If the medium is the message, the White House’s message to Pope Francis couldn’t be clearer. When U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote an opinion piece last month in the magazine First Things, urging the Vatican not to renew its agreement with China on the appointment of bishops, the choice of outlet didn’t go unnoticed in Rome: In past years First Things, a religious publication close to the Catholic right, has grown increasingly favorable to the Trump administration and hostile toward the Holy See, declaring, among other things, Francis’s popedom “a failing papacy.”
The venue itself “already says something about the intention of those who wrote this article,” the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, told reporters. “It was a declaration of which side Pompeo was on,” Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University who recently wrote the book The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis, told me. Pompeo, an Evangelical Presbyterian, also met with Italy’s prime minister and foreign minister late last month to discuss China—according to the Italian press he warned them against Beijing’s involvement in 5G networks.
