Pete Hegseth quotes fake Pulp Fiction Bible verse during Pentagon sermon

[bobalot]

Donald Trump's Defence Secretary has adapted lines from Pulp Fiction falsely attributed to the Bible, while giving a sermon at the Pentagon.

Pete Hegseth was speaking at a worship service at the government complex when he read the prayer, as first reported by Word&Way.

He said he had been given it by the "lead mission planner" of the rescue mission for two Air Force crew who were shot down over Iran.

"The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men," Hegseth prayed.

"Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.

"And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen."

The first few lines of the prayer were written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary in the film Pulp Fiction.

In the movie, the character played by Samuel L Jackson falsely claims they are from the Bible passage Ezekiel 25:17.

The second part of the verse is taken from the Bible, in a condemnation of the Philistines and the Cherethims, foes of the Israelites in the 5th Century BC.

In the movie, Jackson's character utters the verse before gunning down a small-time criminal who owed his gangster boss money.

But Hegseth's prayer changed "the LORD" in the Bible so it was instead about the unit involved in the rescue.

Hegseth has been holding regular church services in the Pentagon in recent months.

His comments overnight came as House Democrats filed articles of impeachment against him.

Nine Democrats accused him of war crimes, abuse of power and mishandling the Department of Defence.

Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari said Hegseth was "violating his oath, endangering US servicemembers, and committing war crimes, including attacks on civilians and a girls' school in Minab, Iran.

"Only Congress can declare war; his actions demand immediate removal," she said.

With Republicans holding a majority in both chambers of Congress, it is unlikely the impeachment will succeed.

A simple majority in the House of Representatives is required, followed by a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

No cabinet official has ever been removed from office via an impeachment, but Secretary of War William Belknap resigned before a vote in 1876.

Source

[bilateralrope]

I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said.

Wow.

[bilateralrope]

Remember that Vance is Catholic. Which means that, unlike Trump's other people, Vance can be excommunicated. That could be entertaining, maybe even useful if timed well.

Also, here are three other articles about the Trump government vs the Pope:

The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy

The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
Christopher Hale
Apr 09, 2026
∙ Paid

[UPDATE at 4:33 PM EDT: Letters from Leo can now independently confirm The Free Press report that the meeting took place — and that some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.

Other officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.]

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

As tempers rose, an unidentified U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

That scene, broken this week by Mattia Ferraresi in an extraordinary piece of journalism for The Free Press, may be the most remarkable moment in the long and knotted history of the American republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church.

There is no public record of any Vatican official ever taking a meeting at the Pentagon, and certainly none of a senior U.S. official threatening the Vicar of Christ on Earth with the prospect of an American Babylonian Captivity.

The reporting also confirms — with fresh sources and new color — what I first reported in February: that the Vatican declined the Trump-Vance White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

Ferraresi obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.

What enraged them most was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere.

The cardinal sat through the lecture in silence. The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.

Ferraresi’s reporting also adds vital color to the collapse of the 250th anniversary visit. JD Vance personally extended the invitation in May 2025, just two weeks after Leo’s election in the conclave.

According to a senior Vatican official quoted in the piece, the Holy See initially considered the request, then postponed it indefinitely because of foreign policy disagreements, the rising opposition of American bishops to the Trump-Vance mass deportation regime, and a refusal to become a partisan trophy in the 2026 midterms.

“The administration tried every possible way to have the Pope in the U.S. in 2026,” one Vatican official told The Free Press.

Instead, on July 4, 2026, the first American pope will travel to Lampedusa, the Italian island where North African migrants wash ashore by the thousands. Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident.

The Pentagon meeting also clarifies the moral intensity of Leo’s public posture over the last six weeks.

After Colby’s lecture, the pope did not retreat into Vatican diplomacy. He pressed harder.

Here’s the full backstory.

Trump's rift with Pope is playing out in public - it's costing him valuable support

Aleem Maqbool
Religion editor

It is not unusual for President Trump to face criticism from Catholic leaders.

