, reportedly, wanted to complain about a speech Pope Leo XIV gave in Rome that appeared to criticize American foreign policy. During the meeting, one official issued what some in the church saw as a veiled threat to the Vatican: a warning that the US wields unlimited military power, and that the pope should be conscious of that.

If true, this episode would mark a low point in modern Vatican-American political relations — on top of being a major religious scandal for Catholics in the US.

The Trump administration denies these accounts; the Vatican is keeping mostly quiet. Meanwhile, the reporters and writers who first surfaced these allegations are standing by their stories.

Whatever the truth ends up being, this scandal points to some important fracture lines in American religious life, and offers a key to understanding the way the Iran war is cracking up the religious right. It  also fits into a broader conflict that is testing MAGA Catholics’ resolve, and setting up the Catholic Church as one of the Trump administration’s most visible and relevant critics. 

So what exactly is the scandal?

This whole saga began with a report from the Free Press on Wednesday, in which Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi reported on a previously unknown meeting between Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, then-top Vatican diplomat in the US Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and a handful of Pentagon officials.

The meeting, which is now confirmed to have happened, was unusual, Ferraresi and other reports noted, because of where and when it happened: at the Pentagon, instead of with diplomats of the Department of State, and after Pope Leo had delivered a speech decrying the breakdown in the post-war international order and the escalating use of force and violence abroad by nations, including the US, to achieve their aims. 

“War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading,” Leo had said in his speech to diplomats.

That the meeting happened isn’t in doubt; but no one seems to agree on what was actually said in the encounter. The Free Press reported that the meeting was meant to be a warning to the Vatican, a reminder that militarily, the US can do “whatever it wants…and that the Vatican, and Leo, better take its side.” And so, it devolved into a “bitter lecture.”

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Thursday that the group “had a substantive, respectful, and professional meeting” and that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.” The US ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican’s political government) echoed that sentiment, and called media reports exaggerations and fabrications.

But other news outlets also began picking up on the fallout. NBC Chicago, of the pope’s hometown, quoted a Vatican source who called the Pentagon meeting “most unpleasant and confrontational.” The Financial Times reported that the meeting was supposed to deliver a “friendly message” to the pope, and to ask the Vatican to be more supportive of the Trump administration’s policies, but unraveled when Pierre said the pope would follow Catholic values in conducting Vatican foreign policy.

That’s when one specific term jumps out, which caused this whole episode to become an actual scandal. Someone in the room, according to the Free Press, the Financial Times, and independent journalist Christopher Hale, invoked the name “Avignon” — which some Vatican officials reportedly understood to be a military threat against the Vatican. 

Why did this particular phrase set off alarm bells? To answer that, we have to go back 700 years. 

Did a Trump official really threaten the Vatican?

Though these accounts don’t agree on who invoked Avignon, the term is a trigger for Catholics, historians, and history buffs: It references the French city that served as the home base for popes in the 14th century after a French king, Philip IV, sent an army to Italy where they attacked the sitting pope, Boniface VIII, after years of feuding over who was the preeminent political power. 

Phiip IV went on to force the election of a new French pope, who moved the papacy to Avignon. For 70 years, popes held court and governed Christendom from the city’s papal palace — and when the last Avignon pope tried to move the office back to Rome, it spawned a crisis for the church and the rise of rival “antipopes” in Avignon claiming to be the real pope for nearly 40 years after.

As you might now understand, “Avignon” is a loaded term. And combined with the nature of the meeting — at the Pentagon, having to do with comments Pope Leo had made about America’s use of force — you can see how this episode could be interpreted as being a veiled warning about the church staying in its lane when it comes to criticizing the dominant military power.

Why are the US and the pope so at odds?

Regardless of who invoked Avignon or how confrontational the meeting was behind the scenes, it fits into a pattern of growing public conflict between the Church and the Trump presidency. 

This applies to both style and substance: Pope Leo, and the American bishops, have become loud critics of Trump’s immigration and mass deportation policy, his foreign interventions abroad and use of force against other nations, and the breakdown of the US-European alliance. For all intents and purposes, MAGA has forced the Catholic Church to appear like the chief resistance.

