Not being groggy now from lack of sleep, I think that the Lavender Mafia, if not the Pope, at the Vatican was hoping to set Trump off. Mission accomplished. Last week we had the Avignon Debacle, which blew up quickly, too quickly for the Vatican?, due to bad faith Democrat operatives like Christopher Hale. The Vatican had to deny that there was any truth as to threats made against the Pope by the Trump Administration. This doubtless attracted the attention of the President, especially since the Pope has been continually attacking Trump’s policy on immigration and in regard to Iran.
On Sunday the Three Red Mice, Cardinals Cupich, Tobin and McElroy appeared on, Trump’s old adversary, 60 Minutes, to attack Trump and his works. Trump is always keenly aware as to what Americans, at least Boomer Americans, might be seeing on television. He also doubtless assumed, and here I think he is likely right, that the Red Mice cleared their appearance with the Vatican, if not directly with the Pope.
It would take a man far more Machiavellian than the President from Queens, the Blue Collar Billionaire, to stay silent in the face of this provocation, and he blew up on Truth Social. Regrettable surely, but caused by the type of nasty games that are typically played by factions within the Vatican, especially the Lavender Mafia.
The Trump comments were absolutely despicable. Faithful Catholics should condemn them without hesitation or qualification.
Hey Don,
60 (ahem) Minutes has an interesting Title on this hit piece:
“Pope Leo’s Church”.
Haven’t watched it, but wouldn’t be great if the title agreed with the content. You know, the fact about Jesus Being God and Man, the Church being His, and Not Leo’s or post Francis’.
Very well said, Don. Sure, they cleared with the Pope.
Inspirational?
“Later, Trump posted a picture suggesting he had saint-like powers akin to those of Jesus Christ. Wearing a biblical-style robe, Trump is seen laying hands on a bedridden man as light emanates from his fingers, while a soldier, a nurse, a praying woman and a bearded man in a baseball cap all look on admiringly. The sky above is filled with eagles, an American flag and vaporous images.” (NPR)
“The Trump comments were absolutely despicable. Faithful Catholics should condemn them without hesitation or qualification.”
Faithful Catholics should also not be blind to the highly malevolent forces working behind the scenes at the Vatican to bring about this confrontation. Trump is Trump and he will be judged as we all will be, but Catholics should have higher standards for those who purport to run the Church. It would help a lot if the Pope would stay more in his lane and pay more attention to the Church and less attention to the Caesars of this world:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/avbsPEVGzfA
Respectfully Don, the Pope has a duty before God to speak out on matters of faith and morals. He is doing so with regards to the war. He is well within the “lane” that Christ our Lord gave him as successor to St. Peter. The comments of the President are scandalous.
As for the Caesars of the world and whether the Church acting through the Pope and our Bishops should pay attention to them; supposing hypothetically that they were thought to be on their way to hell. Shouldn’t we rightfully expect someone with God given authority to warn them? Why else are they here? Or does assuming the role of a “Caesar” give them carte blanche to obey God only when expedient?
Popes would do better I think to emulate the attitude that Christ took to Caesar. There was much that Christ could have said about the brutal Roman occupation and yet he said virtually nothing. His Kingdom was not of this world and His mission was far beyond this world.
Pope Leo is speaking out of a reflexive pacifism that the Popes have adopted since World War II that gives cold comfort to people living under tyrannies and allows bad actors to go about their business unimpeded in the world. His only response is to call for dialogue. How well would dialogue have worked with Hitler and Stalin? About as well as it has worked with 47 years of dialogue with the mullahs running Iran, who want to unleash a nuclear war to bring back their 12th Imam. The Pope’s comments about the Iran War help the mullahs remain in power. When a Pope makes political statements he speaks beyond his office and enters the political realm. Sometimes it can’t be helped, for example the Polish Church under Communism for instance. Where it can be helped, Popes would be better advised to stick to their own business. It is not as if the Church has been well run since Vatican II. There is plenty of work for a Pope to do on the job that is his to perform.
I didn’t see the interview, but I imagine the unbiased “journalists” on 60 Minutes asked these three some hard-hitting questions about their long-standing relationships with Uncle Ted McCarrick … Right?
Read real history.
The Pope’s and the rulers who mattered were often in conflict. Sometimes even physical conflict. Sometimes the Popes deserved the secular smackdown that they received when they played in the secular sandbox. A legitimately elected bishop (just like a legitimately elected president) can behave like an ass.
The post WWII status quo is dead. It was an anomaly where peace was no longer a goal but more like an idol. Were there benefits? Yes. Is it fully beneficial to believe that NOTHING is worth fighting for. Absolutely not.
