Damian Thompson

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast discusses two looming disasters for Pope Francis.  The first is the ‘Amazon Synod’ in October, at which the world’s bishops will discuss a bizarre plan to ordain Amazon ‘village elders’ as priests. The framework for the synod has already been published; my guest Dr Ed Condon uses the word ‘Orwellian’ to describe the language it employs.  The second threat to Francis is more personal. When he became Pope he lost no time making his friend Gustavo Zanchetta a bishop in Argentina. Bad move. Within a short time Zanchetta was facing allegations of sexual and financial impropriety. The Pope was informed of these allegations (and if you Google them you’ll discover that they were pretty lurid).

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the hypocrisy of ‘woke’ capitalism. Netflix, Disney and other corporations are both ruthlessly capitalist and ruthlessly liberal – at least when it comes to America. They’re throwing a fit because there’s been a conservative and Christian backlash against gruesome late-term abortions. They’ve also become risibly obsessed with Pride month and openly contemptuous of just one religion: Christianity. But their liberalism is conveniently moved to the ‘trash’ folder when there’s a chance of making money in communist or Islamic dictatorships. I’m joined by Tim Stanley of the Daily Telegraph and Fr Ben Kiely, a leading defender of persecuted Christians.

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.