On April 6, The Free Press ran a story claiming the Pentagon summoned the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio to a meeting, and invoked the Avignon Papacy, threatening the Vatican. The Department of War, Ambassador Brian Burch, and the Vatican all put out statements saying the “threatening” meeting story is completely untrue. DNC progressive Catholic operative Christopher Hale, however, spent all week pushing and amplifying the story even after it was shown to be false.
On April 9, Pope Leo XIV met with David Axelrod, the former senior advisor to President Obama. Then, on April 10, the Pope made a clearly pacifist, anti-war statement aimed at the Trump administration. To cap it all off, CBS aired a “60 Minutes” episode on Sunday, April 12, with three of the most liberal cardinals in the American Catholic Church who spoke in opposition to the Iran war and against the deportation of illegal aliens. Meanwhile, social media erupted with provocative arguments over who is to blame for America’s moral and spiritual collapse: Catholics or Protestants?
Without a doubt, there is a political operation underway to set up a confrontation between the Vatican and the United States. The goal is to divide conservative Catholic voters from the Evangelical bloc — an established and battle-tested political tactic, cynical and craven as it may be. This has the fingerprints of the DNC and NGO operatives all over it, and the liberal progressives within the Catholic Church are working in their service.
Non-Catholic Americans need to understand there is a serious intra-Catholic war going on between the liberal progressives within the Church and those who are trying to keep the Church faithful to its 2,000 years of Biblical teaching. This war has been hot since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Just like the Protestant progressives, the Catholic Church has a large segment of that generation that wants to do to Catholicism what the Protestant progressives have done elsewhere, not only on issues like abortion, sexuality, and women’s ordination, but in the liberalizing of the entire political and social order. Decades ago Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger fought hard against Communists and Socialists within the Church who were using Marxist ideology to form what is now called Liberation Theology — a politicization of the Gospel. Cardinal Ratzinger knew it posed a threat to the distinction between Church and State.
As a well-assimilated Iraqi Christian immigrant to America, who journeyed through different Protestant denominations until I converted to Catholicism ten years ago, I can say without a doubt that the only reason there is such a strong, faithful, intelligent, fruitful Catholic community in America is because of the kind of nation our Protestant brethren founded in 1776. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI praised the freedoms created by the American system — this shared, common freedom Founding Fathers built allows both Protestants/Evangelicals and Catholics to grow without the meddling hand of the government.
One can admire the traditions, customs, and observances of the Catholics in Europe, but they are a small community that hold no sway in the public squares of their countries. In spite of what seems to be a recent increase in Catholic converts in France, Catholicism as an institution, like its political counterpart in Europe has become a “polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” to use Secretary Marco Rubio’s words.
Some may boast about the Catholic evangelization of South America centuries ago, but Latin America today offers a different picture: societies in moral decline, an anemic Catholic Church losing people to the Pentecostal movement, and corrupt governments unable to provide even basic safety for their citizens.
American Catholicism has a “conservative” segment for two reasons: the faithful presence of our Evangelical and Protestant brethren, which encourages us to remain steadfast in Scriptural teaching, and the blessed miracle of American religious liberty.
European Catholics complain that American Catholics are more American than Catholic, they phrase it in this way because what they cannot tolerate to say is that American Catholics are overall more faithful Christians than European Catholics. And that faithfulness is the wonderful fruit of being in America.
The reason why America has not fully given itself over to the globalist progressive agenda is due primarily to the Evangelicals who have held the line, and their conservative Catholic counterpart who have partnered with them. These two groups have worked hard together in spite of theological differences. The next destructive ideology that needs defeating is the Islamist totalitarianism of the Islamists seeking world domination. Like Pope John Paul II who stood up against Communism, Pope Leo XIV should be working against that ideology, not chastising the only country in the world that has expansive religious freedoms.
Conservative Christians of all stripes need to see this political op for what it is and hold the line, for the good of us all, and for the good of all American citizens.
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Luma Simms is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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