As for Trump’s communications antics, Neo and MJR, get over it.

— Bill Fello

Nobody should ‘get over it’ because it is quite possibly Trump’s greatest political vulnerability. His communications style is also one of his greatest assets at the same time, so it’s a problem.

Trump can condemn someone in what seems like irrevocable terms and then turn around and praise them to the skies, or vice versa. Look at some of what he has said about Ted Cruz or Lindsay Graham or others. To an extent that’s just politics, you have to demonize your opponent in the primaries and then work with them in the general. But Trump is much more intense about it in both directions.

As I said, it’s both his greatest strength and greatest weakness, but as a weakness it could bring him down if he said just the wrong thing about just the wrong person at just the wrong time.

Better than thirty years ago–is it that long–in the wake of Desert Storm, the Presbyterian Church (UDA) was horrified to discover all requirements of the Just War Doctrine–Augustine AND Aquinas–had been met. So a move was made to, as far as I could tell, to add a codicil, “The foregoing aspects of the JWD having been met is insufficient. The actual qualification is whether the US did it. If so, none of the foregoing apply.”

— Richard Aubrey

This is critical. This isn’t just a problem of the Catholic Church, it’s an institutional problem all over Christendom, in both clerical and secular institutions. The educated class of the West hates/loathes their own civilization, and it tends to focus on America as the preeminent Western power.

But not uniquely. Decades ago, for ex, Peter Hitchens (brother to the more (in)famous Christopher) wrote a book called The Abolition of Britain about this same tendency in operation there.

The educated class of the West has soaked up a globalist, one-world, non-violent vision of the future from grade school on, for over half a century now. Not everyone buys into it, obviously, but for a critical mass of that class it’s the air they breathe, the water they swim in, they don’t even think about it, it’s just there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGbgSzBuI6s

This old Coke commercial from 1977 (I can remember when it was on air as a kid) is actually a telling example of that mindset. Coca-cola was just trying to sell soda, of course, but they made that ad because they knew it would have an appeal. Look at the kids singing, all races, all religions, all ethnicities, peaceful and united.

That vision actually does animate the ideological globalists on a deep level, so deep they themselves are only half aware of it. Run, of course, by People LIke Them*.

But that tends in turn to make them turn on their own society, and esp. America, because they know/sense that the majority of the people don’t believe in it. When America asserts its sovereignty, ignoring international institutions, that is a threat their vision. They literally don’t quite perceive the threat of Islamism or the Nigerian issues or China, because they are non-Western. Victims of the West. Oppressed. The world is all messed up because the West messed it up and won’t let them fix it.

They need everybody, everywhere, to stop identifying with their own nations and faiths and so on, and be ‘one world, one people’, like in the commercial. America is strongly nationalistic and insists on acting as a sovereign nation.

It’s the same reason Western intellectuals used to be outraged by South Africa but uninterested in China’s offenses…except for Tibet. The Tibetans ranked higher on the ‘victim scale’.

The first priority, from that POV, is to make sure the West is tied down and firmly under the control of People Like Them. They want to create a world state because they want to create an appeal authority that will overturn their own peoples when they don’t follow the intellectual class.

(See the EU, and it’s infamous ‘vote again’ commands when an election goes against an elite class goal.)

The Church is simply one institution among many that is now dominated by members of that educated class, and so shares their attitudes and assumptions and thus sees the USA as the primary threat to the world and that vision from the Coke commercial.

(Or the song Imagine which comes close to being the anthem of the educated class. I cited the Coke commercial simply because the Church is an outlier on the atheistic elements of the vision from the song.)

Even the sex scandals flowed from it. The Catholic Church was not the only institution with that problem at that time, and not the only one that covered it up. They rightly get more blame because they are supposed to uphold higher standards, but it was an issue institutionally all over the West, a nasty overspill from the Sexual Revolution.

*That’s a human failing, not just them. Almost everyone, when visualizing how things ‘should’ be, indulge in that.

The leftward tilt of the Church from the top all the way down to local priests and parochial schools is undeniable. So, how likely is it that the College of Cardinals would elect any Pope not of a liberal/leftist POV?

— Geoffrey Brittain

The leftward tilt of almost every institution is undeniable. It varies in intensity but it’s widespread because the educated social class runs most institutions and have been pushing this for decades.

That’s one of the mechanisms behind Conquest’s 2nd Law: Any organization now explicitly and intentionally right-wing becomes left-wing over time.

That’ll be true as long as the educated class has the mindset it does.

