Part 6 of the Great BASH Series

Written by Doug Scott, LCSW, MA

cosmicchrist.net  •  April 16, 2026

AUDIO

“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

— Donald Trump, Truth Social, April 12, 2026

“To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is.”

— Pope Leo XIV, aboard the papal plane, April 13, 2026

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

— Vice President JD Vance, Turning Point USA event, April 14, 2026

What Surfaced

This installment was not on the calendar. Part 5—Easter with the Egregore—went up nine days ago. I had planned to let the series breathe. But the past week has delivered, in rapid sequence, the most concentrated Lo tissa event in the life of this project: a president posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, attacking the pope as “weak” and “terrible,” and a Catholic vice president publicly lecturing the Vicar of Christ on how to do theology. The Third Commandment violation is no longer embedded in policy and prayer services. It is being performed in public, on social media, in real time, with the sacred name displayed as costume.

This post is shorter than the previous installments. The framework is already in place. What follows is the application of that framework to a week that made the invisible architecture visible.

The Image

Late Sunday evening, April 12—roughly forty minutes after posting a 330-word attack on Pope Leo XIV—Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself in white robes, light radiating from his hands, healing a sick man in a hospital bed. A nurse prays behind the patient. Military figures stand in adoration. A bald eagle soars overhead amid fighter jets rendered as celestial escorts. The American flag fills the background. The Statue of Liberty glows in the distance.¹

There was no caption. The image spoke for itself.

By Monday morning, the backlash was coming from inside the house. Riley Gaines, Fox News host and prominent MAGA ally: “A little humility would serve him well. God shall not be mocked.” Megan Basham of the Daily Wire: “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy.” Isabel Brown, also Daily Wire: “Disgusting and unacceptable.” Republican Representative Warren Davidson: “This can only be described as madness.” The Knights Templar International—an organization that backed Trump in both 2016 and 2024—demanded a public apology. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose break with Trump has deepened over the past year, called it “more than blasphemy” and identified it as “an Antichrist spirit.”²

Trump deleted the image roughly thirteen hours after posting it. His explanation: “I thought it was me as a doctor. It had to do with Red Cross.” He blamed the media. He refused to apologize. Then yesterday morning—Tuesday, April 15—he posted a new AI image: himself and Jesus in a tender embrace, eyes closed, in front of the American flag, captioned “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”³

The first image was deleted. The second was posted defiantly. The pattern is not course correction. It is the grandiose self testing the boundary, retreating momentarily, and then pushing through it again. The orange-ray blockage does not learn from resistance. It metabolizes resistance as evidence that the resistance is the problem.

The Pope

The Jesus image did not arrive in a vacuum. It came forty minutes after a Truth Social tirade in which Trump called Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” accused him of “catering to the Radical Left,” and claimed credit for Leo’s papacy: “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”⁴

That last claim deserves a factual correction, because it reveals the grandiose self’s relationship to reality. The day after Leo’s election in May 2025, seven cardinals—six Americans and the Vatican’s nuncio to the United States—held a joint press conference at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. Asked explicitly whether Prevost had been chosen as “a counterweight” to Trump, they denied it unanimously. Cardinal McElroy said Leo’s American citizenship was “almost negligible in the deliberations of the conclave. Surprisingly so.” Cardinal Dolan: “I don’t think at all my brother cardinals would have thought of him as a counterweight to any one person.” Cardinal Gregory, while acknowledging that “the cardinals were quite aware of things that have occurred in the United States,” maintained the operative question was “who among us can bring us together.” Cardinal John Dew of New Zealand has more recently called Trump’s account flatly wrong. And the College of Cardinals’ longstanding reticence about an American papacy has always been precisely the worry that a U.S. pontiff would appear captive to U.S. geopolitical power—a consideration that militates against, not for, electing an American as a political foil.²⁰

The trigger was Leo’s Saturday prayer vigil at St. Peter’s, where the pope had condemned the “delusion of omnipotence” fueling the Iran war and called on the faithful to “break the demonic cycle of evil.” Leo did not name Trump. He did not need to. The language of delusion of omnipotence is precise enough to land without a proper noun.⁵

