Running Roughshod on Romanism

With Pete Hegseth prosecuting the war against Iran as a crusade against the Iran's extremist brand of Islam - no, make that all Islam - and Hegseth's own evangelical pastor railing against the Roman Catholic Church as being hostile to American values, Catholics who established partnerships with evangelicals in pursuit of common goals (like overturning Roe v. Wade)  suddenly found out that Christian nationalists like Hegseth and his pastor are anti-Catholic and anti-Vatican.

Hah - I figured that evangelicals and progressives had something in common!

The particular beef Donald Trump and his Christian nationalist allies had with the Church was Pope Leo XIV's opposition to the war against Iran apparently devolved into a threat in which the Pentagon warned the Holy See's ambassador to the United States, according to one source, that the U.S. "has the military power to do whatever it wants" - and if the pope knows what's good for him, he'd better acknowledge that and keep his damn trap shut.

I think it's time that Roman Catholics in the U.S., especially the extreme conservatives who voted for Trump thrice, realize that Trump is not their friend and, given his threat to end Persian civilization as well as force the pope to serve under the dominion of the American military machine in an arrangement not unlike the Avignon papacy in France, he is in fact the Antichrist.  You cannot serve the Holy Father in the Vatican and the Antichrist in the White House.  You cannot undermine your own values by establishing alliances with non-believers who wish you ill when the alliance no longer serves its purpose.  Catholics in the United States must renounce Trump, Trumpism and MAGA, even if it means the dissolution of the Union - which, as I've already argued here, is likely for the best.

And Trump chose the wrong religious patriarch to pick a fight with.  Let me remind you that Pope Leo is from Chicago . . . and he can play hardball as well as any alderman or machine boss.