Deus vult

Pete Hegseth, the Cabinet secretary with control of the U.S. military, has a big tattoo across his right bicep in a Gothic font spelling Deus Vult — the Latin term for “God wills it” — a holy-war motto of Europe’s 11th century Christian Crusades.

A former member of the Minnesota National Guard, he has a tattoo on his bicep reading “Deus Vult”, a latin phrase meaning “God wills it”, a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages.

Hegseth writes in the book that he was removed from his duty guarding Biden’s inauguration because soldiers scrolled through his social media and spotted a tattoo on his chest of a Jerusalem or Deus vult cross, a historic Christian symbol that in recent years has been appropriated by the far-right.

For moderate or liberal Catholics concerned about the extreme political divides within their church, these were worrying developments — part of the increasing entanglement of American Catholicism with ever-more right-wing U.S. politics, which over the last five years has included large swaths of the far right using Catholic imagery or appending phrases like "Deus Vult" and "Viva Cristo Rey" to their tweets.

Security video recorded Gulick spray-painting the phrase “Deus Vult,” a Latin expression meaning “God wills it,” in red letters on the front of a Planned Parenthood facility in Newark shortly after 2 a.m. on Jan. 3 of last year.