Pope francis

Have you read what the Pope has just said about being sexually turned on by eating faeces? He wasn't talking about himself, let me quickly add: just human beings in general. They make him sound more like a desperately tasteless stand-up comedian than the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true. And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done. 'No offence intended.

For almost 400 years, since it was built on the orders of Pope Urban VIII in the 17th century, the grand Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo on a lake in the Alban Hills south of Rome has been the place where popes have retreated to get away from the city’s summer heat. John Paul II liked it so much that he built a swimming-pool there, and his successor, Benedict XVI, was almost as fond of it. But Pope Francis, who avoids all forms of ostentation, has never stayed there: he finds it too grandiose. And now he has thrown it open to the public as a museum, meaning it will probably never again be used as a private papal residence.

Pope Francis has just given implicit permission for many divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion. But he's done so surreptitiously. Effectively, Francis has pulled a fast one on conservative cardinals who didn't want the rules changed. Very fast, in this case. On 5 September, he received a copy of draft guidelines, written by the bishops of Buenos Aires, on giving communion to people in 'irregular' marriages. They were extremely liberal – off the charts in Catholic terms. The Pope gave them a ringing endorsement on the same day. That's a big deal. But the whole business of communion for the divorced-and-remarried has become so complicated that this latest twist has gone largely unreported.

Last week we reached the beginning of the end of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio — the ‘great reformer’ of the Catholic church who, it appears, has been unable to deliver the reforms that he himself favours. This despite being Pope. On Friday, he published a 200-page ‘exhortation’ entitled Amoris Laetitia, ‘The Joy of Love’ (or ‘The Joy of Sex’, as English-speaking Catholics of a certain vintage immediately christened it). This was Francis’s long-awaited response to two Vatican synods on the family, in 2014 and last year, which descended into Anglican-style bickering between liberals and conservatives. At the heart of the disputes lay the question of whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion.

The message of Pope Francis, in his exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), seems to be this: there must be rules. Only tough rules can express the absoluteness of the gospel. Without these rules it will be diluted, its saving force depleted. But the Church must apply these rules with Christlike tenderness and mercy, rather than with legalistic rigour. It must be tolerant of innovators on the edge, testing the boundaries. But it must uphold the core rules, even if they seem harsh. For this harshness corresponds to the absoluteness of the ideals of Christianity. We may all struggle to live up to these ideals, but we need absolute standards to aim for – we need to try, and fall short, in the right direction.

Here's the beginning of the Guardian's report on Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Pope Francis's response to the Synod on the Family: Pope Francis has called for the Catholic church to revamp its response to modern family life, striking a delicate balance between a more accepting tone towards gay people and the defence of traditional church teachings on issues such as abortion. In a landmark papal document entitled Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Francis outlined his vision for the church on family issues, urging priests to respond to their communities without mercilessly enforcing church rules: “Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs,” he wrote. Can you spot what's missing?

Pope Francis has used another mid-flight press conference to make a statement of significance to millions of Catholics. Asked if the Church should drop its opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of Aids (a teaching already modified by Benedict XVI), he effectively declared that the debate was a waste of time. He referred to Jesus's practice – opposed by the Pharisees on legalistic grounds – of healing on the Sabbath. 'Healing is obligatory!' he said. Earlier in the interview, the Pope took aim at Catholic 'fundamentalists' whose attachment to rules was 'idolatrous'. Here's a transcript from RomeReports: Question: Aids is a serious problem in Africa, the epidemic continues.

This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father's method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful: ... soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all making the news, followed by a maelstrom of interpretation and counter-interpretation before an eventual 'clarification' comes out of the Vatican press office amounting to little more than 'We don’t think any of you have it quite right'. I've made the same observation myself (though not nearly so memorably). What I couldn't explain was why Francis was behaving in this erratic fashion.

Are Pope Francis’ reforms and pronouncements risking a civil war within the Catholic church? On the latest View from 22 podcast, Damian Thompson and Fraser Nelson discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the Pope vs. the church. How concerned should Catholics be about the Pope’s wild statements? Is the church pining for the days of Pope Benedict? Is the Catholic church on track to lose its unity? And how split is the Synod over Pope Francis? Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson also discuss whether MPs will ever vote to bomb Syria. Does David Cameron regret losing the Commons vote in 2013 and does he remain determined to put it right?

The aggressively traditionalist Catholic website Rorate Caeli is tonight announcing that Pope Francis has dropped a 'bombshell' in an interview with his favourite Italian journalist, Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica. Here's a PDF of the newspaper's article and here is Rorate Caeli's translation of Scalfari: It is true – Pope Francis answered – it is a truth and for that matter the family that is the basis of any society changes continuously, as all things change around us. We must not think that the family does not exist any longer, it will always exist, because ours is a social species, and the family is the support beam of sociability, but it cannot be avoided that the current family, open as you say, contains some positive aspects, and some negative ones ...

This afternoon the Vatican Synod on the Family amended and approved the final document summing up three weeks of chaotic and sometimes poisonous debate – much of it focussing on whether divorced and remarried people should be allowed to receive communion. The majority view of the Synod Fathers is that they don't want the rules changed. They especially don't want one rule to apply in, say, Germany and another in Tanzania. Pope Francis has just given a cautiously worded (but also, alas, rather waffly) address in which he acknowledges as much: ...