#excommunicate Vance

[profnicsnort]

Big things are happening in the Catholic fandom today. Seems like a controversial main character was written off. He was well-liked by many, even outside the fandom, but some hardcore fans didn't like him because he was too different from past main leads.

My fan theory is that the Pope tried to exorcise the demon from Vance, but due to his previous sickness, his body was not strong enough to endure alone, so the Pope went to get backup from heaven. Season finale is going to end on a cliffhanger with trumpets blowing - let's just hope the next season won't be the series finale!

[pendragonsclotpole]

i just saw a news headline that said the pope was rebuking jd vance’s theology and ngl i would literally die of laughter if the pope were to excommunicate jd vance

[ganurath]

What are the charges?

COME ON BABEY CADAVER SYNOD

CADAVER SYNOD 2 BABEY

[mariacallous]

God works in mysterious ways. Take U.S. President Donald Trump. He claims that he survived an assassination attempt last July thanks to divine intervention. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump said in an inaugural address. His belief is shared by many Christian leaders.

In their ranks, however, you won’t find the most influential of them all: the vicar of Christ. Pope Francis clearly doesn’t think that Trump has been anointed by God and is more likely to be praying for his failure than his success.

The day before Trump took office, Francis denounced the president’s plan for the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants while appearing on an Italian talk show. “If it is true, it will be a disgrace because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance,” the pope declared. “It won’t do. This is not the way to solve things.”

That wasn’t a one-off jab from the Vatican. The pope has a history of opposing the U.S. leader. Back in 2016, when Trump was just a Republican candidate promising to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, Francis said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Throughout Trump’s first term, he spoke out against what he saw as the president’s dangerous excesses, from spurning climate action to stoking fear in American society.

Now, nearly a decade later, the pope is back at it. “I think Francis is heading back into battle with Trump whether he wants to or not,” said Philip Shenon, a former New York Times investigative reporter and the author of Jesus Wept, a new book on the modern Catholic Church.

Francis doesn’t appear gleeful about the prospect of another crusade against Trump. “The pope is reluctant to do it, given how ugly the confrontation became in Trump’s first term,” Shenon said.

At 88, Francis is in bad shape for a grueling fight. He has weak lungs and falls ill often. Just a few days ago, he couldn’t speak at his weekly audience on account of a nasty cold. “He may worry, understandably, that he doesn’t have the energy for another go-round with Trump,” Shenon said. “But Francis doesn’t have a choice, I think, especially given the imminent prospect of mass deportations.”

For the Vatican, however, the initial casus belli wasn’t the United States’ mass deportation scheme but a provocation from Trump last December. The president appointed his close ally Brian Burch, president and co-founder of the conservative advocacy organization CatholicVote, as the U.S ambassador to the Holy See.

Burch, like many far-right Catholics in the United States, is a fierce critic of Francis. He has accused the pope of “progressive Catholic cheerleading” and castigated him for creating “massive confusion” by allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. He has also lent his support to Francis’s enemies in the church, including Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop who was excommunicated in 2024.

This has all been in service of a radical political project. Burch was instrumental in fueling the rise of a conservative Catholic movement aligned with Trump—call it the church of Trump. Membership includes Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, as well as other high-profile members of the new administration such as border czar Tom Homan and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Although U.S. conservative Catholics like to flaunt their faith, they have little respect for Francis. “They have long cast him as an enemy, a champion of liberal values they deem anathema to traditional Church doctrine,” said David Kertzer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini and The Pope at War. “And from what I can tell, it is U.S. wealthy Catholics who are the world’s primary funders of anti-Francis Church activities.” To top it all, Trump sent one of them to be his man in Vatican City.

As payback for the Burch appointment, Francis made a shock appointment of his own—naming Cardinal Robert McElroy as the new archbishop of Washington, D.C. A dedicated supporter of migrants, McElroy is among the most vocal anti-Trump clerics in the United States. He wasn’t the pope’s first choice, but circumstances changed his mind. “Last fall, word in the Vatican was that Francis had settled on a far less confrontational choice for the D.C. job,” Shenon said.

Confrontation now looks inevitable. Unsurprisingly, the first two weeks of Trump’s return to power have already given way to a war of words between the church and the White House.

