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The Pentagon fears the Vatican’s authority in a battle over Christianity’s power
The Vatican has not been a major player on the geopolitical stage in, well, at least a few centuries. The Catholic state is tiny, and has not had a real army or ruled land since, give or take a century, the days of Machiavelli.
Nevertheless, in January the Pentagon summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., to a meeting, according to reporting from The Free Press. There, Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, sparred with the Catholic diplomat in light of Pope Leo XIV’s outspoken opposition to the war in Iran, and to wars in general.
According to the report, which cited anonymous sources, the Pentagon told the cardinal, has the military might to do “whatever it wants” and that the pope “better take its side.” NBC reported its own Vatican sources calling the meeting “most unpleasant and confrontational,” and Catholic outlet The Pillar reported a senior Vatican official describing the meeting as “tense” and “aggressive” though not overtly threatening.
Then, one of the Pentagon reps reportedly referenced the Avignon papacy, a niche bit of church history that the official transformed into a cudgel. During this period, from 1309 until 1376, the papacy moved to France, where seven different popes lived in the territory of Avignon, under the influence of the control and influence of the French crown.
Since the reporting broke, both Pierre and Pentagon representatives have rejected the framing of the meeting as a threatening one. Vatican representative Mateo Bruni said that the meeting “provided the opportunity for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest.”
The Department of War’s X account posted that the meeting was a “substantive, respectful, and professional” one in which the participants discussed “morality in foreign policy, the logic of the U.S. National Security Strategy, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and other topics.” The department denied any mention of the Avignon papacy.
Still, the fact that the Pentagon met with the Vatican ambassador at all is a first, and notable for demonstrating the impact of the pope’s moral leadership and the importance of Christianity in driving and justifying U.S. military actions — in particular, the war with Iran. And the public’s engagement in the debate over the specifics of the meeting proves that the U.S. government is right to care what the church says about its wars; people take it seriously. Military might is not the only force for influence.
Pivotal to understanding what the meeting meant is the disputed reference to the Avignon papacy, a historical moment in which a country’s secular government clashed with the church over symbolic and moral authority. The fact that there is even uproar and debate over whether an esoteric piece of history was mentioned in the meeting is proof enough of the stakes of the meeting.
To understand why Avignon is so pivotal — and why a Jewish publication would even be covering a piece of Catholic ancient history — it’s important to understand that, during that time period, in the 1300s, Europe was Catholic. Martin Luther wouldn’t nail his 95 Theses to the door of the church for two more centuries, and Protestantism didn’t exist. That gave the Vatican massive influence as the leader of Christendom, which encompassed all of Europe, and arguably much more. Kings were seen as vassals of the Vatican, carrying out its orders.
When the French king, Philip IV, asked for the church to fund his war against Britain, the pope refused. In 1302, Pope Boniface VII drove the point home with a papal bull stating that submitting to the pope was required for eternal salvation, placing the Vatican’s authority over all royal power. And he threatened to excommunicate Philip.
In response, the king had Boniface VII beaten to a pulp, and he died shortly thereafter. His successor, not incidentally, forgave the king and restored his religious authority. France used its power at the time to stack the church with French-allied clerics, and the move to Avignon followed shortly thereafter, with the next seven popes all of French background.
Fundamentally, the Avignon papacy was a conflict over symbolic authority. Philip IV wanted his wars to be blessed, and righteous. The Pentagon, clearly, wants the same for the war on Iran, with historically freighted roles. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared the war a Christian mission for the U.S., fighting alongside Israel as the world’s Jewish state — together targeting the Islamic Republic.
The idea that the Pentagon might have summoned the ghosts of the Avignon papacy shows that the U.S. still cares about the moral authority of the peace-preaching Vatican as a rival to military might. And the debate over whether anyone referenced what sounds like a nerdy piece of history is really a debate over the influence of the U.S. as a world leader, and its bona fides as what the current government purports to be a Christian nation.
Catholicism is becoming increasingly high profile in the historically Protestant U.S. Six out of nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. Vice President JD Vance is a Catholic convert. Unsubstantiated rumors are flying online that the pope is considering excommunicating Vance. There is clearly still power in the church, at least culturally.
And Leo XIV has leaned into that cultural authority. In numerous speeches, including his Easter address, the pope has appeared to directly respond to American government officials and decisions, expressing sympathy for migrants as Trump’s deportation efforts accelerated, and critiquing “imperialist” military might as he entered into war with Iran. Despite being the first American pope, he has refused multiple invitations to the White House, including one for July 4 this year to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday; instead, he is pointedly visiting migrants on the same day.
“The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration,” a Vatican official told The Free Press.
The particular clash between the White House and the pope also centers in large part around Hegseth, who is a member of an extremist Reformed Christian church, not a Catholic. (Though he does have a tattoo reading “Deus Volt,” a rallying cry during the Crusades — which were certainly Catholic.) After Hegseth gave a speech declaring that God had blessed the war with Iran and asking troops to pray for military victory, the pope said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Despite their different Christian movements, summoning a Vatican representative to the Pentagon, whatever was said, shows that Hegseth wants the pope on his side, and recognizes his speeches as a major factor in geopolitics.
The battle for Christian moral authority between the government and the pope also comes alongside a more internal Catholic clash in the U.S. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is fighting high-profile Catholic influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, who regularly justify their open antisemitism with Catholicism. Though the pope himself has yet to weigh in, it’s another face of an ongoing struggle to define what Christianity means.
In today’s world, it’s hard to imagine a speech from the pope or the threat of excommunication carrying real weight, among so many churches with many theologies about war, antisemitism and the Middle East. The Vatican is no longer the singular authority over the West, and the pope’s power is largely symbolic. Whether or not anyone in the Pentagon meeting said that the U.S. has the military force to do anything it wants, it’s true.
Yet the fact that the government is engaging so seriously with the Vatican is a sign of the increasing centrality of Christianity, both Catholic and otherwise, in the U.S. government, and in American society. As Christian nationalists in the Trump administration seek to go back to the imagined glory days of Western culture, when Christendom rules, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the oldest, largest and most public face of the religion, or to deny its moral authority.
In a world in which the Vatican has only soft power, the pope’s decrees carry only as much power as they are given. But however soft the pope’s power may be, that surreal Vatican visit to the Pentagon suggests that even the best-armed military in the world is afraid of it.
The post The Pentagon fears the Vatican’s authority in a battle over Christianity’s power appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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