Pope Leo XIV delivers his speech to the faithful during the Wednesday General Audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on November 5, 2025. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images 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. Key takeaways A report from the Free Press this week blew up tensions on the right already escalating over the US-Israeli war on Iran. It alleged that Pentagon officials met with a top Vatican diplomat to the US and raised the memory of a dark time in the Catholic Church’s history: when French rules exercised power over the church and the pope. There are now competing accounts of what actually happened in that meeting, and denials by the Trump administration and the Vatican. These reports sparked furor among Catholics and religious conservatives — adding fuel to an ideological civil war…
Did the Trump administration threaten the pope?