Leo’s response, aboard the papal plane to Algeria the next day, is worth sitting with: “To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is.” He said he had “no fear of the Trump administration.” He said he would “continue to speak out strongly against war.”⁶

The Power vs. Authority distinction has never been rendered with this kind of clarity across two living figures. One man posts a 330-word screed from his phone, claims credit for the other man’s job, and follows it with an AI image of himself as God incarnate. The other boards a plane to Africa, speaks from the Gospel, and says he is not afraid. One operates from Power—dominance display, narrative control, the self inflated to consume all available space. The other operates from Authority—a grounding that does not need to shout, does not need to claim credit, does not need to generate spectacle to stabilize itself. Authority has a center. Power borrows its center from whatever it can dominate.

Trump has continued the attacks. On Tuesday night, just before midnight, he posted again: “Will someone please tell Pope Leo that Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters.” In an interview with an Italian newspaper, he said the pope “has no idea what’s going on in Iran.” The feud has expanded internationally—Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister and one of Trump’s closest European allies, called his remarks about the pope “unacceptable,” and Trump responded by calling her “unacceptable.”⁷

The Vice President

And then JD Vance made it worse.

On Monday evening, appearing on Fox News, Vance dismissed the Jesus image as a joke—“of course, he took it down because he recognized a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor”—and told Bret Baier that “in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and let the president handle public policy.⁸

On Tuesday, at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, he escalated: “In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”⁹

I want to hold these words in the light for a moment, because they are the Schmittian subordination made audible.

JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. He is seven years into the faith. Pope Leo XIV holds a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He served as the Prior General of the worldwide Order of St. Augustine for over a decade—the order founded by the theologian who developed just war theory, the very doctrine Vance invoked in his critique. Leo wrote his doctoral dissertation on Augustine’s understanding of authority. He is the first Augustinian pope in the history of the Church.¹⁰

While Vance was explaining theology to the pope from a Turning Point stage in Georgia, Leo was in Annaba, Algeria—at the archaeological site of ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as bishop until his death in 430 AD. The pope planted an olive tree at the site. He celebrated Mass in the Basilica of St. Augustine. The saint Vance claims as his patron was being honored by his own religious descendant at the moment Vance was lecturing that descendant on how to read him.¹¹

The Hegseth/Vance/Johnson research I developed in Part 3 identified three theological streams within this administration. Hegseth operates from genuine dispensationalist conviction—the war is God’s will, and his orange-ray blockage is internally consistent with his theology. Johnson deploys dominionist framing as legislative armor. Vance is the third stream: Catholic postliberal, Schmittian, intellectually sophisticated—and utterly without tools to resist the loyalty imperative when it collides with his own tradition. The friend/enemy distinction that organizes Schmittian politics made the decision for him. When forced to choose between loyalty to the strong leader and fidelity to the head of his own church, he chose the leader. He told the pope to stay in his lane.

And the book cover matters. Vance’s forthcoming memoir about his Catholic conversion—Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith—features a rural church on its cover. The church is Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia. It is a United Methodist congregation.¹² A Catholic conversion memoir with a Methodist church on the front is the aesthetic signature of the same incoherence: the form of tradition severed from its content. The clothing of the sym-bolon worn by the dia-bolon.

What the Numbers Show

The political cost is already registering. A Fox News poll conducted March 20–23 found Trump’s approval among Catholic voters at 48% approve, 52% disapprove—a reversal from the same pollsters’ February survey showing 52–48 in his favor. In the 2024 election, Trump won Catholics by 12 points. In sixteen months, that margin has collapsed to a net negative. Forty percent of Catholics now strongly disapprove.¹³

An NBC poll found Pope Leo at +34 net favorability among U.S. registered voters. Trump sits at -12. Among Catholics specifically, the Iran war has a net -10 approval. The pope’s favorability was the highest of any figure tested—ahead of every politician in both parties.¹⁴