On Jan. 20 and 21, the president signed a raft of executive orders cracking down on immigration. Two measures concerned the church directly: the suspension of refugee resettlement programs, which the church has long participated in, and the lifting of restrictions on U.S. immigration agents entering places of worship to round up undocumented immigrants.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops immediately issued a statement in condemnation. Bishop Mark J. Seitz, who chairs the conference’s Committee on Migration, spoke to CBS News and sounded the alarm on the new administration’s immigration policies. He argued they went “against some of the basic tenets of our faith, frankly, the fundamental right of every human person that needs to be respected, no matter their origin, no matter their situation.” Seitz added that Francis “certainly is paying attention.”

The Trump administration didn’t turn the other cheek. Homan, who oversees deportations, struck a defiant tone in an interview for Newsmax, declaring that Francis “ought to stick to the Catholic Church and fix that because that’s a mess.” Vance, meanwhile, took aim at the bishops, accusing them of cupidity since the church receives money from the U.S. government under its refugee admission program. “The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said to CBS News.

Vance’s remarks rocked the church. Even Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is close to Trump and led a prayer at his inauguration, was incensed. “That’s just scurrilous. It’s very nasty, and it’s not true,” he said in rebuke to Vance on his weekly radio show. “You think we make money caring for the immigrants? We’re losing it hand over fist.” Dolan later expressed his solidarity with migrants in a video posted on the Good Newsroom. “The church I love should not be blasted for simply obeying the Bible and caring for those immigrants who came here through this clumsy, fractured system.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has made another move that affects the church: drastically slashing the foreign aid administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As a result, Catholic Relief Services, an international humanitarian organization, stands to lose up to $750 million in grants from USAID, according to the National Catholic Reporter. Michael Czerny, a cardinal close to Francis, has condemned Trump’s USAID cuts, saying that millions will die as a result.

Francis has not directly commented yet, but relations between the White House and the Vatican are likely to worsen fast. The Trump administration shows no signs of contrition, but it should beware. The Catholic Church has a history of coming out on top against the merciless. During the second half of the Cold War, for instance, it supported the Solidarity movement in communist Poland, eventually leading to the fall of the regime in 1989. Three years earlier, in the Philippines, the church was instrumental in the People Power Revolution that toppled the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

An ailing Francis might look like an easy target. But, unlike other heads of state, Trump can’t browbeat him. The reason is simple: The president has no leverage on the pope. He can’t slap tariffs on Vatican City, nor can he threaten to annex it and turn St. Peter’s Basilica into a hotel.

As he nears the end of his life, Francis is focused on shoring up his legacy. He just released his autobiography and is still determined to make his voice heard about the world. He won’t stand attacks from the MAGA movement, and neither will the Catholic Church.

Ultimately, therein lies the cardinal sin in the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward the Vatican. They are turning their feud with the pope into something bigger: a feud with the church itself.

Francis might not be pope for long. And while U.S. conservative Catholics are hoping that they can influence the outcome of the next conclave, this is dubious. Francis has transformed the College of Cardinals. Nearly 80 percent of those who will elect the next pope were appointed by him. Many come from the global south and are in broad agreement with him. As such, Francis’s successor is likely to look unfavorably on Trump and Vance—all the more so if the church finally picks an African pope, who would put Africa’s economic development at the heart of their agenda. Cutting foreign aid and disparaging the vital work of charities around the world won’t be something that the next pope would forgive easily.

MAGA’s antics against the Vatican may well come back to haunt them. They think in soundbites. The Catholic Church, as the phrase goes, thinks in centuries.

[dostoyevsky-official]

JD Vance gets excommunicated and converts to eastern (russian) orthodoxy or a weird sedevacantist sect, sometime before the 2026 elections

[illbehalfingit]

me as a traumatized excatholic reading articles about the next potential pope

[memingursa]

It would be so fucking funny if the pope excommunicates vance

[serregon]

2025 predictions

trump’s kids are outed as having an incestuous affair

joe rogan promotes sounding as a miracle cure that the government doesn’t want you to know about

jd vance sex tape leak

elon becomes catholic, gets excommunicated one month later due to reinventing indulgences with crypto

ben shapiro starts a rap career

kanye west and varg vikerness collab

[brewdairymore]

jd vance killed the pope to avoid getting excommunicated

[apenitentialprayer]

Yes, it is. It would have to be Pope Francis or the bishop of Vance's particular Church. If our Vice President is currently counted as a member of the Diocese of Washington D.C., however, I wouldn't hold my breath. Cardinal McElroy wrote an article back in 2021 in defense of President Biden being able to take Communion, in which he deplored the "weaponization" of the Eucharist to coerce civil leaders as a form of "political warfare." He thought that selective use of denying Communion was too divisive and polarizing in a community already suffering too much of that.

