Senior Pentagon officials allegedly summoned Pope Leo XIV's ambassador to the United States for a closed-door confrontation in January, invoking a fourteenth-century act of military coercion against the papacy in what sources describe as an extraordinary attempt to pressure the Catholic Church into supporting the Trump administration's foreign policy.
The allegations, first reported by Rome-based journalist Mattia Ferraresi in The Free Press and independently corroborated by reporter Christopher Hale, centre on a meeting at the Pentagon between Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and Cardinal Christophe Pierre, who at the time served as the Holy See's ambassador to Washington.
