Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Strange Bedfellows

More than a few observers are beginning to look past the conventional wisdom in the disagreements between President Trump and Pope Leo. Just at random, I ran across the YouTube remarks embedded above from Pesach Wolicki, an Orthodox rabbi born in the US who emigrated to Israel. He begins his remarks by pointing pout that Pope Leo misrepresents scripture when he says (as he did in a tweet I embedded yesterday), "God does not bless any conflict". At 1:23, Rabbi Wolicki says,

Take a look at the Bible. For example. in the song at the sea, in Exodus 15, where it says that the Lord is a man of war, Adonai ish Milchamah, OK?

This is Exodus 15:3, which in the CatholiC New American Bible says "The LORD is a warrior; LORD is his name!" Back when I was in RCIA (now OCIA), the catechist frequently said, "Scripture without context is pretext." When I looked this up, AI helpfully added,

This verse is part of the "Song of Moses" (or Song of the Sea), a hymn of praise celebrating God's victory over the Egyptian army at the Red Sea.

A week or so ago, I mentioned Exodus 17:8-16, the battle with the Amalekites at Rephidim, in which while Joshua's army fought on the ground, Moses went to the top of a hill with Aaron and Hur, carrying the staff of God. When Moses raised the staff, Joshua prevailed. When he grew tired and let the staff fall, the Amalekites prevailed. Aaron and Hur placed a stone for Moses to sit on and stood on either side of him, holding his hands steady until sunset.

God also commanded Moses to write the account in a book as a permanent memorial, declaring that He would "completely blot out the name of Amalek". Sounds a little like wiping out a whole civilization, doesn't it? I'll get back to Rabbi Wolicki below, but I notice that this morning, Rich Lowry of the National Review, never a Trump cheerleader, has taken a similar tack:

The Bible has a realistic view of the inevitability of human conflict.

As Ecclesiastes says, there is “a time for war, and a time for peace.”

In the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel or Kings, it is often a time for war.

The key question is whether or not a war is righteous — the difference between Israel, say, prevailing in the Battle of Deborah, or seeing the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem.

. . . Leo has wrongly made it sound as though no war can possibly be just — and regardless, his opposition to the Iran war isn’t dispositive or binding on anyone else.

At 4:25 in the video embedded above, Rabbi Wolicki takes up the issue of Leo's audience with David Axelrod:

Dabvid Axelrod is a senior adviser to Obama, and he had visited the pope just a few days before all of this happened. So there's a lot of suspicion that this was part of some sort of op to try to influence Trump or pull Catholics away from President Trump, which is already somewhat happening, we'll talk about that in a bit.

At 25:30, he sums things up:

Right now in America, you have a very vocal and sizeable wing of the Republican party that is very anti-Israel and is very anti this war, and is dominated by traditional Catholic voices. Traditional Catholics, including people like Candace Owens [a recent "convert" for whom there is no clear indication that she or her husband went through RCIA] and Tucker Carlson [actually Episcopalian] . . . Megyn Kelly . . . in this growing anti-Israel wing of MAGA, it's dominated by a lot of traditional Catholics. So I think that these anti-Trump and anti-Israel forces. . . decided to meet with the pope and to drive a wedge, a further wedge, between Trump and Catholicism, to make it less palatable to be supportive of Trump if you're a Catholic. . . and tht's why I think that Pope Leo is participating in what is basically an op.

I would say, though, that it's questionable how large the traddy Catholic anti-Trump wing actually is, and how Catholic those really are. Of the people he names, Owens and Carlson are sketchy if they're Catholic at all; Megyn Kelly is apparently a cradle Catholic, but by her account, she's only recently become observant enough to begin the process of securing a declaration of nullity for her first marriage. In other words, if she attends mass at all, she'd better not receive the sacrament until this is straightened out.

The fact is that traddy Catholics tend to be so traddy that they're on the fringes of the faith. Some in that group tend toward the view that no pope since Pius XII legitimately holds the seat, which is a heretical position. Others are deeply skeptical of Vatican II, likewise raising questions on whether they're Catholic at all. Still others, like Edward Feser, insist that the opposition of recent popes to the death penalty is unscriptural at best -- but all of a sudden, he's calling us all to come to Jesus!

In other words, he's rallying the sketchy traddies, the ones who don't think Leo is really pope, the ones who don't like Vatican II, the ones who are nervous about LGBTQ+ masses and Fr James Martin, the ones who want to kneel at the communion rail, to come home to Pope Leo. "[Y]ou rally to his defense when he is attacked by an outsider [Trump]. And if you don’t, there is something very wrong with you."

Now and then I've raised questons about Prof Feser's rhetorical errors, especially his hypostatization, when he treats a diverse set of "just war" principles articulated over millennia under widely differing historical circumstances as a single, consistent, abstract doctrine. Here, I think, he errs in using a variation of the "bandwagon" technique: we're a big family! Leo is our father! No matter all our sometimes heretical disagreements, no matter we maybe shouldn't be receiving the sacrament, or we aren't receiving it anyhow, no matter we haven't been to confession, no matter some of us aren't even Catholic, let's rally to Pope Leo! Otherwise something's very wrong with us!

But who is Pope Leo, really, and why did he have that meeting with David Axelrod?

I've got to say that as he's presented himself lately on social media, Prof Feser reminds me a great deal of the leftists I knew on campus in the 1960s. He isn't in that generation, so he may not have their examples to compare himself to, but he's starting to look a lot like those angry, bitter, scruffy guys back in the day. I was at least a good acquaintance of some of them, and even when I sympathized (which I often did at the time), there was always a little voice in my head asking if they were being paid, what kind of a network was behind their agenda, there were all sorts of strange coincidences.

I'm starting to get the same sense of underlying, bitter anger in Prof Feser that I used to have with my SDS schoolmates. I'm also getting a very similar discomfort with what I'm beginning to sense is disingenuousness on his part. Who's he working for? I'm wondering if he knows more about the agenda here than he's letting on.

More than just a few people are wondering if this is all an op, and Prof Feser, whom I used to admire, seems to be losing credibility the more he looks like he's pitching the party line.

posted by test @ April 15, 2026   0 Comments