Broader voter regret is also measurable. CNN polling shows 17% of Trump voters now report at least “mixed feelings” about their 2024 vote, up from 8% a year ago. His approval among working-class white voters—the demographic he locked down most effectively—has fallen from 63% to 49%.¹⁵

John White, professor emeritus of politics at Catholic University of America, told EWTN News—the Catholic network, not a liberal outlet—that Trump’s 2024 coalition “is now in tatters [and] Catholics are no exception.”¹⁶

The Information Architecture

Fox News’s Monday morning coverage is a case study in editorial management. Fox & Friends—the most-watched cable morning show, anchored by Ainsley Earhardt, whose personal brand is built on Christian faith and who hosts an entire Fox programming vertical called “Fox Faith”—delivered a 40-second segment on the pope’s Africa trip. The Jesus image was not mentioned. The editorial decision to simply not cover the most inflammatory religious act by a sitting president was made deliberately.¹⁷

Newsmax’s approach was more active. The network brought on Frank Pavone—a priest defrocked by the Vatican in 2022 specifically for “blasphemous communications on social media”—to defend Trump’s blasphemous social media post. Pavone told viewers that Trump’s “actions are in fact advancing the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Host Rob Finnerty framed the entire pope conflict as a coordinated Democratic plot, noting that Leo had met with David Axelrod and suggesting the real goal was “trying to convince Catholics to turn against Republicans before the midterms.”¹⁸

The information architecture’s work is differentiated. Fox managed the story through silence—don’t show it, and viewers who depend on Fox won’t process it. Newsmax managed it through narrative inversion—show it, but reframe the outrage as enemy action. Both approaches serve the same function: metabolizing a Lo tissa violation so that the base can continue to carry the name without confronting what the name is being carried over.

The Egregore’s Sunday

I said in Part 5 that the egregore feeds on sincere worship directed at the wrong object. This week demonstrated the corollary: the egregore also feeds on the sacred image itself, consumed and worn as skin.

The AI Jesus image is the Third Commandment violation made visual. The white robes, the healing hands, the light—these are the iconographic vocabulary of the Incarnation, the tradition’s way of rendering the moment when the divine enters matter in order to serve, to heal, to lay down power rather than seize it. Kenosis in paint. And the AI generator has taken that vocabulary and draped it over a man who, on the same evening, attacked the pope, refused to apologize, claimed credit for the papacy itself, and has spent the past month threatening to destroy a civilization while invoking God’s name.

This is not a man playing dress-up. This is the nasa—the carrying, the lifting, the bearing—at its most literal. The name of God is being carried as a banner. The image of Christ is being worn as a costume. And the actions underneath the banner and the costume are the precise inversion of what the name and the image represent. Lo tissa says: you shall not carry this name over actions that contradict this name’s character. The AI image is what the violation looks like when it becomes self-aware enough to generate its own iconography.

The Desert Fathers would have recognized the structure instantly. The logismoi—the intrusive thought-patterns that wear the clothing of Logos while pulling toward fragmentation—are operating here at the level of image production. The image looks holy. The light looks like grace. The posture looks like healing. That is the mechanism. The dia-bolon does not work by making evil look evil. It works by making the counterfeit indistinguishable from the real. And AI has given it a new medium.

And Vance’s response—“he was posting a joke”—is itself a logismos. It provides the exit ramp. It converts the sacred violation into a misunderstanding about humor, which converts the people who recognized it as blasphemy into people who “don’t get the joke.” The exit ramp is part of the architecture. It is how the thoughtform metabolizes its own exposure.