Is the image of Trump as a ruler who heals really more over the top that Leo’s assertion that all war is always bad? Which is likely to dupe more people in the long run?
I stopped polluting my brain with 60 minutes decades ago. The one thing that is a constant is you can assume that it will be reflexively liberal. As the lavender Mafia is reflexively liberal.
“The Pope’s comments about the Iran War help the mullahs remain in power. When a Pope makes political statements he speaks beyond his office and enters the political realm. Sometimes it can’t be helped, for example the Polish Church under Communism for instance. Where it can be helped, Popes would be better advised to stick to their own business. It is not as if the Church has been well run since Vatican II. There is plenty of work for a Pope to do on the job that is his to perform.”
As I used to say back in my Southern Baptist days, prior to being received into the Church some 18 years ago, “Amen, Preacher!”
No doubt that Pres. Trump is crude as a cob, to use a Southern expression, but the Pope is way out of line here or, as you say, way out of his lane.
Post that AI picture of Trump as Christ and tell me how you’d feel about it if it were Obama or Biden.
Without getting into Pres. Trump’s War of Words with Pope Leo, I am appalled by his retweeting the AI image of him in a clearly Messianic role as healer. In and of itself, it is at best sacrilegious. But, compounding it is the slight, but significant, change he made to the original artwork: He changed the central “angelic” soldier into a weird …. something. Why? What is it supposed to represent?
Saw the show. For a moment a vision of three social workers in a white car with the plate reading Pacem were racing toward the UN building on the East River passed my eyes. Then I realize that no one cleared the way for them and no one was gathering to listen to them at their destination.
The picture was not just blasphemous but bizarre. Trump, like most of us, is ever his own worst enemy.
We live in a decadent age where the Church is run by institutional apparatchiks who have little to offer. Leo’s a disappointment; that’s in keeping with all of them being disappointments.
==
As for Trump, on the one hand he is astonishingly resilient. On the other, he has neuralgic reactions to flotsam and jetsam in the medial sewer, including the latest banality out of some bishop’s mouth. I cannot make sense of the contrast in dispositions.
Midterms?
Not long ago Biden’s appearances and utterances became a selling point, especially when Harris backed him up as being something he most definitely wasn’t. Competent.
It didn’t take long for “Himself” (Trump) to drill holes into his own ship and not think of the party.
His own worse enemy can waft into many a moderate conservative’s conscience come November.
Don’t take my comment as a Rino, but as someone who most definitely doesn’t want to lose the House or the Senate to an Orwellian
bunch of lawmakers who become fans of Trump’s gaffes.
Our Pope goads our President into a Twitter tantrum (while 100% true, a tantrum nonetheless) and then the three sleaziest Cardinals in America join forces to spin the confrontation to the Left’s political advantage.
I wonder if something like this wasn’t suggested during Axelrod’s audience with Pope Leo…. At any rate, it appears to have likely been orchestrated from Rome.
Politicians are going to play games like this, to thumb their opposition in the eye and energize their base. I’d rather politicians were above these sorts of games, but that’s just wishful thinking, I know.
That said, a Pope worth his salt shouldn’t be acting like a mere politician. He should be above instigating and manipulating scenarios like this, for no other reason than to advantage a political side he favors. I’m trying to recall Benedict XVI or John Paul II doing anything remotely similar and coming up empty. For me, this sorry spectacle has damaged Pope Leo’s prestige more than it has President Trump’s. Other’s mileage may vary on that score.
It would be interesting to know just when the three sleaziest Cardinals in America cleared what I assume to be relatively busy schedules in order to synchronize their 60 Minutes appearance so quickly. It would not surprise me to find out it had actually been arranged before Trump’s tweet. I suppose we may never know for sure…
Popes in ages past found alliances with the powers of the age useful, but often treacherous, and always losing their usefulness as time passed. First the Christian Roman Empire, then the Holy Roman Empire, then the medieval French state, then early modern Spain and Austria proved useful (if challenging and sometimes dominating), and eventually lacking. Astute popes knew how the manage such arrangements and the best learned when to let go.
For modern popes, it’s diplomacy as modeled through the UN, shaped by postwar Western (especially European) liberalism and “democratic” socialism. As that diplomacy has always looked down its nose at American culture and international efforts as “out of step” with the wiser Euros, so the expanded Vatican diplomatic corps regards us (and Trump does offer a rather lush target). The modern popes most sympathetic to us were precisely those who experienced the role of American arms and policy in liberating their people from totalitarian oppression: Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.
As long as the Church’s leadership is controlled by Westerners formed by the postwar liberal-socialist “consensus”, I don’t see conflicts with American Republican presidents ending.