His hardline immigration policies, promised in his campaign and cheered on by supporters, have prompted condemnation from church leaders.

For months it has put the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the US at odds with more right-leaning rank-and-file Catholics.

But the broad backlash in the last 48 hours, over Trump's attack on Pope Leo and his sharing of an AI image of himself as a Christ-like figure, is very different.

What is striking is where some of this criticism is coming from - loyal, conservative Catholic allies.

They are unhappy, not just because of Trump's public friction with Pope Leo, but at a much deeper level over the Iran war.

The uproar over Trump's lengthy social media attack on the first American pope, as too liberal and too "weak on crime", together with the AI image, have crystallised a shift in opinion among many Catholic conservatives since the war began six weeks ago.

"I pray that all of this will clarify for people that we don't look to a national leader, we don't look to those who have the most money or the most weapons. We look to Christ," says Bishop Joseph Strickland.

These words come from a man who, only last year, participated in a prayer event to "consecrate" the president's Mar-a-Lago home.

In 2024, Strickland delivered the keynote speech at CPAC where Donald Trump was the guest of honour. In 2020, he addressed a march of Trump supporters calling to overturn the election results.

He has been a staunch supporter of Donald Trump through thick and thin. Indeed, his overt political alignment, and open confrontation with the late Pope Francis, even played a part in his removal from office as Bishop of Tyler, Texas.

Yet, in the face of starkly competing White House and Vatican narratives regarding the war in Iran and the wider Middle East, Bishop Strickland has made a rare break from the administration.

"I do not believe this conflict meets the criteria of a just war. I stand with the Holy Father and his call for peace. This is not about politics. It's about moral truth," he told the BBC, saying the scale of death and suffering faced by innocent civilians meant the war could never be viewed as "just".

More than that, he has challenged the White House on its handling of the war and encouraged other Catholics to do the same.

"It becomes very dark when religion is used to justify immoral behaviour... using religion to justify especially dropping bombs is contradicting what the faith is about," says Bishop Strickland.

When asked about Trump's attack on Pope Leo and the image some have referred to as "AI Jesus", which Trump said he thought was a doctor not Jesus, Bishop Strickland said he felt it was his "duty" to remind the US president of the Gospel of Matthew. He pointed to a passage that teaches that supreme power resides with Christ and not with any man.

"When world leaders forget this truth, all are in peril," he said.

This shift in the way conservative Catholics regard the US president comes with political perils, given that he increased his support among that group in the 2024 election.

It remains a complex picture, according to Pew Research Center. Racial background played a significant role, with 62% of White Catholics voting for Donald Trump and 37% for Kamala Harris, while 41% of Hispanic Catholics voted Trump and 58% Harris.

This still constituted a trend towards the Republican Party among Catholics as a whole, but with pronounced splits.

Historically, the data suggests that when it comes to outlook, politics is more important than faith for a lot of American Catholics. They are largely split along party lines, says Greg Smith, Senior Associate Director of Religion Research at Pew Research Center.

US Catholics have constituencies that hold highly polarised positions on issues like abortion and immigration. It is why a coming together like this among Catholics on the left and right over the Iran war is rare.

Their views of the head of the Catholic Church bear this out. Pope Francis was much more popular among Catholic Democrats than Catholic Republicans, while Leo enjoys high support from both, according to Pew.

Pope Francis was often seen as a spontaneous progressive, who sometimes alienated Catholic traditionalists - for example in his restrictions on Latin Mass, which Pope Leo has eased.

The Pope is not above a certain level of criticism, says Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, and a prominent voice of the US Catholic "right".

"The Pope is the Pope, we owe him a certain amount of deference, but I don't think that Catholicism wants the obedience of cadavers. We are living, thinking persons," he says.

