Damian Thompson

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 the list of candidates acceptable to liberals – i.e. someone not in the mould of Benedict XVI. Sure enough, the new Pope Francis appeared wearing a plain white mozzetta or shoulder-cape; the BBC reported that he'd refused to put on the ermine-trimmed red velvet number sported by his predecessors, declaring that 'the carnival is over'. Actually, the carnival was just beginning: we were treated to one gesture after another of high-profile humility.

Twitter brings out a mean streak in some people that can take the breath away. And I should know. I was re-reading my old tweets the other day and thinking: good God, if this was my actual conversation at a dinner party I’d have to get my coat - remember the bloke in The Fast Show? - right after the soup. In the new Holy Smoke podcast, I’m joined by Harry Mount, Lara Prendergast and Freddy Gray to discuss the warping of our personalities by social media. Also, the complete failure of religious leaders to address the moral dilemmas it throws at us every day: bishops, being hopeless at Twitter and Facebook themselves, ignore them, preferring to lecture us on the finer points of government welfare and immigration policies. It’s a no-holds-barred conversation.

Our guest on today's Holy Smoke podcast is A.N. Wilson, author of a hugely admired biography of Queen Victoria and – as you'll hear – the most mischievous intellectual in the land. Cristina Odone and I started out by asking about Victoria's vigorous (and possibly whisky-fuelled) persecution of Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England: the Queen lobbied hard for the legislation that sent several of them to jail for popish "ritualism". But that was the just the beginning of Wilson's hilarious whistlestop tour of the passions and prejudices of Queen Victoria.

You must listen to the feisty new episode of the Holy Smoke podcast, in which Cristina Odone and I ask our guest Jeremy Vine whether, if he were alive in the 21st century, Jesus would have been on Twitter. If so, what would happen to him? Jeremy – whose new book What I Learnt discusses social media – points out that the Sermon on the Mount could easily be sliced up into memorable tweets. Indeed, but you can also fit Jesus's description of the Jews as children of Satan into 140 characters. That would lose him his blue tick, if not cause him to be banned altogether. But all three of us agreed that, if Christ appeared on social media, he'd be a magnet for trolls.

English country churches: everyone loves them, no one wants to actually pray in them. 'People have a massive sentimental attachment to the buildings, but they don't actually come to services,' says my guest on this week's Holy Smoke podcast, the Rev Ravi Holy. He's a country vicar in Wye, Kent, where he regularly attracts 150 worshippers in his main church – but, in the smaller churches he looks after, he's sometime confronted by just six people. Do listen to our incredibly frank conversation. Ravi is an ex-Pentecostalist, a liberal Catholic 'post-evangelical' who believes in the Resurrection but isn't too bothered if some of his flock don't. He's even conducted a funeral for an atheist with no reference to God in the service. (I put him on the spot about this.

Today's Holy Smoke podcast responds to rumours that the Government is planning to betray parents who want to send their children to faith schools. As The Sunday Times reported: Ministers are expected to drop plans to allow Christian, Jewish and Muslim state schools to admit all their pupils from one faith after warnings that the move could heighten community divisions in Britain. A U-turn would jeopardise dozens of new free schools planned by faith groups, some to cope with the influx of Catholic families from Poland and other east European countries. Catholics said this weekend they would not open new state schools if they had to reserve half their places for children of other faiths, raising new school funding problems for the government.

At the end of June, Pope Francis dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller from his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – arguably the most important position in the Catholic Church after that of the Pope himself, since the CDF is in charge of doctrine. Müller was given no notice that the Pope was breaking from tradition by not renewing his five-year mandate – and no explanation. A few days later, on July 4, he explained what had happened in a long phone call to his friend Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of four cardinals who had challenged Francis on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. Meisner was horrified to hear the details of Müller's humiliation.