But it’s the joint US-Israeli war on Iran that has caused the most visible strain and direct condemnation of Trump and the American government by the Roman pontiff. After spending weeks calling for peace talks and ceasefires, and preaching the Church’s anti-war message during Holy Week commemorations, Leo used Trump’s name for the first time last week, expressing hope that he was “looking for an off-ramp” from the war.

And after Trump warned that Iranian civilization might “die” on Tuesday, Leo condemned the statements as “truly unacceptable” and urged “the citizens of all the countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them, tell them to work for peace and to reject war.”

Has Pope Leo weighed in on Avignon-gate?

The pope hasn’t said anything on this latest development, but the Vatican has weighed in — a significant move given their traditional reluctance to address these kinds of political disputes. 

After the Vatican Press Office initially declined to comment earlier in the week, Vatican press secretary Matteo Bruni released a statement on Friday confirming Cardinal Pierre met with Colby “for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest,” and that “the narrative offered by certain media outlets regarding this meeting does not correspond at all with the truth” — without clarifying which narrative that was, or where existing reporting got things wrong. 

Meanwhile, the Vatican diplomat involved in the meeting, Cardinal Pierre, told one independent journalist he would “prefer not speak.”

But the Free Press report suggested that this dustup is leading the Vatican to keep the US government at arm’s length while Trump is president. The first American pope has declined invitations to come to the US during its 250th celebrations, and will instead spend that time at an island in Italy where migrants fleeing danger in Africa frequently stop off while trying to reach Europe. The Trump administration has openly supported anti-immigrant political parties and leaders in Europe, while also trying to block asylum seekers and refugees from entering America.

Where does JD Vance come into all this? 

Vance, a Catholic convert who has a book coming out later this year on his faith journey, was asked about the Pentagon episode on Wednesday while traveling in Hungary. He denied knowing the Vatican diplomat in question, and said he’d rather not comment on an unconfirmed report.

Vance is the highest ranking of a significant number of Catholics serving in the Trump administration (including Secretary of State Marco Rubio), was one of the last public leaders to meet with the late Pope Francis before his death, and was famously rebuked by two popes (Francis and Leo, albeit before the latter became pope) for invoking his new faith to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policy. 

Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026.

As Vance’s prior papal feuds indicate, the Free Press story also runs into some intra-Catholic tensions. Colby, the Pentagon official embroiled in the mess and a reported ally of Vance, is also Catholic. Some of the leading intellectual figures on the right in MAGA circles are traditionalist Catholics who have been critical of the current and former popes for what they see as concessions to modern liberal political values.

Within US politics, Vance also represents a wing of the GOP that is being split apart by the Iran war, partly over religious lines — and in ways that could threaten his potential aspirations for the presidency in 2028. This story could make that divide even more difficult to navigate. 

How does this latest story fit into MAGA’s current civil war? 

Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026, and how the Iran war is affecting both the MAGA coalition and the American Catholic Church.

The report landed just as arguments over Israel and Iran were driving a wedge between the GOP’s pro-Trump evangelical base, who tend to be Christian Zionists sympathetic to Israel, and a group of prominent Catholic and non-evangelical commentators who are increasingly hostile to Trump’s foreign policy agenda and critical of Israel. 

Among the latter group, which includes Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Nick Fuentes, Avignon-gate quickly became a hot topic, with many eager to embrace the most explosive interpretation of events. 

“On the pope thing, that is how you know this administration is the antichrist…these people hate Catholics,” the self-described Catholic and white supremacist Nick Fuentes said on his show Thursday. Boller took aim at Colby on X, saying, “you won’t bully or threaten the Catholic Church into your unjust war.”

Many of these more isolationist and antiwar figures have also been condemned within the right for either tolerating or openly espousing antisemitism. As they rally to the church’s side now over the war, and justify their opposition to Trump in increasingly theological terms, this episode puts more pressure on Leo to address the church’s relationship with them as well. Ferraresi, the author of the Free Press article that kicked off this affair, challenged Pope Leo in the same piece to condemn “the growing choir of Catholic pundits injecting bigotry into the MAGA infosphere,” and not just focus the church’s fire on the pro-war right. 

In short, it’s a mess. Avignon-gate is almost perfectly calibrated to raise temperatures not only between the White House and the Vatican, but within the US Catholic community, and within the MAGA movement. And the issues it raises are nowhere near being resolved.