Wolfgang has transitioned from a cautious Trump pragmatist, keen that abortion laws be overturned, to a more enthusiastic supporter. He is a strong defender of mass deportation policies and the brand of Catholic nationalism represented by JD Vance. But he is now highly critical of the US president's behaviour towards Pope Leo.

"President Trump does not understand how Catholicism works. The Pope is not merely a head of state, he is the Vicar of Christ. Attacks on him are received as attacks on the Church itself. The more he attacks the Pope the more his support will drop among his Catholic voters," Wolfgang told the BBC.

Peter Wolfgang says his faith led him to challenge US Catholic bishops when they criticised President Trump's immigration policies, but the same faith makes him opposed to this war.

"When President Trump is out there talking about ending Iranian civilisation, or Secretary Hegseth is out there making some bloodthirsty prayer that is unrecognisable to Catholics, then it's completely natural for conservative Catholics to line up behind Pope Leo," he says.

Soon after the first US and Israeli attacks on Iran, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recited a highly controversial prayer at a Pentagon worship service that talked of "overwhelming violence" and "justice executed swiftly and without remorse".

In his writings, Peter Wolfgang often reserves his fiercest criticism for the Catholic "left" but he thinks the Iran issue has to some extent unified factions, partly because of the clarity of the Pope's anti-war messaging.

Unusually no senior US Catholic member of clergy publicly has supported the war in Iran. Even Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester, a key Trump ally, demanded that the US president apologise to the pope for his angry tirade, a demand that was rebuffed.

Positioned on the liberal wing of the Catholic church, Steven Greydanus, a deacon and prominent commentator, also sees this unusual convergence of opinion.

He feels that a contributory factor has been the White House's "subversion" of the principles of "Just War Theory" - theology that determines when it is right to go to war and how to conduct that war.

But he says it is also partly down to the contrast between President Trump and the "healing presence" of Pope Leo.

"While I am grieved by the directness of Donald Trump's attacks on Pope Leo, in a way I welcome the clarity of the choice Catholics are being presented with," Greydanus says.

The Vatican has stuck to the narrative that what we have seen play out in recent weeks is not a battle between Pope Leo and President Trump at all, but a Pope clearly drawing on his faith to oppose the logic of this war.

But when President Trump said that "a whole civilisation would die" in Iran, the pope did respond directly, calling the threat "truly unacceptable".

"There is an important difference between challenging a man and challenging the principle that makes war possible," says the Reverend Antonio Spadaro SJ, Undersecretary for the Vatican's Dicastery (Ministry) for Culture and Education.

Rev Spadaro told the BBC that while dialogue was happening behind the scenes in "places of power", the Pope also had to make public pronouncements against the conflict to "mark the moral limit" of what was acceptable.

So what is the view from Vatican City about some convergence between US Catholics on the left and right in their backing of Pope Leo's anti-war messaging?

"He does not unite everyone, of course," says Rev Spadaro. "But Pope Leo moves the Catholic debate away from a purely partisan track."

There are questions about why President Trump would post an AI image that was certain to alienate and offend some of his supporters. Unusually, he did back down and delete it.

And there are questions about the the motive of the tirade against Pope Leo. For some, it appeared to be designed to diminish the Pope's opposition to the war.

"But in trying to delegitimise, Trump's attack implicitly acknowledges the weight of the pope's moral voice," says the Vatican's Rev Spadaro.

"If Leo were irrelevant, he would not deserve a word. Instead, he is invoked, named, opposed - a sign that his words matter."

“Something Called the Just War Doctrine” — Speaker Johnson Lectures Pope Leo XIV on Augustine

The Speaker, an evangelical with no theological training, told Pope Leo XIV he misunderstands the doctrine his patron saint invented while the pope walked through the ruins of Augustine’s cathedral.
Christopher Hale
Apr 16, 2026

Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a House Republican press conference on Wednesday and offered Pope Leo XIV a theology lesson. “It is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology,” Johnson told reporters. “It’s something called the ‘just war doctrine.’”