…or Egypt…

There is the fact that leo was part of the bishopric in algeria where christianity id largely proscribed and missionaries were murdered in the 90s but he finds ‘dignity’ in algeria

He as much as damned the president, quoting isiah saying ‘god doesnt hear the prayers of those who wage war’

Doesnt it suggest a 5th column since he has been nearly basenghi on the regimes atrocities

Some have pointed out pope pius anbivalence but context that he was supporting a coup against hitler among other things

That gets in the word of the narrative promulgated by hochhuths the deputy

Frankly i was rooting for Cardinal Sarah who is strong in the word but the conclave is rather useless

As has been said about a million times, his Holiness is not stopped from noticing Nigeria, is he? Is any Christian church forbidden by Heaven to notice Nigeria? Seems like it.

If you take the “leadership” of any Christian denomination, I may except the most conservative but I’m not sure, as being made up of the mot egregious hypocrites, you’ll be pretty close to target.

Cite for the Church’s “fury”?

Firstly: with pleasure. I already provided one such citation, in my previous link. However, there are more. Starting with the proclamation of excommunication laid upon the first trial’s two main prosecutors and assorted others. Unfortunately I was unable to find an original proclamation of the matter online (though it seems search engines are getting worse) but it is briefly covered in the first link here.

https://sojournphotography.com/joan-of-arc/essay.htm

https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trial-of-Joan-of-Arc.pdf

https://kolbefoundation.org/gbookswebsite/studentlibrary/greatestbooks/aaabooks/joanofarc/sessions4.html

https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-nullification/

Secondly: no need to put sarc air quotes around the “fury.” It was quite serious. About a dozen or so excommunications were published in retaliation, leading to quite a few executions and some vigilante killings. The chief prosecutor Pierre Cauchon was already dead but upon his excommunication his corpse was intentionally dug up from consecrated ground and thrown in the river, with it only being recovered and reburied in secret with the hallmarks of his office at great risk by some of his remaining supporters (hence why his body was only recently rediscovered). To say this was quite the harsh and serious – especially for those at the time – reproach would be an understatement.

And we will soon see why.

Alas, it was largely confined to the sort of middle managers, the clerical and university staff directly connected to the trial rather than the bigwigs like the Duke of Burgundy or the English lords, in part due to politics and in part because it would have been hard to prove what they knew or when they knew it on the various illegal and downright heretical things in the trial (and indeed one reason for the acquittal trial and ensuing excommunications taking as long as they did was because the Anglo-Burgundians purposefully hid the relevant documents in Rouen and would not give them up until the Valois took Rouen by arms, and even in trial with Papal oversight several of the VIPs involved in the convictions flatly refused to answer questions about what trial proceedings were like).

Are you arguing, Uncle Joe-style, that Joan wouldn’t have been burned had Rome known at the time of what was happening at Rouen in 1431?

Correct, that is absolutely what I am arguing. Or at least; that is what would be the case if the Papacy and Church higher ups applied canon law as they did in the retrial, and for various reasons I think there is no real reason to believe they would not have.

But perhaps the most eloquent evidence in favor of that was the nature of the trial itself and what the perpetrators did during it. Among other things, Monsieur Bishop Cauchon took pains to exile one of the prior judges mid trial for voicing that the trial was proceeding unjustly and in contrast to the law, and he and his co-conspirators took pains to minimize reporting of the matter to their ecclesiastical superiors (though they rather unwisely for them but fortunately for us kept a rather complete record of the trial, which was crucial evidence against them). They also refused to turn over records to their superiors for more than 20 years until the Valois seized them and the city that held them, and their successors repeatedly refused to answer basic questions about etiquette and conduct on the trial even when confronted by a Papal Legate speaking with the authority of the Pope.

To say this screams Mens Rea and at the time also did does not even come close to describing it. It shows the Burgundian operatives involved in the trial knew they were operating in violation of their oaths and canon law, expected there to be trouble if (when) that became obvious, and took pains to purge naysayers and limit the evidence that could be brought to bear on them. I may be a Protestant who has plenty bad to say about the Catholic Church now, even moreso to say about it in the time of the Late Middle Ages, and I think there can be something to be said about a system that allowed men like this to seize the power and impunity they had and how the Church’s institutions had allowed that, but one reason the Maid has the stature she does is because the trial and retrial were not particular edge cases and not a case like with say the Knights Templar where the central Papacy knew what was going on and at least passively approved it (even if grudgingly or under duress/threat as in the case of the Templars).

Cauchon etc al broke basically every rule in the book, knew it, and relied upon a conspiracy of silence and the Burgundian/Plantagenet armies to hide the evidence. And so when that came to surface the Papacy was livid and took bloody revenge.

The Church didn’t “get wind” of Joan’s burning and react. No, Joan’s family, friends, and supporters tied to the French crown formally pushed for it.