The Mirror

Something is surfacing. The polling shows structural erosion, not noise. Bishop Robert Barron—a member of Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission—publicly demanded an apology. The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed dismay. Catholic bishops across the political spectrum, the National Catholic Reporter, America Magazine, EWTN’s own news service—the institutional Church is registering the violation.¹⁹

Whether this surfacing constitutes a genuine opening—a green-ray crack in the orange-ray armor—or whether it will be metabolized and reabsorbed by the loyalty architecture remains the open question. The evangelical critics who pushed back on the Jesus image (Basham, Brown, Gaines) objected to the blasphemy without breaking with the war, the pope attack, or the policy apparatus that produced the moment. The correction was about propriety—“don’t make us look bad”—not about the underlying Power-over-Authority orientation. It was orange-ray self-policing at the surface level. The boundary of the symbol was defended. The energy driving the symbol was left untouched.

And Newsmax’s Pavone gambit is worth one more beat of attention: a priest defrocked for blasphemous social media posts, brought on television to defend a president’s blasphemous social media post. The recursion is the message. The egregore does not hide its mechanics anymore. It performs them openly and dares the audience to notice.

And then, on Wednesday—as if the week had not already provided enough material—Hegseth delivered his April Pentagon worship service. He read aloud a prayer he called “CSAR 25:17,” which he said was “meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.” The prayer read: “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds 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.”²¹

This is not Ezekiel 25:17. The actual verse is a single sentence of prophetic condemnation against the Philistines. What Hegseth read is a military adaptation of Samuel L. Jackson’s monologue in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—words Tarantino invented for a hitman to recite before executing an unarmed man. The words were composed for cinema, attributed to scripture by a fictional character, and are now being prayed aloud at the Pentagon podium as devotional text by the Secretary of Defense during an active war.

Hegseth himself acknowledged the prayer’s connection to the verse while apparently unaware—or unconcerned—that the bulk of what he was reading was written by a filmmaker, not a prophet. He told the congregation that what they heard in the worship service should “inform the remainder of our day and the remainder of our week and who we are and how we conduct ourselves, no matter what we’re doing.” Fifteen minutes earlier, he said, he had been discussing naval blockades with Admiral Cooper.

I have been writing about Lo tissa for six installments now—the carrying of God’s name as a banner over actions that contradict God’s character. The AI Jesus image is the visual form of the violation. Vance lecturing the pope on theology is the intellectual form. And Hegseth reading a Tarantino screenplay as scripture at the Pentagon podium is the liturgical form—the word of God replaced by the word of Hollywood, spoken as prayer, in the house of war, and no one in the room appears to have noticed the substitution. The logismoi do not need to be subtle anymore. They are being spoken from the podium in plain sight.

The contemplative task has not changed. Name it. See it. Refuse to feed it from the other side—because outrage directed at the BASH feeds the same thoughtform from the opposite pole. Hold the mirror up. Include ourselves in the mirror’s frame. Ask the only question that matters: what are we carrying, and is the name we bear reflected in our actions?

Because Lo tissa is not addressed to presidents and popes. It is addressed to anyone who carries the name. The commandment does not say “they shall not carry.” It says you shall not carry. The mirror faces both directions. That is why this series exists.

This is my limited, partial, open-handed offering. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

This post is part of the Great BASH Project at cosmicchrist.net, an ongoing series examining authoritarian political movements through psychological, geopolitical, and metaphysical lenses. Previous installments: How the Egregore Great BASH Shows Itself at the Threshold of Human Shift (March 10, 2026); The Terran Self at War with Itself (March 2026); The Billionaire Who Named His Surveillance Company After Sauron’s Weapon and Then Lectured on the Antichrist (March 2026); The Prayer at the Pentagon (March 31, 2026); Easter with the Egregore (April 7, 2026).

Notes

1. Donald Trump, Truth Social post, April 12, 2026, late Sunday evening. The AI-generated image depicted Trump in white robes with light emanating from his hands, healing a man in a hospital bed, surrounded by military figures, a nurse, a bald eagle, fighter jets, the American flag, and the Statue of Liberty. Reported by Washington Post (“Trump post appearing to depict him as Jesus removed amid backlash,” April 13, 2026); Variety (“Trump Deletes Post With Image Depicting Himself as Jesus After Backlash,” April 13, 2026); ABC News; CNN; Axios; Al Jazeera; CNBC; Fox News.

