Damian Thompson

  Update, 3.20pm Monday: As I write this, various cardinals have said they didn't sign the letter, some of them waiting several hours before distancing themselves from it. Now Erdö says he didn't sign it. It's extremely hard to get at the truth. 'Not signing' can mean a number of things, ranging from an outright false claim that a cardinal supported the letter to panicky backtracking by cardinals who did assent to it but are grasping at the technicality that they didn't personally append their signature. But the damage to the synod is done.

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.

Apologies for the picture quality (it's from live coverage by ABC News), but this shot of Pope Francis cracking up as he sees a baby dressed as a pope is just the sort of image that his conservative critics dread. That's because it undermines their attempts to stop Francis waving through what they regard as a dangerous watering-down of Catholic teaching. The Pope's visit to the US, which has just ended, has been a public relations triumph. Meaning: a triumph, full stop. Francis was eloquent, relaxed and amazingly youthful for a man heading for 80. He tilted in a liberal direction, but not far enough to create anxiety among most churchgoing Catholics anywhere in the world. Maybe they should be feeling anxiety.

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students? A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’ Ms McCabe told the press that ‘I’d quite like to learn about the music of Clara Schumann.’ OK, let’s start there.

Pope Francis today made sweeping changes to the procedures by which Catholics get their marriages annulled – that is, receive official permission to marry again because their first marriage was invalid. Here's part of a news story by Reuters Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella: Pope Francis on Tuesday made it simpler and swifter for Catholics to secure a marriage annulment, the most radical such reform for 250 years, and told bishops to be more welcoming to divorced couples. Under the old norms, it often took years to win an annulment, with hefty legal fees attached. Francis said the procedure should be free and the new rules mean that a marriage might be declared null and void in just 45 days in some cases ...

The headline on page 33 of today's Times reads: 'Repent and we will forgive abortions, Pope tells women'. It's a bad headline, because the Church already grants absolution to women who repent of their abortions. CNN did much better: 'Pope Francis says all priests can forgive women who've had abortions'. (In fact, the Church teaches that God does the forgiving, but 'priests can forgive women' is OK as shorthand.) That said, headlines aren't written by reporters, so you'd expect the Times article to set the record straight. On the contrary: Tom Kington, the author, litters his piece with ignorant misrepresentations of Francis's ruling.

Pope Francis, unpredictable as ever, has just announced that during the forthcoming 'Year of Mercy', Catholics can receive absolution from priests of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), which has illicitly ordained its own bishops and doesn't recognise the Second Vatican Council. He's also given all priests permission to absolve anyone who truly repents of the sin of having or procuring an abortion – which they could already, though they might need the permission of the local bishop since it incurs automatic excommunication. So this isn't such big news.

Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they're not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the 'sceptics' are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though they don't think it's happening today. So you'd expect the BBC's 'Environment and Energy Analyst', Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Here are two tweets he sent out yesterday (links here and here): Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail's parliamentary sketchwriter and theatre critic, celebrated for his sometimes caustic but more often gentle wit.

For the last few months, young American liberals have been writing love letters to a white-haired 73-year-old former mayor from Vermont who supports gun owners and worries about the threat posed by mass immigration to 'American kids'. Only now is it dawning on them that they may have been sending them to the wrong address. The love letters took the form of articles in Salon, Slate and dozens of other, like, really cool websites. The recipient was Bernie Sanders, the only US senator to declare himself a socialist. Which is also really cool, because it must mean he hates the Republicans and the One Per Cent. So what if he was born in 1941? Seniors are a 'minority', right? This man has been a social justice warrior for decades. Awesome!

'The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.' In that one sentence, Cardinal Pell puts his finger on what is wrong with Laudato Si', Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment. In that document, Francis waded into an argument about climate change and took sides. Moreover, he gave the impression that he was speaking for all Catholics when he did so; and, if by any chance he wasn't, errant faithful should fall into line. In an interview in Thursday's Financial Times, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy stepped out of line. See above. It was a brave thing to do: Pell's wholesale reform of the Vatican's finances is making him plenty of enemies as it is, and now he's even more vulnerable to attack. Why take the risk?

One of the finest speeches Benedict XVI ever delivered was about sacred music. It is a small masterpiece, in which Benedict recalls his first encounter with Mozart in the liturgy. ‘When the first notes of the Coronation Mass sounded, Heaven virtually opened and the presence of the Lord was experienced very profoundly,’ he said. Benedict robustly defended the performance of the work of great composers at Mass, which he insisted was necessary for the fulfilment of the Second Vatican Council’s wish that ‘the patrimony of sacred music [is] preserved and developed with great care’. Then he asked: what is music? He identified three places from which it flowed.