Damian Thompson

As any Catholic master of ceremonies will tell you, it takes only the tiniest sartorial mishap to lend a Python-esque flavour to moments of the utmost solemnity. On 1 July the rebel traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX) created four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV during a five-hour open-air Latin Mass in a Swiss alpine meadow. The consecrating prelates wore dark-red velvet chasubles over scarlet-and-gold dalmatics with matching gloves. They descended from their thrones bearing sacred chrism. Afterwards the new bishops stood in a row, mitres perched on their heads for the first time. Liberal bishops wear stumpy headgear.

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionised weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic or Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have created a sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change. Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days ‘staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing’, not only feeling no urge to eat but also no ‘desire for anything’.

Pope Leo XIV has just passed the first great test of his pontificate. He has published a thoughtful encyclical on a controversial topic that (a) does not contain whole sections obviously farmed out to progressive lobbyists; (b) is not stuffed with semi-literate jargon; (c) does not display myopic hostility to capitalism; and (d) has been broadly welcomed by conservative Catholic commentators. Or, to put it more simply, it could not have been published in the name of Pope Francis. (I’m wording that carefully: popes rarely write their own encyclicals, and cynics suggested that the Argentinian pontiff did not even bother to read his.

The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew about the Chicago-born Robert Prevost when he was elected last May was that – despite having an older brother who supported MAGA – he detested the immigration policies of the Trump administration. His private X account, now deleted, made that clear. Pope Leo has rejected the president’s invitation to visit the United States to celebrate his own country’s 250th anniversary; instead, he will visit Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island collapsing under the strain of thousands of North African migrants who have risked their lives to get there. We have gone from a baffling reference to a medieval schism to the suggestion that President Trump may – what? – bomb the Vatican?