He was responding to Pope Leo’s declaration that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Johnson, a Southern Baptist with a business degree from LSU and a law degree he parlayed into running a law school that never enrolled a single student, felt the need to correct the pope on a point of Catholic theology.

The pope he was correcting is an Augustinian friar. Pope Leo XIV entered seminary at fourteen, spent eighteen years in continuous theological formation, earned his doctorate at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, and served twelve years as the worldwide head of the Order of Saint Augustine.

His patron saint — the namesake of his religious order, the figure whose writings shaped his vocation, whose thought he studied in his doctoral dissertation — is Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine invented the Catholic just war doctrine in the fourth century.

The same week Johnson offered his lesson from a podium in Washington, Pope Leo was walking through the archaeological ruins of Augustine’s cathedral in Hippo, Algeria.

He laid a wreath of flowers where Augustine preached sixteen centuries ago, planted an olive tree as a symbol of peace, and celebrated Mass at the Basilica of St. Augustine while a choir sang hymns in Latin, Berber, and Arabic drawn from Augustine’s own texts.

This is the second time Johnson has publicly lectured Pope Leo on theology.

In February, the Speaker published a 1,700-word essay on X laying out what he called “the biblical case for border security,” arguing that mercy toward migrants is an individual obligation but never a governmental one. He cited Romans 13 to claim that nations “bearing the sword” fulfill God’s will through enforcement.

The pattern has become unmistakable: Johnson keeps picking theological fights with a man who has spent his entire adult life inside the tradition Johnson claims to understand.

Johnson was not alone on Tuesday.

Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters the pope should “keep his nose in the church’s business and stay out of the political arena.”

Nehls — who was fired from a Texas police department for nineteen violations in a single year and later stripped of a Combat Infantryman Badge the Army confirmed he was never eligible to wear — offered no theological reasoning for his position.

Rep. Carlos Giménez of Florida, asked whether he sided with the pope or the president, answered that he was “for the pope for spiritual things and for the president for political things.”

It was the MAGA version of telling Pope Leo XIV to “shut up and pray.”

Their entire framework assumes Catholic teaching on war and peace is a spiritual abstraction rather than a concrete demand on the state.

Augustine wrote City of God to demolish exactly that assumption. Catholic social teaching does not recognize a wall between the spiritual and the political — the dignity of the human person makes claims on every institution, from governments to congresses to the men and women who lead them.

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert who chose Augustine as his confirmation patron saint, made a similar argument this week — questioning whether the pope understood just war theory just hours after Pope Leo honored the man who created it.

The U.S. bishops’ doctrine chairman, Bishop James Massa, responded with a clarification on just war theory that I covered earlier today: a war can only be just as a defense against active aggression, and only after every effort at peace has been exhausted.

Augustine did develop the just war framework. He wrote it amid the collapse of the Roman Empire, and he never treated it as a permission slip.

War, for Augustine, can only be an act of grief undertaken to protect the innocent and restore order. The man who spent twelve years leading Augustine’s religious order as its Prior General — who prayed at his tomb, walked the ground where he preached, studied his writings in Latin as a seminarian in Rome — grasps the tradition that Johnson referenced on Tuesday.

Nothing in Johnson’s background, from a business degree to a law school with zero students, suggests he has engaged with it at any depth.

A political movement that needs religious cover for a war in Iran is attempting to conscript a sixteen-hundred-year-old Catholic doctrine into service, and the people doing the conscripting cannot name its conditions or its limits. Pope Leo can.

He has spent his life studying them. The gap between theological literacy and political performance has never been wider, and it is visible to anyone paying attention — including the twenty-one percent of the American electorate that is Catholic.

[bobalot]

Just when you thought the fucking buffoonery has hit rock bottom, they outdo themselves.

[Ralin]

It's pretty impressive that Trump insulting the Pope and blaspheming against Christ is a bigger deal to Iranian Muslims than many American Christians.