Catholic Left Projects Its Own Misdeeds Onto Trump Administration, by Peter Wolfgang

By Peter Wolfgang, Catholic Culture, Apr 10, 2026

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own.  See full bio.

“Whatever the left accuses you of, they are doing it themselves.” That’s a common saying on the right and it is often true. But it’s not always the whole truth. Sometimes it’s true of the left and only partly false about the right. The recent news story about the Pentagon and the Vatican—or, rather, the uses to which that story has been put—strikes me as one of those times.

According to an April 6th Free Press article, senior Pentagon officials summoned the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio to the United States to deliver a blunt warning after the Pope made statements sharply critical of U.S. foreign policy under President Trump. The article claimed U.S. defense officials pushed the Vatican not to interfere in matters of American strategic policy in language understood to imply that the U.S. could retaliate by fostering a rival Catholic authority or otherwise pressuring the Church—an insinuation supposedly underscored by an explicit reference to the Avignon Papacy, the historical episode in which the papacy was effectively subordinated to a secular power….

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