2. Riley Gaines, post on X, April 13, 2026. Megan Basham, post on X, April 13, 2026. Isabel Brown, post on X, April 13, 2026. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), post on X, April 13, 2026. Knights Templar International, post on X, April 13, 2026. Marjorie Taylor Greene, post on X, April 13, 2026: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.” Compiled from reporting by Time, Variety, ABC News, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and Fox News, April 13–14, 2026.

3. Trump’s “doctor” explanation: ABC News and CNBC, April 13, 2026. New AI image posted April 15, 2026: screenshot from “Irish for Trump” X account showing Trump and Jesus embracing, captioned “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Reported by The New Republic (“Fresh Off AI Jesus Scandal, Trump Posts Another Crazy Jesus Photo,” April 15, 2026); Yahoo News; TMZ.

4. Donald Trump, Truth Social post, April 12, 2026. Full text of the 330-word attack on Pope Leo XIV reported by Fox News (“Trump accuses Pope Leo of being ‘terrible’ on foreign policy,” April 12, 2026); Axios (“Trump slams Pope Leo as ‘weak,’ ‘terrible’ after Iran war criticism,” April 13, 2026); CNN; NPR; Washington Post; Time; LiveNOW from FOX.

5. Pope Leo XIV, Prayer Vigil for Peace, St. Peter’s Basilica, April 11, 2026. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” Reported by Axios, Fox News, NPR, and Vatican Media. Leo’s earlier post on X, April 10, 2026: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

6. Pope Leo XIV, press conference aboard papal plane en route to Algiers, April 13, 2026. “I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism.” Reported by Associated Press (via NPR), CNN, BBC, PBS, Fox News, Newsmax, ABC News.

7. Trump’s continued attacks: Truth Social post, approximately midnight, April 14–15, 2026 (CNBC, April 15, 2026). Interview with Corriere della Sera reported by Fox News (“Trump calls Giorgia Meloni ‘unacceptable,’” April 14, 2026). Meloni’s response via Fox News; see also NPR, BBC, Reuters.

8. JD Vance, interview with Bret Baier, Fox News Special Report, April 13, 2026. “I think the President was posting a joke.” On the Vatican: “In some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.” Reported by Deseret News, America Magazine, ABC News, Democracy Now!, Time.

9. JD Vance, Turning Point USA event, Georgia, April 14, 2026. Reported by MSNBC/Rachel Maddow Blog (“Vance presses Pope Leo to be ‘careful when he talks about matters of theology,’” April 15, 2026); The Daily Beast (“Catholic Convert JD Vance Mansplains Theology to the Pope,” April 14, 2026); Irish Star; NPR.

10. Pope Leo XIV’s credentials: doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), Rome; Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine; dissertation on St. Augustine’s understanding of authority. National Catholic Reporter (“Vance questions the pope on just war theory hours after Leo honored its founder,” April 15, 2026). Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., quoted in the same article: “You cannot satisfy the just war tradition’s criterion of right intention if you do not have a clear intention.”

11. Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Annaba, Algeria, and the archaeological site of ancient Hippo, April 14–15, 2026. Leo celebrated Mass in the Basilica of St. Augustine and planted an olive tree at the site. National Catholic Reporter, April 15, 2026; The Daily Beast, April 14, 2026.

12. Vance’s forthcoming memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, announced April 1, 2026. The cover features Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia, a congregation of the United Methodist Church’s Holston Conference. Reported by The Daily Beast, April 14, 2026; Time, April 14, 2026.

13. Fox News poll conducted March 20–23 by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research, 1,001 registered voters, margin of error ±3 percentage points. Catholic voter breakdown: 23% strongly approve, 25% somewhat approve, 12% somewhat disapprove, 40% strongly disapprove. Previous Fox News poll (February 28–March 2) showed 52% approve, 48% disapprove. Reported by National Catholic Register, April 10, 2026; EWTN News; Newsweek; Axios; ZENIT News.

