Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator and presenter of The Spectator’s Holy Smoke podcast

Saturday

Damian Thompson

Time is running out for the ‘Dictator Pope’ as a new scandal hits Rome

From our UK edition

Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras, one of the most influential figures in the Catholic Church, has been accused of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Catholic university in his ceremonial role as its chancellor – and of investing more than $1.2 million in London financial companies, some of which has now allegedly vanished. These claims form part of a set of spectacularly damaging but unproven allegations by the widely read Italian media outlet L'Espresso. You can read the report here; it also speculates about a 'close and unseemly relationship' between a bishop close to Maradiaga and a mysterious man apparently posing as a priest.

Damian Thompson

Why more and more priests can’t stand Pope Francis

From our UK edition

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: Damian Thompson on Pope Francis: On 2 January, the Vatican published a letter from Pope Francis to the world’s bishops in which he reminded them that they must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards child abuse. The next day, the American Week magazine published an article that told the story of ‘Don Mercedes’ — Fr Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest with a passion for expensive cars and underage boys. In 2012, Pope Benedict stripped Inzoli of his priestly faculties, effectively defrocking him. In 2014, however, they were restored to him — by Pope Francis, who warned him to stay away from minors.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

How the music of Bach can teach us how to die

From our UK edition

Imagine if we had access to over a hundred Shakespeare plays in which the Bard was at or near the top of his game – but we didn't bother to watch them and couldn't even remember their names. Bach has as good a claim as any composer to be the Shakespeare of music, yet a vast proportion of his work is little known even by music-lovers. He left us more than 200 sacred cantatas (many more are missing), most of which are miraculously inspired. So, why their neglect? Is it their supposedly dour and frightening Lutheran theology? The latest Holy Smoke podcast suggests that, if we take the plunge, the music and texts of the cantatas help us address the central questions of existence – even if we're not Christians.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Fighting talk | 23 November 2017

From our UK edition

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head? I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico Muhly, whose opera Marnie — based more closely on Winston Graham’s novel than on Hitchcock’s film — was given its world première by English National Opera last Saturday. Would I make it out of the room without asking the Wrong Question? Muhly, who made his name as the cherubic, prodigiously gifted but prickly protégé of Philip Glass, is scary to interview. This is well known in New York.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Cult classic

From our UK edition

In Dan Brown’s new thriller, Origin, we are introduced to the Catholic church’s sinister far-right rival — a paranoid worldwide cult dedicated to undermining the reforms of Pope Francis. This toxic outfit has its own pope, who runs it from his ‘Vatican’ at El Palmar de Troya, on the Andalusian plain; hence its name, the Palmarian Catholic church. Brown describes a ‘soaring Gothic cathedral’ dominated by ‘eight towering spires, each with a triple-tiered bell tower’. Inside, members are required to attend interminable masses and pray to hundreds of freshly created saints, including St Adolf Hitler. Origin is a clumsily fashioned thriller, even by Brown’s standards, and you might imagine that he invented the Palmarian church.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Make mine a double

From our UK edition

If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position the instruments. They can sit side by side, an arrangement known as ‘twin beds’. Or they can be slotted together so the performers face each other. That’s called a ‘69’. When Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich play together, they opt for twin beds. Appropriately, you might think, since they’re divorced — but really it’s because Kovacevich insists on sitting so low that Argerich can’t see his head if she’s opposite him. With everyone else she prefers a 69, as do most pianists: it’s easier to make eye contact.

Friday

Damian Thompson

The Protestant passions of Queen Victoria: her biographer A.N. Wilson reveals all

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

If Jesus Christ was on Twitter, would he be attacked by malignant trolls?

From our UK edition

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.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

Is the Church of England dying in the countryside?

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Losing our religion

From our UK edition

Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this clear in a Radio 3 interview just before the broadcast, because the BBC was just itching to cast the work — a melancholy score, despite its thunderous drumbeats — as a lament for us leaving the EU. That would have been neat, given that the second half of the concert consisted of Beethoven’s Ninth, whose ‘Ode to Joy’ has been clumsily appropriated by Brussels. Incidentally, some Remainers in the audience chattered through the symphony’s first three movements, impatient for their Big Tune.

Friday

Damian Thompson

The knives are out for Christian faith schools

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Beethoven: Missa solemnis

From our UK edition

When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes. But the more I listen to it, the more I agree with the composer that it’s his greatest work — or, at least, up there with the last two piano sonatas and his String Quartet Op. 131, my other nominees. Despite its titanic scale, the Missa solemnis inhabits their intimate sound world: it is built from the harmonically ambiguous motifs of Beethoven’s ‘third style’. Nothing in it is as catchy as the ‘Ode to Joy’.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Pope Francis is behaving like a Latin American dictator – but the liberal media aren’t interested

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Cardinal Pell returns to Australia ‘to clear his name’. But what are his chances of a fair trial?