Clinton-
We WILL know for sure, one day.
The great laundry-airing called the General Judgement has a mandatory attendance requirement, for sheep and for goats both.
Before then, yeah, us plebes will never know.
Three Red Mice. Red as in Cardinal Red or Commie Red? Do I repeat myself?
The power of both Greg!
The reason the IRGC wants nuclear weapons is NOT for national defense! PLEASE study the IRGC’s apocalyptic Mahdi Cult of Shia Islam; this is why we struck!
Yep, they clearly wish to unleash a nuclear holocaust in order to bring their 12th Imam back. You are correct Joe!
The Battles of Lepanto and Gates of Vienna were against the intractable Islamists of the age, I am sadly ignorant of much, too much of that terrible age. The first won on 10/7, and the second on 9/12. Huh.
I vastly prefer President Trump in that image of, perhaps, healer, over that weird Gang of Three. Or triumvirate.
As usual late to the party.
I had thought for a brief moment that the appointment of Bari Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS news might mark a return to Cronkite normalcy in reporting for the organization. In retrospect, I suppose it was too much to hope for,
Neither Trump nor AI understand religious imagery enough to make a coherent icon. But this is a religious icon featuring Trump. Defending it as merely Trump-as-healer strikes me as absurd. The primary light in the upper portion, the birds / fighters between the light and the man, the man radiating energy from his palms, the positioning of people around him looking up, one of whom is explicitly in prayer, this is Christology.
i didn’t see the AI image of trump postted on truth social.
did it portray trump with a halo?
Eddie – See Philip’s comment.
Don, you are correct all around.
All Trump had to do was simply post “Nite Nite, Baby.” And the trolling would be over.
I dunno Pinky, seems plausible…
Perhaps Fr. Guido Sarducci, gossip columnist for the Vatican newspaper, could get to the bottom of this!
I miss Guido!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWBhsiBMOIo
Wasn’t there someone on Trump’s staff who would add pictures without checking with the front office? I think that person was removed. The photo is strange like a movie poster. It’s a stretch even to think it is St Luke the doctor , definitely not Christ.
Trump tends to be a bull in a china shop on his own, but I think he is often ill served by staff who cater to his worst instincts.
Perhaps it is time to give the Vatican some of our selective TS/SCI NSA IRGC intercepts over time planning and killing Americans… they can’t be THIS dumb!
Joseph Reich-
“They can’t be THAT dumb”
Hillaire Belloc humbly offers a different opinion.
Does it seem likely that men are better men *now* than in his day?
Well, we haven’t fought two world wars as they did in his day. I think however, based upon historical examples, that we should never underestimate the capacity for foolishness of anyone in a position of power.
I will first give the caveat that I voted for Trump 3 times; I am quite accustomed to his “Trumpisms”, and only poorly inclined toward being outraged.
I finally reviewed his notorious image; there are enough elements of both sacred and profane, it’s difficult to be offended by it, unless I take a sternly cynical view.
…Honestly, I saw worse for the Olympics these past few years.
If I’m not impressed with Trump’s spat with Pope Leo and 3 senior American prelates, …I haven’t been impressed with the clergy either.
If I had seen them all be vigorous advocates for offering Mass “by-the-book”, to ease restrictions on the traditional Mass, if they had been vigorous advocates of chastity, marriage, and…prayer…., if they had been advocates for abiding by the law (about immigration), I should have been willing to hear their critique.
But they haven’t.
So far, Pope Leo has been.. mediocre. True, he hasn’t started any new concerns of debatable nature, …yet neither has he halted anything foolish. We still have the synod idea floating around, Traditionis still stands, …nobody has bothered corrected Fr James Martin, nor any other scandalous priest.
They’ve been quite willing to undermine the humanity of the American citizenry, if only by refusing to admit that mass immigration has not been a boon to any society.
Soo…. I guess I’ll keep on keeping on, hope that prayers will bring more people to Christ. ..and let the Church’s leadership be thorns if they are so inclined.
I’m reminded of the disgust I had decades past: Church leaders had insisted the Church was pastoral, not political from the mid-80s. …we later learned that Catholic Charities and similar NGOs had been accepting (very) large sums of money from one or another federal agency for years. …Soo… not so charitable or pastoral, after all.
If our Church’s leaders wish to me to believe them, …it will help a great deal if they actually act on the Church’s teachings, not a merely a “modern” interpretation of it.
Today the Pope said:
“woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
He also criticized people who spend $billions on killing … You know, as opposed to spending $billions on silencing abuse victims.
All I could think was “people who live in glass houses …”