Big Tech, the Vatican, and the Battle for Spiritual Authority in the Age of AI
The Pentagon threatened the Pope. A billionaire is lecturing on the Antichrist at the Vatican’s doorstep. The most powerful political network in America has no website, no public face, and members in the Cabinet, the Pentagon, and the Vice Presidency. This is not conspiracy.
In January 2026, Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre to the Pentagon. Pierre was Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador to the United States. What followed was a lecture.
The United States, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.
As the temperature in the room rose, a U.S. official reached for a weapon that was seven hundred years old. He invoked the Avignon papacy.
For anyone outside the Catholic world, that reference might sound like an obscure historical footnote. Inside the Vatican, it landed like a declaration of war. In 1303, King Philip IV of France sent agents to physically attack Pope Boniface VIII. The pope was beaten, humiliated, and died shortly after. By 1309, the papacy had relocated to Avignon, in French territory, where it remained under royal control for nearly seventy years. Popes were elected, governed, and died under the shadow of the French Crown. It was the most traumatic institutional crisis in the history of the Catholic Church before the Reformation.
A Pentagon official deliberately invoked that history in a room with the Pope’s senior diplomat.
The Pentagon has since called this characterization “grossly false and distorted,” describing the meeting as “substantive, respectful and professional.” U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch claimed that Cardinal Pierre himself called recent media reports “fabrications.” The account was first reported by Mattia Ferraresi in The Free Press, citing unnamed Vatican officials briefed on the meeting, and was independently corroborated by Christopher Hale with additional sources. The Vatican has not issued an official statement.
The Vatican was so alarmed that Pope Leo XIV canceled plans to visit the United States. The first American pope in history will instead spend July 4th, 2026, America’s 250th birthday, on the island of Lampedusa, where North African refugees wash ashore by the thousands. Robert Francis Prevost is too precise a man for that to be coincidence.
The question I have been investigating is not whether this confrontation happened. Multiple sources have now confirmed it. The question is: why? What is the contest between the Pentagon and the Vatican actually about? And who is behind it?
The answer begins with a billionaire, a dead French philosopher, and a series of secret lectures on the Antichrist.
The Philosopher and the Billionaire
René Girard was a French Catholic literary theorist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. He died in 2015. His central insight, which he called mimetic theory, is deceptively simple: human desire is not original. We do not want things because we independently decide they are valuable. We want things because someone else wants them. Desire is imitated, copied, contagious.
From this observation, Girard built an entire theory of civilization. If all desire is mimetic, then all human communities inevitably generate rivalry, because everyone is competing for the same objects of desire. That rivalry escalates until it threatens to tear the community apart. The solution, repeated across every ancient culture Girard studied, is the scapegoat mechanism: the community unites by directing its collective violence against a single victim. The victim is sacrificed. Peace is restored. The cycle begins again.
Christianity, in Girard’s reading, is the event that exposed this mechanism for the first time in human history. The Gospels tell the story of the crucifixion from the perspective of the victim. They reveal that the scapegoat is innocent. Once that revelation enters a culture, it gradually undermines every institution built on concealed sacrificial violence, because people can no longer participate in the scapegoat mechanism with a clear conscience.
Ba’al, Blood, and Bread, outlined this pattern. The sacrificial economy, the priesthood that manages the violence, the intermediary that extracts order from chaos by channeling collective energy onto a designated victim. Girard gave the academic framework to what the ancient world encoded as theology.
Peter Thiel studied under Girard at Stanford. He has called Girard the most important thinker of the modern era. He co-founded PayPal, co-founded Palantir (the surveillance and data analytics company that contracts with the CIA, the Department of Defense, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and created the Founders Fund, one of the most influential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. His portfolio includes early investments in Facebook, SpaceX, and dozens of other companies that now constitute critical infrastructure of the digital age.
