Pope Leo gets the last laugh
What Trump doesn't know about papal history fills volumes
Pope Gregory VII’s register for the year 1075 includes a set of 27 “dictates” that set out a sweeping view of papal authority.
Popes can depose emperors, the document asserted. They can free people from an obligation to follow immoral leaders. No one can judge a pope. His name must be recited in church. And the pope is the only figure whose feet must be kissed by kings.
Leave it to France’s Cardinal Richelieu, the minister to King Louis XIII, to come up with the appropriate riposte six centuries later. If the attribution to him is correct, the cardinal quipped, “We kiss the pope’s feet — and bind his hands.”
The struggle between popes and secular leaders for pre-eminence has been going on for a very long time. But it has been a while since it surfaced in as crude a form as it did, according to the Free Press, at a January Pentagon meeting attended by Pope Leo XIV’s U.S. representative. In the National Catholic Reporter, Aleja Hertzler-…
