It doesn't sound like a heat-of-the-moment reference, but a very calculated one based on this line from the article:

> According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.

Sounds like a Europa Universalis player tbh ;)

> the same person who could reference that

Let’s not give that same person more credit than they deserve. I’m sure they came preprepared with some LLM derived threats for when they didn’t get what they wanted from the Vatican.

Fun Fact - Elbridge Colby is a Catholic, maybe time for excommunication?

It is literally this tweet from a few years ago:

> Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like "I think we're supposed to give this food to poor people" and every adult convert is like "the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have driver's licenses."

There's this weird affect of modern "trad" catholic converts. Not everyone who's an adult convert acts this way, but most converts obsessed with "trad" aesthetics seem to be.

They obsess over the law, doctrine, and history of the Catholic church. Invoking events from millennia prior, and despite converting to Catholicism by choice, will denounce the Pope for being woke or what have you, insisting it's not the true Catholic church.

It's extremely bizarre and counterintuitive. Why convert to the branch of Christianity with the elected god-king if you don't want to listen to the elected god-king?

Eh I'd expect any diplomat to have the historical knowledge to reference important Church events, especially if there's time to prepare before speaking with church representatives. It was a very significant political period in Catholic history!