Damian Thompson

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 ...

This afternoon the Vatican Synod on the Family amended and approved the final document summing up three weeks of chaotic and sometimes poisonous debate – much of it focussing on whether divorced and remarried people should be allowed to receive communion. The majority view of the Synod Fathers is that they don't want the rules changed. They especially don't want one rule to apply in, say, Germany and another in Tanzania. Pope Francis has just given a cautiously worded (but also, alas, rather waffly) address in which he acknowledges as much: ...

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane is one of the bishops who'll be voting on the final report of the Synod on the Family at the Vatican tomorrow. He's 'quite a character', I'm told by a priest who knows him. But anyone who's been reading his startlingly frank and witty diary of the Synod, published on his diocesan website, will have already worked that out. There are cardinals and bishops who, after a few jars, will let slip what really goes on at these occasions. And then there's Archbishop Mark, who – although no doubt great company in the pub – doesn't need any prompting to spill the beans. He hasn't broken any rules, mind. There are no leaks in his dispatches. But let's just say that it's lucky for him that Pope Francis doesn't read English.

I first saw the YouTube film from which these photographs are taken over a year ago. I'm surprised it hasn't gained wider currency. It appears to show the future Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, distributing Holy Communion to a crowd at a Mass at San Cayetano, Buenos Aires. On the film, he hands the hosts (i.e., the consecrated wafers that Catholics believe are the body of Christ) to people in the middle of the crowd who stick out their hands. He doesn't check what happens to them; indeed, the hosts are apparently passing hand to hand. For traditional Catholics, this is a shocking way of distributing communion that breaks every rule in the book. I suspect any English priest caught doing it would be hauled in front of his bishop.

Pope Francis yesterday gave an address to the profoundly divided Synod on the Family in which he confirmed his plans to decentralise the Catholic Church – giving local bishops' conferences more freedom to work out their own solutions to the problems of divorce and homosexuality. This is the nightmare of conservative Catholic cardinals, including – unsurprisingly – those in the Vatican. They thought they had a sufficient majority in the synod to stop the lifting of the ban on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, or any softening on the Church's attitude to gay couples. But in yesterday's keynote speech, delivered as the synod enters its last week, Francis told them that the decentralisation will be imposed from above.

The Catholic Church is this week in the biggest mess it's been in since the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Francis is to blame. The Vatican cardinals in charge of doctrine, finance and worship are believed to have written to Francis at the beginning of the Synod on the Family – now in its second chaotic week – privately warning him that it was likely to spin out of control. That's because most of the world's bishops don't support any major change to the church's rules on allowing divorced and remarried people to receive communion, or to the way it treats gay couples. You may think they're wrong, but that is the situation.

Cardinal George Pell, Prefect of the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy, has just issued a statement saying there is 'no possibility' that the 'minority' of Synod Fathers who favour allowing divorced and remarried people to receive Communion will get their way at the chaotic Synod on the Family. His spokesman said: 'There is strong agreement in the Synod on most points but obviously there is some disagreement because minority elements want to change the Church's teachings on the proper dispositions necessary for the reception of communion. 'Obviously there is no possibility of change on this doctrine.' The cardinal confirmed the existence (but not the accuracy) of a letter to Pope Francis, leaked today, reportedly signed by himself and very senior cardinals.

This picture of Pope Francis apparently talking to retired Belgian cardinal Godfried Danneels at the Synod on the Family, which began this week, is circulating on Twitter and disturbing many Catholics. This is what you need to know: 1. Five years ago, Cardinal Danneels tried to cover up a revolting case of family sex abuse. As the National Catholic Reporter revealed on August 30, 2010: Audio recordings leaked to the Belgian media this weekend reveal Belgium's Cardinal Godfried Danneels urging a sex abuse victim not to make public that his abuser was his uncle Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium. The recordings show Danneels pressuring the young man not to force Vangheluwe to resign.

Pope Francis’s three-week Synod on the Family began on Sunday. Most of the 279 ‘Synod Fathers’ are senior bishops, many of them cardinals. They have no authority to change any aspect of Catholic teaching or pastoral practice. They are discussing the ‘hot button’ issues of communion for the divorced and remarried and the spiritual care of gay Catholics — but, once the meeting is over, power will rest entirely in the hands of the Pope. Conservative Catholics aren’t happy. Last year, at a preparatory ‘extraordinary’ synod, officials hand-picked by Francis announced in the middle of the proceedings that the Fathers favoured a more relaxed approach to gay relationships and second marriages.