Pope francis

Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there was an awful lot going on; fun stuff, more fun than looking at a screen. And at that point I broke the habit. It’s a bit like giving up sugar in your tea for Lent: the first time is awful; by the next Lent it’s easier; by the end, it’s normal. And so, term by term, I just lost interest. And I’ve never gone back.

Ireland, for so long the most overtly Catholic state in Western Europe, has voted for gay marriage by a stupendous margin – 62 per cent. Never before has a country legalised the practice by popular vote. It would be naive to ask: how could this happen? Hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland, thanks not only to the paedophile scandals but also to the joyless quasi-Jansenist character of the Irish Church, which was handed complete control of education in the Free State after partition in 1922. (Many of its priests were outstandingly holy and charitable, but you'll get your head bitten off if you suggest that in today's anti-clerical republic.) Anyway, I don't want to focus on Ireland.

Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123. Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed to me personally but I did play my part. What happened was this.

Home Launching the Conservative party manifesto, David Cameron, the party leader, told voters he wanted to ‘turn the good news in our economy into a good life for you and your family’.

Ed Miliband could still win the general election, but what would happen next? On the latest View from 22 podcast, The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges discusses this week's Spectator cover feature on what to expect from a Miliband premiership with George Eaton of the New Statesman. Would Miliband manage to take his lofty ideas about reshaping capitalism into No.10? Or would he be more pragmatic in power? Like his mentor Gordon Brown, could Miliband's indecisiveness turn out to be a fatal flaw? James Forsyth and Alex Massie also discuss the current madness of Scottish politics.

The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican. Our guide, Tonia, takes us through security, and within minutes we are in a nearly empty Sistine Chapel. In an hour it will be crammed with tourists — sweating, gawping, getting in each other’s way. Vatican officials will be shushing and clapping to quieten the chatter. Now, though, we are free to contemplate Michelangelo’s swirl of naked bodies in peace. Michelangelo claimed that he painted the ceiling entirely on his own. In fact, Tonia explains, he started off with 15 helpers, though he got rid of them all along the way. He ‘fought everyone’, she says. ‘On the one hand he was amazing but in human relationships, no.

Phew! I was worried that the smear campaign against Cardinal George Pell mounted by the pigs at the Vatican trough would persuade Pope Francis to water down Pell's plan to impose proper accounting procedures on the Curia. But today Francis published the legal framework for the reform and – well, I can't improve on the reporting of the Vatican correspondent of Crux website, Inés San Martín: Pope Francis decided the future of his financial reform on Tuesday, issuing a new legal framework for three key oversight bodies that largely confirm the authority of the man he put in charge of his clean-up operation, controversial Australian Cardinal George Pell.

Pope Francis, is, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper - a Swabian formerly responsible for ecumenism - neither a traditionalist nor a liberal - "both of which categories have become rather timeworn and hackneyed" - but rather a radical who wants to advance a revolution of forgiveness. Well, that's what Christians are kind of for, even if most of us fall rather short of the ideal. But though the liberal/trad categories may indeed be a bit hackneyed - possibly because they're completely and utterly lost on the secular majority -- it's not to say that the old agendas aren't still being fought over with gusto. And right at the top of the liberal shopping list is a married clergy.

Ever since Cardinal George Pell was appointed by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican's finances, I knew a hit job was coming; and I was doubly certain when he spoke up for orthodox cardinals when their views were being trashed by the liberal organisers of the chaotic 'Carry On Synod' on the Family. The Sydney Morning Herald, no fan of Pell in his days as Archbishop of Sydney, has accused him of 'living it up at the Holy See's expense'. They cite leaked documents purporting to show he rented an office and apartment in Rome at a cost of £2,580 a month – which, unless I've got the figures wrong, isn't very expensive. Plus £1,270 on 'religious robes'. Oh, for God's sake.

Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth. I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses to use contraception. Indeed, I still do fear that I am infertile and that all these conceptions, if not immaculate, are at least miraculous. I am 56, after all. And guess what?

Catholics should not breed like rabbits and gender theory is a bit like the Hitler Youth. Yup, the Supreme Pontiff is giving another of his in-flight interviews and yet again he leaves everyone shaking their heads: 'He said what?' Now, let's be clear. Francis reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control (sort of) while observing that 'God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that – excuse the word – that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.' I know what he means. I think. Contraception and family planning are fine so long as you don't artificially block procreation. But the subliminal and unintended messages are (a) that Catholics have a reputation for breeding like rabbits and (b) birth control is OK, full stop.

Just before Christmas, virtually unnoticed by the media, the German Catholic bishops made a plea for the readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics (or Catholics married to divorcees) to Holy Communion. That it should be the Germans, led by Cardinal Reinhard Marx – Archbishop of Munich, president of the German bishops' conference and coordinator of the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy – is no coincidence. In 1993, the future Cardinals Kasper and Lehmann asked the Vatican to admit couples in irregular marriages to Communion – indeed, to allow these couples to make up their own minds as to whether they should receive the sacrament. Cardinal Ratzinger kicked that proposal, and with it the liberal German Church, into the long grass.

How many of Pope Francis's spiritual diseases do you suffer from? The pontiff laid out no fewer than 15 of them in an 'exchange of Christmas greetings' yesterday. They included 'spiritual Alzheimers', 'existential schizophrenia', 'working too much', 'planning too much', 'working without co-ordination' and, above all, 'the terrorism of gossip'. I did a quick check and found two I definitely don't suffer from: working too much and 'feeling immortal, immune and indispensable'. It reminds me of the narrator of Three Men in a Boat who, on leafing through a medical dictionary in the British Museum, discovers he suffers from every ghastly malady except housemaid's knee.