Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Rome visiting the Vatican on Wednesday and was scheduled to meet Pope Francis when the pontiff suddenly canceled it. Pompeo was there to solicit the Roman Catholic Church’s support in pressuring the Chinese Communist Party to end its religious persecution. Pompeo noted just how dire the situation is in China, stating, “[The] Communist Party’s program of forced sterilizations and abortions of Muslims in Xinjiang, its abuse of Catholic priests and laypeople, and its assault on Protestant house churches — all of which are parts of a ‘Sinicization’ campaign to subordinate God to the Party while promoting [President] Xi [Jinping] himself as an ultramundane deity.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is even rewriting the Bible itself, Pompeo warned.

A Vatican spokesman insisted that Francis’s reason for canceling the meeting was his desire to avoid appearing to support the reelection campaign of President Donald Trump. “Yes, that is precisely why the pope will not meet American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,” asserted Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Vatican secretary of relations.

However, the Vatican’s explanation simply fails to hold water given the fact that just last week the pope similarly refused a meeting with Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, who was also seeking to compel Francis to apply pressure on China’s religious-freedom-trampling communist regime. It appears the true motive behind the pope’s decision has everything to do with an unwillingness to cross Beijing — especially after a 2018 deal to approve CCP-appointed Catholic bishops.

But that explanation doesn’t play well to the international public and Catholics across the globe, so blaming Trump (as if he were the devil incarnate) was a much easier play — one that the Trump-hating Leftmedia would eat up. Furthermore, Francis, with his Marxist sentiments, much prefers the ostensibly Catholic Joe Biden to Donald “America First” Trump.