If you read “The Arms Race for the Holy Grail,” you already know where Thiel sits in the entropy framework. Thiel is the one building the infrastructure to capture friction at every transfer point: financial (PayPal), informational (Palantir), biological (his extensive longevity and anti-aging investments). Every one of his major ventures maps onto the Girardian framework: find the point where entropy accumulates, build the infrastructure to capture it, position yourself as the indispensable intermediary.
Thiel has described Christianity as “the prism with which I look at the whole world.” He has been speaking publicly about the Antichrist with increasing frequency and urgency since at least 2024. His position, drawn directly from Girard, is that Christianity’s exposure of the scapegoat mechanism has been destabilizing civilization for two thousand years. Every institution that relied on concealed sacrificial violence has been progressively undermined. The Antichrist, in Thiel’s framework, is the figure or system that offers to restabilize civilization by providing a new form of unity, one that doesn’t rely on the now-exposed and failing sacrificial mechanisms. The Antichrist offers peace through technology, through consensus, through the elimination of conflict, and people accept it because the old institutions have already been hollowed out.
“It’s just a few core ideas I come back to,” Thiel explained in 2024, “and it’s something like this wonderful and terrible history of the world that we’re living through as Christianity’s unraveling our culture, and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side.”
The question is: who gets to define what “the other side” looks like?
The Lectures
In September 2024, Thiel launched ACTS 17, a lecture series whose name stands for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. The first iteration was a four-part, off-the-record, invitation-only series on the Antichrist, held at theCommonwealth Club in San Francisco. The lectures sold out.
This was not Thiel’s first foray into esoteric intellectual gathering. Founders Fund hosts an event called Hereticon, billed as “a conference for people banned from other conferences.” The second iteration ran from October 28th through the early hours of October 31st, 2024, at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach. Topics included transhumanism, constitutional monarchy, eugenics, revisionist demography, and immortality. The event follows the Chatham House Rule: you can discuss what was said, but not who said it. After dark, on the top floor, in a room plastered with newspaper clippings about UFO sightings and secret bases, there was reportedly a séance.
Attendees at Hereticon II have described Thiel’s presentation as drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s warning that electronic media constitutes “a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ” and on Girard’s insight that human evil follows algorithmic patterns. The theological content was the intellectual centerpiece of the event, delivered by the host, to an audience of the most powerful investors and technologists in the country.
By early 2026, the ACTS 17 series had expanded to Rome. The Rome iteration was where the contest with the Vatican became visible.
The lectures were initially supposed to be held at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known colloquially as the Angelicum. This is one of the most prestigious pontifical universities in Rome. It is also where a young Augustinian priest named Robert Francis Prevost studied for his doctoral thesis in canon law.
Robert Francis Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV.
When word circulated in the Italian press that Peter Thiel was planning secret lectures on the Antichrist at the Pope’s own alma mater, the Angelicum moved swiftly. “We would like to clarify that this event is not organized by the University, will not take place at the Angelicum, and is not part of any of our institutional initiatives,” the university said in a public statement.
The Catholic University of America also distanced itself. “The Catholic University of America is not sponsoring or hosting an event featuring Peter Thiel this month in Rome,” a spokesperson told the Associated Press. The lectures had been connected to something called the Cluny Institute, described as “an independent initiative incubated at the university” that brings together leaders from academia, religion, and technology. In 2023, CUA had hosted Thiel on its Washington campus for a talk on Girard. The institutional relationship was maintained. The institutional distance was public.
So Thiel’s Antichrist lectures were rejected by the Pope’s alma mater and disavowed by the American Catholic university that had previously hosted him. Catholic institutions were drawing a line.
A senior Vatican advisor, speaking to journalists about Thiel’s project, offered a remarkable assessment. Thiel, the advisor said, believes society is “incapable of self-government” and that “the only alternative to apocalypse would be a technocratic order imposed by an elite of rulers.”
The Vatican just named what Thiel is building. What exactly has he built, and why did the Pentagon threaten the Pope on its behalf? Who is in the network? Its members include some of the most prominent figures in American media and government today.
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