A senior Pentagon official summoned Pope Leo XIV's ambassador to a closed-door meeting in January and told him the United States 'has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world' and that 'the Catholic Church had better take its side,' according to accounts from Vatican and US officials briefed on the extraordinary encounter.
As the meeting grew heated, one American official invoked the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century period when the French monarchy wielded military force to bring the Catholic Church to heel.
