Catholics

W.H. Auden, in his essay on detective fiction, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, asked: ‘Is it an accident that the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries?’ He was thinking about confession and how this changes things. In Auden’s view, murder is an offence against God and society and when it happens it shows that some member of society is no longer in a state of grace. But confession gives a transgressor a means of returning to a state of grace, so the moral order can be restored without recourse to a policeman. You wonder: do ghost stories too flourish most in a Protestant (or formerly Protestant) society?

Pope Francis was a man of remarkable complexity who cultivated an image of utmost simplicity. He began the moment he first stepped out on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in plain white papal attire, without the traditional red mozzetta covering his shoulders, and greeting onlookers with a homely ‘buona sera’. The following day, he was photographed settling his hotel bill. Instead of moving into the Apostolic Palace, he opted to live in a Vatican guesthouse, the Casa Santa Marta. This was also seen as a sign of the new Pope’s humble style. But the decision was more complicated than it seemed: the Casa Santa Marta’s rooms aren’t drafty monastic cells; the Apostolic Palace isn’t exactly the Hotel de Russie.

For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinean, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. By the time he became pope in 2013, he and the Democratic Party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they forged an alliance — one the Pope may soon regret, now that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill are beginning to grasp the scale of the Vatican’s corruption. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organizations, motivated not just by their shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.