Damian Thompson

If the head of any other organisation were guilty of such complicity, he or she would not only be forced to resign but could also end up in the dock

The allegation by a former senior Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis vigorously covered up sex abuse is looking more credible by the day. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, says he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser of seminarians. The Pope ignored him,

A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that ex-Cardinal Theodore

The young writer Guy Stagg threw in his job a few years ago to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome – choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up

In an interview with Reuters, the supreme pontiff uses Trumpian rhetoric to criticize the migrant children scandal.

Only one pope in the history of the Catholic Church could have uttered the following words: ‘Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.’ Speaking

Nigel Lawson once wrote that ‘the National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion’. It’s a justly celebrated line because it rings so true – though the second half of the sentence, even more uncomfortably true, is invariably left out: ‘… with those who practise in it regarding themselves as

There was never going to be a happy ending to the story of Alfie Evans, the 23-month-old boy treated at Alder Hey hospital, Liverpool, for an undiagnosed neurological condition that destroyed his brain. But somehow the British establishment has contrived to make a tragic situation worse – to the point where large swathes of European

Last week The Spectator published a fascinating and mischievous piece by Ysenda Maxtone Graham entitled ‘A tale of two Sarahs: the cuddly bishop vs the terrifying cardinal’. The first Sarah is Sarah Mullally, who is just about to take office as the first woman Bishop of London; she’s a former nurse – indeed, the former

Fake news is dangerous because it uses ‘distorted data’ to manipulate the public, Pope Francis warned us in January. Well, he should know. Yesterday it emerged that his press office doctored a photograph of a letter from Benedict XVI in which the Pope Emeritus apparently praised some new books containing Francis’s collected writings. Benedict wrote

Five years ago, the name of the Pope was announced from the balcony of St Peter’s and I was given less than an hour by the Daily Telegraph to write an article about a man I knew virtually nothing about. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, had been fairly low down on