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It's the Patrick Madrid show on relevant radio. Well, his name is undersecretary Colby, and it was said in a number of different media reports that he had had a tense meeting with the former Papal Nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christoph Pierre, who has just recently retired and a new papal

nuncio has been named, but this was Archbishop or Cardinal Pierre in question.

And it characterized the meeting as very tense, and it was suggested that, or it said, actually,

that the Avenue on Papacy in which seven popes wound up being,

and they were French popes, they wound up living in their whole papacies in France, in Avignon

France. And they were, they had been co-opted by the French crown.

And the vast majority of all the Cardinals in the College of Cardinals during that time were French, 111 out of about 132, 134.

So we spent a little time talking about that.

But the backdrop to that story were these reports

that were circulating that said that in essence, in a veiled sort of way, or at least that's how it

was interpreted, that the United States government, that the Trump administration, through the

auspices of these people who were said to be in this meeting, that they sort of implicitly

threatened the Vatican, the Holy See, and saying you have to get on board with what we're doing.

And, of course, there's a lot going on, the war in Iran, that Pope Leo has been very

overtly opposed to, the war specifically.

So I'm happy now to be able to say that in the aftermath of all that, and I talked about it,

and I presented it as a story, and yet there was more to the story.

So later in the day, toward the evening, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Ambassador

Brian Birch, he issued a statement, and I'm just going to read it to you because it explains everything,

and it clarifies and corrects the misinformation that was circulating in these other stories.

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