Steve Bannon told Jeffrey Epstein he would "take down" Pope Francis. That's according to newly released Department of Justice files containing messages between the former White House advisor and the late financier, exchanged in June 2019.
The messages, part of a broader trove of Epstein-related communications shared by the DOJ, show Bannon and Epstein discussing the Pope, the Clintons, Chinese President Xi, and the European Union in the same breath — a kind of globe-spanning enemies list dressed up as casual banter between two men who apparently had more contact than previously known.
"The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother."
That was Bannon to Epstein. Whatever one thinks of the targets on that list, the company in which those thoughts were shared should stop anyone cold.
The conversations centered in part on *In the Closet of the Vatican*, a 2019 book by French journalist Frédéric Martel that made the bombshell claim that 80 percent of clergy working in the Vatican are gay. Bannon apparently wanted to turn it into a film — and told Epstein he was the executive producer.
"You are now exec producer of 'ITCOTV.'"
Epstein's reply referenced Noam Chomsky — the leftist intellectual with whom Epstein was known to be close — asking about the status of the film. Whether any of this was a real production effort or just two men inflating their own sense of influence over cocktail-napkin schemes remains genuinely unclear.
What is clear: Bannon, who reportedly identifies as a Roman Catholic, was actively discussing how to weaponize a book about Vatican corruption against the sitting Pope — and his chosen collaborator was Jeffrey Epstein, as The Independent reports.
None of this hostility toward Pope Francis was new for Bannon. In a 2018 interview with The Spectator, he described the Pope as "beneath contempt" and accused him of "siding with globalist elites." The DOJ files simply reveal that his contempt had an operational dimension — and a deeply troubling partner.
At one point, Epstein sent Bannon an article titled "Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose." Bannon's response was two words:
"Easy choice."
It's worth pausing here — not to relitigate Bannon's views on Catholic Church governance, some of which resonate with faithful Catholics who have legitimate grievances about institutional corruption and doctrinal drift. There are serious critiques to be made of Pope Francis's pontificate from a conservative Catholic perspective. The problem isn't the critique. It's the chat room.
The Epstein files have been a slow-drip indictment of elite culture across the political spectrum. Every new release names people who had no business being in that man's orbit — and yet were. Bannon's inclusion in that orbit is significant not because it discredits conservatism, but because it illustrates how Epstein operated: attaching himself to the power of every ideological flavor, making himself useful, making himself trusted.
Conservatives who rightly demanded full transparency on the Epstein files — who pushed for every name to be released and every connection scrutinized — cannot flinch now that the files touch someone on their side of the aisle. The principle was never "expose only the Democrats." The principle was sunlight.
The same release that shows Bannon's messages also shows Epstein in communication with Chomsky, a figure the left has lionized for decades. Epstein's network was ideologically promiscuous. That's what made it dangerous.
Pope Francis and the conservative movement had a genuinely complicated relationship — one that extended well beyond Bannon's personal vendetta. In 2016, Francis suggested that Donald Trump's border wall plans made him "not Christian":
"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."
Just one day before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025, Francis weighed in again on mass deportation plans:
"If it is true, it will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance. It won't do. This is not the way to solve things."
These interventions frustrated many American conservatives who saw a Pope more interested in scolding sovereign nations for enforcing their borders than in addressing the institutional rot within his own Church. That frustration was — and remains — legitimate.
Vice President JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, offered perhaps the most thoughtful conservative response to this tension. In an interview, he articulated the concept of *ordo amoris* — the ordered nature of Christian love:
"There's this old school – and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world."
Francis directly contradicted this, insisting that Christian love "is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups." It was one of the more revealing theological exchanges in recent political memory — two Catholics, both sincere, arriving at fundamentally different conclusions about what love demands of a nation.
Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday 2025 and shared a homily with him. Francis died on April 21, 2025. President Trump called him "a good man, who worked hard and loved the world."
The DOJ files raise questions that deserve answers — not from partisan actors looking to score points, but from anyone who took the Epstein accountability project seriously. The specifics of why these files were released, through what legal mechanism, and what other communications they contain remain unclear.
Bannon's representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
The conservative critique of Pope Francis — on immigration, on globalism, on the Church's internal scandals — stands or falls on its own merits. Millions of faithful Catholics hold those views without ever exchanging a single message with Jeffrey Epstein. That's the line. The critique doesn't need Epstein, and anyone who brought him into it contaminated something that was otherwise defensible.
You can want accountability in the Vatican without wanting it delivered by a man who trafficked children. That distinction matters more than any of the politics around it.