From our UK edition

Cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican's finances, has been charged with historic sex offences in his native Australia. He is returning there 'to clear his name'. 'I look forward to my day in court', he said at a press conference in Rome this morning. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't be looking forward to it. I believe – on the basis of the very sketchy evidence we've seen so far, and also my personal encounters with him – that the Cardinal is innocent of these charges. But what are his chances of a fair trial in Australia? Let me quote at length from an article by Angela Shanahan in The Australian, published on June 11. It seems to be behind a paywall, but this is what she had to say: Pell can never receive a fair trial.

Monday

Damian Thompson

Is the British government about to be held hostage by head-banging biblical fundamentalists?

From our UK edition

Forgive the inflammatory headline, but that's the conclusion that millions of Britons have drawn from media descriptions of the DUP. Mainland commentators seem unable to make any distinction between the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the late Ian Paisley, and his small Free Presbyterian sect, which is indeed influenced by American fundamentalism. We know the DUP is against abortion and gay marriage. But are its members also creationists who think the world was created 6,000 years ago? In this week's Holy Smoke podcast, Cristina Odone and I talk to Jon Anderson, a Northern Irish writer specialising in religious and political sectarianism. He lays some myths to rest. For example, the DUP is not the main party of the Orange Order.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Kissin in action

From our UK edition

Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but chooses not to’. But you could certainly argue that Kissin has been the world’s most enigmatic great pianist since the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997 – though, unlike the promiscuously gay Richter, his overwhelming concern with privacy does not conceal any exotic secrets. He has recently married for the first time, but chooses not to publicise the fact.

Monday

Damian Thompson

The Christian views of Theresa May and Tim Farron are way below the radar. And that’s how they like it

From our UK edition

There's a mischievous, not to say malicious, Twitter photograph of Theresa May circulating this morning. It shows her sporting shoulder pads and severely slicked-backed boyish hair, campaigning in the 1987 general election. On top of it someone has added the words: 'Curbing the promotion of lesbianism in Merton's schools starts with girls having male role models in their lives'. Did she say it? No one can source the quote. But Mrs May, then as now a weekly churchgoing Anglican, did vote against the repeal of Section 28 in 2000. In those days she was an opponent of same-sex marriage, as was Tim Farron, also a weekly churchgoer. Both the Prime Minister and the Lib Dem leader held this view for religious reasons, though they preferred not to be drawn into theological debate.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Period drama

From our UK edition

Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons copulating on a tin roof’. But now two masters of the instrument, the Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani and the German Andreas Staier, are locked in mortal combat. For connoisseurs of finely tuned insults, it’s riveting stuff. For their colleagues it’s a wretched business, because one of the two musicians is setting fire to his own reputation. Also, a third harpsichordist — a gifted young Frenchman, Jean Rondeau — has been cruelly dragged into the feud. It goes without saying in period instrument circles that Esfahani picked the fight.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Pope Francis’s liberal fan club visibly upset after he hits it off with Trump

From our UK edition

Pope Francis met President Trump this morning and they appear to have hit it off. After a 30-minute meeting in the Vatican, the president emerged beaming, describing the private audience as 'the honour of a lifetime'. The Pope, too, was described as 'grinning from ear to ear'. We don't know if the two men discussed global warming, on which they famously disagree. Francis did give Trump a copy of Laudato Si', his encyclical on the environment – but as Christoper Lamb, Rome correspondent of the left-wing Tablet, glumly tweeted: 'No mention of climate change in Vatican statement'. Lamb is not a happy bunny today.

Monday

Damian Thompson

Britain’s loss of religious faith: how should we interpret shocking new statistics?

From our UK edition

Just 30 per cent of Britons feel that their religion or faith is important to them, according to the 2017 Ipsos MORI survey of global trends. That puts us at the bottom of the international table: only Swedes (29 per cent), Belgians (27 per cent) and the Japanese (22 per cent) are more secular than we are, according to this poll. The global average, meanwhile, is 53 per cent. Muslim Indonesia heads the list with 93 per cent. Christian America is on 68 per cent, despite a recent slump in church attendance. (I'm always a bit suspicious of what Americans tell pollsters about their faith.) Even Australia – hardly a nation that flaunts its piety – is on 42 per cent.