He has been pretty vocal in his critique of the Trump administration's plans for mass deportation, but I don't think he'll be rolling out this tactic.

It's hard talking Christian theology when a lot of people still haven't seemed to grasp the whole "love thy neighbor" thing.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I know we were all laughing at the concept of the Pope excommunicating Vance...but he pulled the other ultimate power move and literally died rather than meet with that chucklefuck.

[alyt-neroon]

the pope should excommunicate all american catholics until they present jd vance's head on a pike as tribute

[virginiaisforhaters]

like don’t get me wrong I’m gonna be absolutely crushed if papa frankie dies cause he will most likely be replaced with another ratzinger but on the other hand if the last thing he did in this world is say “fuck jd Vance” it would be a beautiful ending. Papa Frankie listen excommunicate him before you go it’ll be so funny. Take out large swaths of tradcaths and you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower

[mellyena]

JD Vance excommunicated for being the Pope’s final straw

[runawaymun]

Hi Mun, I'm curious about something you mentioned in the Vance post. Totally all good if you don't have room on your plate to answer this.

You said the Mormon phrase “burning in the bosom” is an example of how high demand groups shut down rational questioning. Could you expound on that?

As someone who is/has been a part of that religion, I'm not sure I've seen it used to shut down questioning (though I've certainly seen it over extended from the original scripture passage it references, which was talking to a specific person about a specific thing). But I've definitely only heard a tiny slice of what people say and don't always pay much attention.

Anyway, super curious for a more outside (and clearly well-studied) perspective on it if you feel like sharing.

Hey! I don't mind at all bc tbh religion in general is a special interest so thanks for giving me an excuse to talk about it 😅

Take me with a grain of salt because I am NOT LDS or exmo, but the area I live is heavily LDS and I've had LDS friends and many, many discussions with the various missionaries who show up at my door (I've also attended a few meetings and had a discussion with a bishop out of pure curiosity). My information also comes from Alyssa Grenfell on YT who's a very vocal relatively young/recent exmo, and Dr. John Dehlin who is also exmo but much older and formally excommunicated since he won't stop talking about the church and interviewing other exmos haha. I like listening to what they have to say especially because they come from the traditional/"normal" (non-fundamentalist) background. Everybody finds it easy to understand that fundamentalist Mormonism is a high-demand cult, but it's harder at surface level to recognize how the modern LDS is also a high-demand religion, just in a different way, since on the outside they present as very harmless "good Christian values" etc. etc.

Regarding "the burning in the bosom", what I'm really getting at is the matter of testimony. Your personal testimony is paramount within the LDS church, and it's based on feelings and personal revelation, which essentially means that you are constantly self-indoctrinating. Dr. John Dehlin was talking about this a lot on a recent podcast -- the problem with this, is that there is no litmus test as to whether or not the burning in your bosom is just your personal feelings, or if it's Heavenly Father, so a) everything becomes confirmation (pattern recognition), and b) it makes LDS people especially vulnerable to radicalization, since personal revelation can come to anyone at any time, and again there is no litmus test for whether or not these feelings or 'revelations' are true.

This becomes especially problematic when trying to reason and point out holes or inconsistencies. When a member of the LDS church experiences cognitive dissonance, they immediately fall back on (and are heavily encouraged to fall back on) their Testimony. That 'burning in the bosom', the 'feelings', as their litmus test of 'this is real and I know it to be true, even if the facts don't concur'. I've experienced this while talking to missionaries, and this is also something that I've heard discussed over and over by people like Alyssa Grenfell and Dr. John Dehlin (and the many people he interviews!). I've also heard that questioning people are often pressured into bearing testimony in order to publicly reaffirm their faith, or to create a hostile environment where if they aren't willing to bear testimony, then everyone assumes something is Wrong -- though I assume that varies from ward to ward.

If you're at all interested in how mainstream LDS falls into the high-demand religion/cult catagory, I cannot recommend Dr. Dehlin and Alyssa enough. Alyssa's information is very personalized to her, but Dr. Dehlin interviews pretty much everybody across the board that he can get to come in for a podcast (and also invites a LOT of very knowledgeable guests). I still find Alyssa's story extremely valuable though, because it's so recent. Can't recommend their work enough!

[callthefruitsquad]

Pope Francis has the ability to do just the best thing. Like just excommunicate JD Vance.

While I'm at it also excommunicate all of the tradcats that are not technically in line with the church!!

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