Damian Thompson

The English parish has been a source of spiritual consolation, and a certain amount of social comedy, for more than 1,000 years. So it's very old – and, it turns out, frighteningly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Countless parish churches, both Anglican and Catholic, will quietly shut their doors forever over the next few months. Bishops will blame Covid-19, but they bear a heavy responsibility for the fragile state of parish life before it was hit by the epidemic. In this episode of Holy Smoke, former Church of England vicar Dr Gavin Ashenden tells us what it was like running a parish, and reveals his strategies for dealing with difficult personalities in the congregation, some of whom really did resemble the stereotypes of British sitcoms.

Every day there’s some sort conspiracy theory being aired by right-wing Catholics on social media involving the globalist agenda of the Pope’s UN/Chinese/Masonic/Soros foundation puppet-masters. No surprise, perhaps, given the fervour with which the Pope promotes a globalist agenda while his diplomats kowtow to Beijing. Some left-wing Catholics are into the conspiracy business, too: in their imaginations it’s the feisty conservative broadcaster EWTN taking the role of the Soros Foundation.

Rarely has a religious culture collapsed more rapidly than that of Catholic Ireland, which just 30 years ago seemed indestructible. Incredibly, it looks as if the Irish Church will have ordained more bishops than priests in 2020. It goes without saying that the Irish abuse crisis has hugely accelerated the process of secularisation in what was once the most Catholic of countries. Young people in Ireland now refer to the clergy with a withering disdain verging on hatred. My guest today, the celebrated Irish journalist, broadcaster and playwright Mary Kenny, offers a more nuanced analysis of the powerful and paradoxical world in which she grew up: one in which Catholic clergy and lay people could be simultaneously fervently pious, warm-hearted and yet paralysed by petty snobbery.

In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson says the Vatican's report on allegations of sexual assault by Theodore McCarrick is a whitewash.

Has there been a single Covid death as a result of someone attending a socially distanced church service? The answer is no, as you'd expect it to be. But, despite this, the Government will ban public acts of worship from Thursday. This decision is so perverse that even the Catholic bishops of England and Wales – who fell over each other during the last lockdown in their eagerness to shut churches – have written to the government asking for the scientific evidence indicating that properly supervised Masses pose a threat to the people attending them. So far they haven't received the courtesy of a reply, probably because there is no evidence.

Ask yourself: who are the most vulnerable and marginalised people in British society? My answer would be young adults suffering from learning disabilities, who attract sympathy when they are children but, once they enter their 20s, simply drop off the map of public consciousness The consequences of this are dreadful: 95 per cent of them are unemployed. But four years ago that situation began to change, when Rosa Monckton founded Team Domenica, named after her daughter, now aged 25, who has Down's syndrome. Domenica was the last godchild of Diana Princess of Wales, who was a close friend of Rosa's.

There was a point in the Watergate scandal when revelations came so thick and fast that journalists struggled to keep up with them. And we seem to have reached an equivalent point in respect to the scandals engulfing Pope Francis's Vatican.  Last week I interviewed Vatican expert Ed Condon about the sacking of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused by the Pope of stealing or misusing unimaginable sums of Church money, something he denies. Since Ed and I spoke, there have been two developments, both in their own way hard to believe.  First, Angelo Becciu is now accused of overseeing the transfer of large amounts of money to Australia during the trial on fabricated sex abuse charges of his arch-adversary Cardinal George Pell, who had rumbled him.

The Vatican is this week in the grip of a paranoia reminiscent of the days when Renaissance popes (and their dinner guests) were forced to employ food-tasters. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, until 2018 the sostituto at the Secretariat of State – that is, the Pope's hugely powerful chief of staff – has been sacked by Francis, who has accused him of stealing vast amounts of money. It's now a matter of record that Becciu organised a series of bizarre investments, costing the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars, in a former Harrods warehouse converted into luxury flats and an African oil company.

Boris Johnson's package of Covid restrictions announced this week included a rule that weddings will be limited to 15 people and funerals to 30 – numbers plucked out of thin air that will have questionable effect on the transmission of the virus. You might think that a ruling that affects only weddings and funerals isn't such a big deal for the churches, but that is to underestimate the fanatical zeal of their leaders for implementing, and expanding, restrictions on their own worship. The control-freak Archbishop of Canterbury, predictably, seemed quite thrilled by the government's intervention.