14. NBC News poll conducted February 27–March 3 by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, 1,000 registered voters, margin of error ±3.1 percentage points. Pope Leo: +34 net favorability. Trump: -12 net favorability. Pew Research Center September 2025 data: 8 in 10 U.S. Catholics held a favorable view of Pope Leo. Reported by Newsweek, April 8, 2026; HNGN, April 14, 2026.

15. CNN/SSRS poll, April 2026. Trump voter regret: 17% report “mixed feelings” or worse, up from 8% in April 2025. Working-class white voter approval: 49%, down from 63% in February 2025. CNN (“Trump voter regret is clearly registering now,” April 4, 2026).

16. John White, professor emeritus of politics at Catholic University of America, quoted by EWTN News/Catholic News Agency, April 10, 2026. Susan Hanssen, history professor at the University of Dallas, quoted in the same report: “A reversal of positions seems to be underway within the Catholic community.”

17. Mediaite (“Fox News is Openly Ignoring Trump Posting Himself as Jesus,” April 13, 2026). Fox & Friends co-host Carly Shimkus delivered a 40-second reader on the pope’s Africa trip without mentioning the Jesus image. Howie Kurtz, Fox News Media BUZZmeter, April 14, 2026: observed that the Jesus image “created a furor that will dominate the news for days” and that “nobody bought his attempt at an explanation.”

18. Mediaite (“Newsmax Invites Priest Defrocked For ‘Blasphemous’ Social Media Posts to Defend Trump’s Blasphemous Social Media Post,” April 14, 2026). Frank Pavone, defrocked 2022 for “blasphemous communications on social media” and “persistent disobedience.” Rob Finnerty, Newsmax, April 14–15, 2026: suggested the pope’s criticism was coordinated with David Axelrod ahead of the midterms. Reported by Joe.My.God., April 15, 2026.

19. Bishop Robert Barron, post on X, April 13, 2026: called Trump’s post “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” and said “the President owes the Pope an apology.” Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, statement April 13, 2026. Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez of Philadelphia, statement April 13, 2026. Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, statement reported by America Magazine, April 14, 2026. See also National Catholic Reporter; America Magazine; EWTN News; Deseret News.

20. Joint press conference, seven cardinals, Pontifical North American College, Rome, May 9, 2025 (the day after Leo’s election). Cardinals present: Daniel DiNardo, Timothy Dolan, Joseph Tobin, Blase Cupich, Wilton Gregory, Robert McElroy, and Christophe Pierre (then apostolic nuncio to the U.S.). Reported by ABC News (“Cardinal suggests Pope Leo XIV wasn’t elected as ‘counterweight’ to Trump,” May 9, 2025); Religion News Service (“US cardinals say Pope Leo XIV election was not about Trump,” May 9, 2025); National Catholic Reporter (“Cardinals: President Trump had nothing to do with selecting first US pope,” May 9, 2025); NBC News; NewsNation. Cardinal John Dew of New Zealand’s subsequent denial reported in multiple outlets, April 2026.

21. Pete Hegseth, Pentagon worship service, April 15, 2026. The prayer, titled “CSAR 25:17” (Combat Search and Rescue 25:17), is a military adaptation of the fictional monologue delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). In the film, Jackson’s character attributes the monologue to Ezekiel 25:17 before executing an unarmed man; the actual biblical verse is a single sentence of prophetic condemnation against the Philistines. The link to Pulp Fiction first reported by A Public Witness (Word & Way), April 15, 2026. Also reported by Newsweek (“People Ask if Pete Hegseth Just Quoted Tarantino’s Version of Bible,” April 16, 2026); The Daily Beast (“Pentagon Pete Hegseth Cites Fake ‘Pulp Fiction’ Bible Verse in Bonkers Prayer Meeting,” April 16, 2026); The Hollywood Reporter; Middle East Eye; Irish Star; AOL/Yahoo News. Hegseth’s statement that the worship service should “inform the remainder of our day” and his reference to discussing blockades with Admiral Cooper fifteen minutes prior: A Public Witness, April 15, 2026.

• Cosmic Christ