Semantics. And again as my links point out, while Cauchon etc al ultimately kept far better records than was good for their reputational health close at home they sent scant reports up the chain. Hence confusion from the higher church authorities in France and Italy when they thought of it even at the time (which admittedly was not often, they had other fish to fry like the Ottomans sweeping up and the embers of a massive church schism being healed as well as “more mundane” peacemaking roles) prior to the Royal and Doremey appeal, and bafflement and increasingly anger as they dug up the case and ran into the Burgundians stonewalling increasingly futilely.

Which is again why the Pope not only personally squashed the excommunication of Joan and all other adverse verdicts, but the excommunication of a host of those involved in the trial.

Without that I doubt anything would have been done to clear Joan and certainly not at the time she was condemned.

You are entitled to your doubts, but I would like to point out how there were already a host of question marks raised at the trial even at the time and while the wider church did not think much of it at the time Cauchon etc al’s intentional vagueness in reports was noted and even at the time Cauchon and to expel one of the judges and a host of other witnesses and staff from the trial midway precisely because they were objecting to his particular flavor of railroad.

Obviously significant royal and French clergy pressure helped speed this along, as did the fact that the excommunication of Joan was never affirmed throughout the rest of the Church and English Rouen and Burgundian Paris largely failed to get it to hold even on their bow territory. But this is the kind of thing that would likely be picked up and dug up after the fact.

The Church’s “position” on Joan changed dramatically over time:

1431: Condemned as a heretic (local Church court, politically influenced)
1456: Declared innocent (official Church review overturns verdict)
1920: Canonized as a saint

So the Church first condemned Joan of Arc, then later admitted it was wrong, and ultimately elevated her to sainthood.

This is a misreading of the Church structure both then and now, and would be closer to what happened with Jan Hus. But in Joan’s case the excommunication and execution for relapsed heresy was only passed in a relatively few portions of the local church administration (not coincidentally those that were Burgundian and Plantagenet aligned), with their superiors (mostly the other bishops and the Primate to the Gauls and some assorted cardinals and nuncios) being baffled at the poor quality of the reports but not finding it too out of the ordinary in a time of plague, war, and social collapse, but not affirming the verdict and in particular with large parts of the rest of the church territories in Western Europe never respecting or accepting the verdict (and again even the Burgundian and Plantagenet clergy having a hard time getting it to stick in their own territory).

Then the appeals came in and worked their way up, to the scandal of those, and a certain lesser know Borgia Pope murmured a bit about how these were very serious charges so let’s examine this decision from the subordinates. And the rest is history, and theology with a side bit of legality.

There was much more politics involved at each level than principle.

Well sure, but it helped that in this case the prosecutors ran afoul of a huge amount of the politics involved as well as some of the principles. Even if Pope Callixstus III had been a much more shameless and cynical man than even I think he was (and I do think the vigor with which he reacted indicates some amount of genuine disgust and righteous rage) why the Devil would he happily accept this kind of overreach and systematic insubordination from a mere Bishop for nakedly secular reasons? And I note that even Uncle Joe was content purging people not just for their crimes that he had authorized or ordered them to do (as Yezhov might attest) but also a few cases where he learns some of them were taking “liberties” he had never approved of, as Dybenko could attest.

Ed: For those interested, here’s a link to a framework of St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Just War Doctrine.” This will answer some of Noah’s questions, but it doesn’t settle all of them. My frustration with this debate isn’t whether it applies to our military action against Iran – which is fair game for a debate – but that the Vatican refuses to even apply it at all. The last two pontificates have rejected Aquinas’ teaching and adopted the unscriptural and flabby moral posture of the pacifist in all circumstances. Aquinas knew better based on both the Old and New Testaments, and it’s frustrating to watch an entire establishment of the Church believe they can outsmart one of the most intelligent Church doctors in the Magisterium.

===

Presented without comment. https://t.co/ou2ISvz7du pic.twitter.com/ye5LhQInK3

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) April 14, 2026

Ed: Almost all of the people lecturing us about listening to the Pope on the war are doing so from Planned Parenthood-paid soapboxes.

If I were President, I wouldn’t want to alienate Catholics. However, as noted above, not all Catholics are behind the Pope 100%.

Also, most Hispanics are Catholic, and Hispanics are an important and growing constituency.

BUT he lied in order to make Trump look EVIL!

Ergo, ALL is forgiven…

…and His Eminence should be applauded.
Congratulated.
BEATIFIED, even, for his courage, fortitude and moral probity…in warning us all about the Orange Monster.

(BTW, if he’s not afraid of lying to the world, why should he be afraid of Trump?)

File under: Deep Encyclical—“Fake but accurate” hermeneutics…in the service of “a higher Truth”…
(Unless the real question is, WHO’s his speech writer?)