Canossa is a small town in Italy with a castle on a rugged perch of rock that dominates the countryside. You probably have not heard of it, unless you’ve studied church history a bit, for in this little town, in 1077, a drama was played out. Here, in the dead of winter, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich (Henry) IV stood in the snow for three days, begging the then-pope, a fellow German with the surname of Hildebrandt, and known to history as Pope Gregory VII, to lift his excommunication. For people in seminaries and church history studies, the episode is famous and well-known for the way it redefined the relation of church and state, with the Papacy able to force the State’s acceptance of its claims to ecclesiastical, and temporal authority and supremacy.  Behind this convenient narrative, however, lay a much more nuanced and problematical development. Both the Emperor and the Pope were Germans. Indeed, Gregory VII’s presence on the cathedra of Rome represented the final conquest of the papacy by the Germans, a process that had begun under Charlemagne some two hundred years earlier, and which, along the way, had accrued new claims and wedded itself to other doctrinal formulations which, to reject, was to reject the Papacy itself. In the ironies of history, at the very moment the Germans had finally and irrevocably captured the Papacy in a kind of medieaval “regime change operation”, they, in the person of Hildebrandt/Gregory VII, had lost it. Hildebrandt, for whatever his faults or even spurious claims, was not about to play the secular game that so many German Holy Roman Emperors were enamored of.

The situation has its odd parallels to today. After World War II the Vatican increasingly entered America’s Cold War geopolitical calculations. Contacts between the world’s newest intelligence agency, the CIA, and the world’s oldest intelligence organization and political chancery, the Papacy, were forged under the pontificate of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, aka Pope Pius XII. Pacelli’s Vatican became the intermediary to launder American money to the Italian candidates standing against the Communists in Italy’s 1948 elections. The daliances with the papacy continued through Pacelli’s successors: Roncalli (John XXIII), Montini (Paul VI), Luciani (John-Paul I), Woytilja (John-Paul II), Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Bergoglio (Francis), and now, Prevost (Leo XIV). Indeed, under the first non-Italian pope in centuries, John-Paul II, the Papacy’s politics and America’s became wedded to such an extent they seemed almost inseparable, for the Papacy and the PrResidency were both locked in a life-and-death duel with the Soviet Union, a duel that the Soviet Union would lose, not just because of Mr. Reagan, but because of John-Paul II’s threat to return to Poland to confront any potential Soviet military invasion of the country to keep it within the orbit of the Warsaw Pact.  It was the Soviet Union’s “Canossa” moment, and like Henry IV, it lost that contest. The Warsaw pact, and eventually the Soviet empire itself, unraveled.

Rumors still abound, and I am inclined to believe them, at least, in their major outlines, that Benedict XVI was forced to resign by the exertion of quiet pressure from the United States, and a consortium composed of the ever-miserific George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama to bring in a much more "convenient" and much less traditionally inclined pope in Francis. but like Hildebrandt, the final capture was cemented with the unlikely election of Robert Cardinal Prevost, an American, to be Bishop of Rome in 2025.

Amid this weird parallel, consider the following story shared by S.D.(with our gratitude):

US-Vatican Relations Extremely Strained As Pentagon Denies It Berated Pope's Diplomat

Note the following:

Washington's attack on Iran alongside Israel has come under repeat condemnation from the Vatican, leaving US relations very strained. What hasn't helped things are widespread allegations that US officials berated the Vatican's top diplomat in Washington.

Pentagon and Vatican officials are denying reports that US authorities gave the Holy See’s ambassador a "bitter lecture" demanding the Church align with the Trump administration following criticism of the Iran war by Pope Leo XIV.

"Today, as we all know, there has also been this threat against the entire people of Iran. And this is truly unacceptable," the pope had told reporters Tuesday evening in Italy, in reaction to Trump threatening to wipe out a whole "civilization".

The exact nature of the reprimand from the USA to the Papacy sounds all-too-familiar, and all-too-mediaeval, for after all, the Emperor had the knights, the armor, the soldiers, the siege engines, just as Washington has the bombs, the planes, missiles, soldiers, and financial infrastructure:

The Free Press had specifically reported that Cardinal Christophe Pierre received a "bitter lecture" from US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby.

Colby is said to have told the Vatican representative that Washington "has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the Church had better take its side."

The report also stated that a US official referenced the Avignon Papacy, when the French crown used military force to dominate papal authority in the 14th century. The suggestion was that the US could overpower and dominate the papacy - or something along those lines.

But again, both sides appear to be denying the entirety of this, instead saying the exchange was actually normal and cordial.

Pope Leo XIV has also lately condemned what he described as "diplomacy based on force" - and most recently in his Easter blessing he urged "those who have the power to unleash wars" to "choose peace."

It may indeed be true that if the Papacy wishes to criticize American policy or the pronouncements of what appears to be an increasingly unhinged leadership, the same sorts of responses should have been made by the Papacy decades ago in response to the Iranian regime. There's no moral distinction, as far as I can see, between the American President threatening to end Persian civilization and with it, a considerable number of Persians themselves, and the various Ayotoilets' endless threats and chants of "death to Israel". So if the Papacy intends to play the role of Gregory VII once again, it must do so with absolute equanimity and avoid every appearance of mere politics.

That said, however, I, for one, am not buying the attempt to play down and paper over the episode, for the threat narrative has one thing going for it: Mr. Trump's bombastic character.  Additionally, we have seen in recent months a wholesale media campaign being waged against anyone who questions America's foreign policy subservience to Israel, and its equally bombastic prime minister.  In the context of all those developments, a bare and unbridled militaristic threat against the Vatican - especially with an American pope ("we know who your family are and where they live") -  not only makes sense, it would be in character for this administration. After all, the one Roman Catholic on Mr. Trump's so-called religious liberty commission was forced to resign when she questioned the evangelozionist theology being tacitly promoted by the Trump Administration (consider only Ambassador Mike Huckabee), and when she stood up for the traditional Roman Catholic (and by the way, traditional Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox, Coptic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Armenian, and Nestorian) doctrine on what the Incarnation of Christ means for the Old Testament promises.   The administration has proven it will not tolerate any articulation of the traditional position. Why would it stop when it thinks it has leverage over an American pope?

And this is where the miscalculation comes in, and the miscalculation is orders of magnitude larger than the miscalculation of the Emperor Henry IV standing in the snow at Canossa. It is magnitudes of miscalculation larger, even, than the Soviet Union's miscalculation of the situation in Poland when John-Paul II threatened to intervene. For in this instance, I submit, Leo XIV is speaking less as pope, for he is not invoking nor even mentioning the papal claims. He is speaking more as "traditional Christian bishop", and therefore speaking for the whole of Christendom in the renunciation of the evangelozionist theology and its political implications.  He is speaking with the same voice, and the same concerns, of all those American podcasters whom Mr. Trump so recently denounced as being "pro-Iranian", which is to miss their - and his - point entirely.  If this reading of Leo is correct - and I will be as surprised as anyone else if it is - then what we are seeing may be the first of more such actions to come, rather than the last of a long line of liberal popes checking off another box in the progressivist messaging list.

And for the record, it will turn out no better for Mr. Trump than it did for Henry IV, or Yuri Andropov and general Jaruzelski. The road to and from Canossa is always a bitter one for mere secular power.  Time will tell if this particular road to Canossa will be a bitter one for the papacy as well.

See you on the flip side...

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 Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

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