Damian Thompson

In the new Holy Smoke podcast episode, I finally get something off my chest. For 30 years I've been bored senseless by the public pronouncements of bishops – Anglicans and Catholics. Why do they feel the need to speak in such dreary jargon? Why do interesting clergy never make it to bishop? I'm joined by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, who shares my views. But I'm the one who names names, including that of a certain Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, so our conversation could get me into trouble. Listen to it in case you never hear from me again...

The photo above is of my sister Carmel and me having tea a few days after our mother’s funeral. She looks cheerful, doesn’t she? That’s because she was: although we both missed our mother intensely, and always will, we had done most of our grieving before she died, as we watched her tortured by Parkinson’s disease and severe dementia. Carmel looks well, too. And she thought she was. Ovarian cancer plays that trick on women. The first symptoms tend to be annoying rather than alarming. A few weeks after this photograph was taken, I was reassuring her that Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a common response to bereavement – which it is. But that’s not what was wrong with her.

Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue Peter!’ my mother would call out, in a voice that made it clear that my presence was required in front of the television. Blue Peter — 60 years old this week — was top of the very short list of programmes of which my parents approved. We lived in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. You can’t beat that for a Blue Peter-ish address. Our house was mock Tudor; my father worked for the Prudential. My younger sister and I, pupils at modest private day schools, slotted perfectly into the middle-middle-class demographic at which the show seemed to be aimed, though its reach was far wider.

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is under intense pressure to explain what he knew about his disgraced predecessor, the sex abuser and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Wuerl had asked to resign. He knew his position was untenable: not only is there widespread scepticism about his claim that he didn’t know McCarrick routinely assaulted seminarians, but he’s also under fire for alleged mishandling of abuse cases when he was Bishop of Pittsburgh. His departure hasn’t come as a surprise: he is past retirement age anyway.

This is a slightly misleading headline for today’s Holy Smoke podcast, because Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, Lara Prendergast and I didn’t spend a lot of time duscussing episcopal rudeness. The episode is actually about snobbery in church circles. Fr Alexander muses on clergy who name-drop like dowagers while Lara picks her way through the minefield of wedding invitations. But rude bishops do crop up, because it's something I’ve wanted to get off my chest for years. That’s a bit rich, I know, given some of the articles I’ve written. But I reckon most journalists would rather deal with a slimeball from the Palace of Westminster than an over-promoted middle manager in a mitre (or cardinal’s red hat).

The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI are also implicated; they did nothing, or almost nothing, while Mc-Carrick was seducing every seminarian he could get his hands on. (‘Hide the pretty ones!’ they used to say when he visited seminaries.) Yet powerful cardinals kept quiet and are now suspected of lying their heads off after Mc--Carrick’s crimes were recently made public. McCarrick is the world’s only ex-cardinal.

It’s depressing to see the media – both Catholic and secular – shielding Pope Francis from the explosive allegation made by his own former nuncio to the United States, that he knowingly covered up for and revived the career of serial gay predator Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, in testimony published on Saturday, says he personally told Francis in 2013 that McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, had ‘corrupted generations of seminarians and priests’. The Pope shrugged this off, says Viganò, and went on to lift canonical sanctions placed on McCarrick by Benedict XVI.

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, he claims – and lifted sanctions placed by Benedict XVI on McCarrick. Moreover, he fully rehabilitated the old man, who became one of his most trusted advisers. Viganò has called on Francis to resign.

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 McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington DC, was a compulsive predator. His serial molestation of seminarians was an open secret, and cannot possibly have come as a surprise to some of his friends in the US hierarchy. The grand jury report – which examined only a tiny fraction of America’s nearly 200 dioceses – has set off an explosion of rage from US Catholics on social media, including many priests.

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 only by his rucksack. His new book The Crossway grippingly describes his solitary journey. He was a pilgrim, not just a traveller, he insists - despite still being an atheist at the end of it. On this week’s Holy Smoke podcast, Guy explains why that makes sense to him. And I also take the opportunity to ask Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, why he’s irresistibly drawn to church buildings while remaining an unbeliever - albeit an agnostic rather than an atheist.

A solution ‘must be found’ in order to halt the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families, according to an American cardinal. That’s hardly news, you may say: the US conference of bishops is united in outrage at this cruel practice. But the cardinal I’m quoting is Raymond Leo Burke, former Archbishop of St Louis, a theological and political conservative who is the closest thing the president has to an ally in the American hierarchy. Cardinal Burke therefore finds himself in an unfamiliar place: on the same side of the fence as the man who sacked him from a top-ranking post in the Vatican, Pope Francis.

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 to a gay Chilean victim of clerical sex abuse last month, Pope Francis – yes, you guessed it – appeared to press the 'delete' button on the Church's teaching that homosexuality is 'intrinsically disordered'. As I say in this week's Spectator, the Vatican hasn't denied Juan Carlos Cruz's account of the conversation. So, even if Francis didn't use precisely those words, he's happy for them to be out there. Homosexuality was the subject that reduced the Anglican Communion to rubble.