Damian Thompson

Last week we reached the beginning of the end of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio — the ‘great reformer’ of the Catholic church who, it appears, has been unable to deliver the reforms that he himself favours. This despite being Pope. On Friday, he published a 200-page ‘exhortation’ entitled Amoris Laetitia, ‘The Joy of Love’ (or ‘The Joy of Sex’, as English-speaking Catholics of a certain vintage immediately christened it). This was Francis’s long-awaited response to two Vatican synods on the family, in 2014 and last year, which descended into Anglican-style bickering between liberals and conservatives. At the heart of the disputes lay the question of whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion.

Here's the beginning of the Guardian's report on Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Pope Francis's response to the Synod on the Family: Pope Francis has called for the Catholic church to revamp its response to modern family life, striking a delicate balance between a more accepting tone towards gay people and the defence of traditional church teachings on issues such as abortion. In a landmark papal document entitled Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Francis outlined his vision for the church on family issues, urging priests to respond to their communities without mercilessly enforcing church rules: “Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs,” he wrote. Can you spot what's missing?

The decline of the Church of England has been one of the most astonishing trends in modern Britain. The pews of churches in this country are emptying fast. Next week, a book was to be published about this collapse entitled That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People. But suddenly the publishers, Bloomsbury, decided to pull it. The book, it seemed, was a little too incendiary. Those reviewing the book received a panicky message: ‘Following the receipt of a legal complaint, Bloomsbury are recalling all review copies of this book and ask you to immediately return the copy received…’. Apparently there has been a legal action because of ‘a disputed passage about a Christian leader’. It sounded intriguing. But which leader?

Just before Christmas, the Catholic Herald named the composer Sir James MacMillan as its first Catholic of the Year. The award recognised many things: masterly compositions such as the St John and St Luke Passions and the Fourth Symphony, the latter played at this year's Proms; his investiture as a knight in December; the setting up with his wife, Lynne, of a new music festival, the Cumnock Tryst; and his intellectually dazzling defence of orthodox Catholicism. What the magazine didn't tell its readers, or even James, was that we also wanted to honour the MacMillan family for its profoundly Catholic response to a family crisis. James and Lynne's daughter, Catherine, had a severely disabled daughter, Sara.

.... Bonnie Greer. Which is a shame, because before Twitter she was feisty and thought-provoking. Just two years ago she came in to the Telegraph newsroom for one of our Telegram podcasts and was terrific value – just as I remember from the golden era of The Late Review (i.e. before Mark Lawson was replaced by right-on, pleased-with-herself socialist millionairess Kirsty Wark). But then Greer discovered Twitter and THIS happened: These are just from the last month or so. It's not exactly news that Greer, a Chicago-born playwright, is left-wing; but I remember her as a lefty with a sense of humour, not Private Eye's Deirdre Spart.

Pope Francis has used another mid-flight press conference to make a statement of significance to millions of Catholics. Asked if the Church should drop its opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of Aids (a teaching already modified by Benedict XVI), he effectively declared that the debate was a waste of time. He referred to Jesus's practice – opposed by the Pharisees on legalistic grounds – of healing on the Sabbath. 'Healing is obligatory!' he said. Earlier in the interview, the Pope took aim at Catholic 'fundamentalists' whose attachment to rules was 'idolatrous'. Here's a transcript from RomeReports: Question: Aids is a serious problem in Africa, the epidemic continues.

This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father's method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful: ... soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all making the news, followed by a maelstrom of interpretation and counter-interpretation before an eventual 'clarification' comes out of the Vatican press office amounting to little more than 'We don’t think any of you have it quite right'. I've made the same observation myself (though not nearly so memorably). What I couldn't explain was why Francis was behaving in this erratic fashion.

The aggressively traditionalist Catholic website Rorate Caeli is tonight announcing that Pope Francis has dropped a 'bombshell' in an interview with his favourite Italian journalist, Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica. Here's a PDF of the newspaper's article and here is Rorate Caeli's translation of Scalfari: It is true – Pope Francis answered – it is a truth and for that matter the family that is the basis of any society changes continuously, as all things change around us. We must not think that the family does not exist any longer, it will always exist, because ours is a social species, and the family is the support beam of sociability, but it cannot be avoided that the current family, open as you say, contains some positive aspects, and some negative ones ...