Thursday Cartoons: Butt of the Moon

Good morning, have you seen this?

Following Pope Leo’s “state of the world” address this past January, the Pentagon invited Holy See ambassador to the U.S. Cardinal Christophe Pierre for a meeting. The move was characterized as “unprecedented” in the report, as “there is no public evidence of any Vatican official ever taking a meeting at the Pentagon.”

There, U.S. officials expressed their disapproval of the Pope’s speech. The report continued:

According to both Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the meeting, Pentagon brass picked apart the pontiff’s January speech, reading it as a hostile message directed at Trump’s policies. What particularly enraged the Pentagon, one Vatican official said, was the passage in which Leo appeared to challenge the Donroe Doctrine—Trump’s update of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere.

In his speech, the Pope declared: “A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.”

At one point in the meeting, the report said, one U.S. official made mention of the Avignon Papacy of the 14th century. During this time, the French Crown used its military power to influence the papacy.

The pope is refusing to come to Trump’s Fourth of July trailer park bash…

Instead, on July 4, 2026, the American pope will visit Lampedusa, a tiny island in the Mediterranean that serves as a gateway for North African migrants risking everything to reach Europe. No pope has ever been more aware of what that date means, and Leo is too deliberate to have chosen July 4 by accident.

One Vatican official put it bluntly: “The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration.”

Good.

As it is, Trump is threatening again:

I’ve been dealing with a killer headache so enjoy the cartoons from Cagle:

Be safe out there.