No, Steve Bannon has been trying to overthrow or delegitimise the Pope for some time now.
Bannon’s pan-European populist project, the Movement, has also stalled. Everyone seems to be taking a step back as this initial Trumpist era runs out of steam.
It's all very Game of Thrones though. A very convoluted storyline with very dodgy characters.
Bannon (who was charged with defrauding Trump supporters) has been working with American Cardinal Raymond Burke on a Birther theory to delegitimise Pope Francis and claim Benedict as the true Pope. (Cardinal Burke received substantial monetary gifts from alleged kiddie fiddler West Virginia bishop Michael J. Bransfield, who mysteriously managed to escape criminal charges as evidence disappeared.) Bannon even had prominent Italian politicans wearing Benedict t-shirts.
They set up Dignitatis Humanae Institute, based in a 13th-century mountaintop monastery not far from Rome. (The institute’s chairman is former Italian MP Luca Volontè, on trial for corruption for accepting bribes from Azerbaijan.) They were working with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. (Malofeev has been funding, or funneling Putin funds, Ukrainian separatism and is funding international anti-gay movements.)
Burke withdrew his support after Bannon said he wanted to make a film from a book alleging homosexuality in the Vatican, as the Guardian article indicates. Because even though Dignitatis Humanae Institute is anti-gay, they can't get the Vatican homosexual faction offside because they are also a conservative faction that opposes the progressive Pope and are in charge of much of the Vatican finances. Australia's Cardinal Pell, a factional ally of US ultra-conservative Catholics since his visits there in the 1960s, has been trying to wrest power of Vatican finances off that faction.
So it's mighty interesting stuff, if you like your political drama with plenty of plot twists, utterly amoral characters and lots of crime.
