Damian Thompson

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.

Damian Thompson is joined by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary's ambassador to the Holy See. A member of one of Europe's most historically influential families, Eduard explains how his religious practices have adapted to the acceleration of new technologies, and tells Damian how the Habsburgs keep in contact.

The Church of England has a new Archbishop of York and a problem on its hands. Or to be more accurate, the problem it already had – senior bishops who speak entirely in progressive jargon – has just got infinitely worse. Archbishop Stephen Cottrell made the headlines even before he was enthroned last week, when he ‘revealed’ that Jesus was black. This came as news to everyone except the far left, race-baiting fanatics of Black Lives Matter, who enjoy dabbling in bizarre ‘Afrocentric’ history. Perhaps Cottrell picked up the idea from them: he seems completely obsessed with racism, especially of the imaginary variety that supposedly poisons the Church of England.

Vatican officials are anxious to get their hands on an advance copy of The Next Pope, a survey of 19 leading contenders to succeed Pope Francis scheduled for publication next month. The author, Edward Pentin, discusses these papable cardinals in today's episode of Holy Smoke. The full list is still under wraps, but inevitably we talk about Cardinal Robert Sarah, the African-born apocalyptic visionary whom liberals most fear. (If you doubt that, read this despicable and semi-literate hatchet job on Sarah by Christopher Lamb in The Tablet.) Equally inevitably, we talk about the charismatic and ambitious Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, formerly Archbishop of Manila and now one of Francis's main allies in the Vatican.

In the current episode of Holy Smoke, my guest Professor Richard Landes – a historian specialising in apocalyptic movements – explains what is so clever, and so dangerous, about the modus operandi of Black Lives Matter. As he says, it allows people to indulge their own fantasies, even if their visions of the future are incompatible. So millennials, encouraged by intellectually lazy politicians, business leaders and churchmen, can persuade themselves that the toppling of statues will clear space for a multiracial utopia. The far-left thugs of Antifa, meanwhile, can fantasise (more plausibly, alas) about the collapse of capitalist society.

Today’s episode of Holy Smoke exposes the extent to which ordinary Christians have been betrayed by their own bishops. This is a process that began decades ago – but it is only this year, during the coronavirus pandemic, that we’ve seen just how corrupted church leaders have become by secularisation. The need to close churches for public worship during the lockdown meant that, for the first time in many decades, Anglican and Catholic bishops were able to exercise a small but significant degree of secular power – something they desperately crave. In doing so, they displayed a mixture of ruthlessness, vanity, hypocrisy and stupidity that will accelerate the decline of their own institutions.

When the shadow of the coronavirus is finally lifted, the British public will have a long list of people to thank: doctors, nurses, cleaners, shop assistants, charities and – maybe – Boris Johnson. But there won’t be a round of applause for the parish clergy, that’s for sure, and it's not really their fault: the bishops, especially the Catholic ones, have mishandled the Covid crisis spectacularly.One might have guessed as much. For years, the two main churches have been in the hands of mildly spiritual middle-managers who have somehow managed to acquire mitres.And in the United States? To be sure, there are bishops and pastors who, like the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, form a Mafia of the Mediocre.

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the strange and unstable world created by digital technology: one in which distinguishing between truth and falsehood is becoming almost impossible. It’s a follow-up to an article I wrote in The Spectator last week in which I argued that, trapped between populist conspiracy theories and liberal media bias, and confronted by thousands of sources of dubious information on YouTube, people are discovering that ’the more we know, the less we know’.This is the environment in which the churches are trying to survive – and failing miserably, because they don’t understand the Internet and don't know how to talk to people. But this episode is more about civil society than religion.

Last week I was sent a copy of a devastating 7,000-word letter accusing the Catholic bishops of England and Wales of grossly mishandling the coronavirus crisis by lobbying the government for a complete shutdown of their own churches, even for private prayer. The author called herself (or, more than likely, himself) ‘Fiona McDonald’ – and used a heavily encrypted email service in order to avoid being tracked down.  McDonald claimed that the bureaucrats of the Bishops’ Conference were sending out misleading and even untruthful messages about the church lockdown, claiming that it was forced on them by the government. It quoted a letter from Richard Moth, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, which contradicted this.