The Pentagon's most senior officials reportedly summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre to meet and then told him that the United States has the military power to do "whatever it wants," and that Pope Leo, the first American-born pontiff, had "better take its side."

As a Christian, as a Protestant, as an American I renounce this as evil.

The Free Press reported that as “tensions escalated,” in this January meeting, one U.S. official “went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

The arrogance required to summon a representative of a church and demand its silence is staggering. To make this very clear, this is the state telling a religious institution what it may and may not say. That is not American. That is not freedom. This is authoritarianism.

We have seen this before as well, not just in the 1300s, but in 1933 when Adolf Hitler signed the Reichskonkordat with the Vatican, a treaty that promised to respect the Church’s autonomy in exchange for its political silence.

Many German Catholics believed it was protection when in reality it was a leash. When bishops like Clemens von Galen dared to speak out against Nazi atrocities, the regime threatened, intimidated, and in many cases imprisoned or executed those who would not comply.

The state did not want a church. It wanted a mouthpiece to religiously justify its power. And the churches that went along, that traded their prophetic voice for institutional safety, they became instruments of one of history’s greatest evils. This is the road that begins with a summons and a warning.

The separation of church and state exists precisely for moments like this. Our founders, many of whom had fled state-controlled religion, or watched it crush dissent across Europe, understood something essential: when the church and government crawl into bed together, the results are catastrophic.

The same is true for when the government controls the church. When this happens, the church can no longer speak truth to power. It becomes a tool of the powerful. A chaplain to empire. That is not the Church. That is a corruption of it.

We’ve seen this all throughout church history. When one Christian sect holds the most power, it persecutes other Christian sects it finds out of line. We are witnessing a strain of neo-evangelical Protestantism do this to the Catholic Church in this example from top officials in the Pentagon.

The First Amendment does not just protect the church from the state. It protects the state from the kind of moral rot that sets in when no institution is free to say “this is wrong.” The Pope looked at this war and called it wrong. That is exactly what a shepherd is supposed to do. The moment we allow a government to punish that voice of Christians, to haul in an ambassador and issue threats, we have crossed a dangerous line.

And let no one mistake this for just a Catholic issue. Today it is Rome. Tomorrow it is your pulpit. If the state thinks it can silence the oldest Christian institution on earth over a matter of war and peace, no church is safe. No pastor is safe. No conscience is safe.

These are not partisan values. They are the foundation. And when a government, any government, threatens a church into silence, every person of faith should be alarmed. Every American should be alarmed.

Speak up. To both political and faith leaders alike.

I don’t believe the pope or the Vatican will budge an inch on this issue. Neither should we.