While I am not sure how one would "invoke" the Avignon Papacy, I would be impressed if anyone in the Trump Administration really had ever heard of it. But even after that had led to schism, then there were people on both sides who have subsequently been canonised as Saints, since neither side, nor eventually any of the three, held any heretical proposition. One, or eventually two, sides merely erred as to who was the Successor of Saint Peter at the given time. Moreover, that error made nothing like the doctrinal or moral difference that it would today.
By contrast, JD Vance's clear threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran is contrary to everything that the Church has ever taught on the subject, since it was immediately apparent, when such weapons were first developed, that such use could not possibly be reconciled with just war doctrine. That could in fact have been said about the entire war with Iran. As it was. By the Pope. It is no wonder that MAGA wants its own. But who? And seated where? Give reasons for your answers.
Still, by forcing the White House to clarify that there was no American nuclear threat to Iran, a clarification that made sense only as concession of those weapons' inherent immorality, Vance has effectively and usefully rendered them uselessly ineffective. If "of course" you could never be so wicked as to deploy them, then why have them? Over to Keir Starmer. Over to Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, Zack Polanski, and Nigel Farage. And over to each of the Labour candidates to succeed Starmer. Any of the third could be Prime Minister next month. Any of the second could be Prime Minister in 2029, when we are going to pour the present party system into the present electoral system with utterly unpredictable results. And Starmer has his finger on the nuclear button right now. Would he ever press it?
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