Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

What is the truth about Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor and ‘Team Bergoglio’?

A couple of days ago John Bingham, the excellent religious affairs editor of the Telegraph, broke a story that is only now filtering out. I hope he'll forgive me if I wonder whether he realised just what a big story it was. Bingham wrote: Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, helped to orchestrate a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign which led to the election of Pope Francis, a new biography claims ... [The book] to be published next month, discloses that there had been a discreet, but highly organised, campaign by a small group of European cardinals in support of Cardinal Bergoglio.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was she the ‘woman taken in adultery’, the one told to go and sin no more. Nor was she the wife of Jesus.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

Pope Francis and ‘the Great Division’: the Catholic civil war draws closer

In the magazine a couple of weeks ago I asked if we were in the early stages of a Catholic civil war fuelled by confusion over Pope Francis's apparent willingness to soften the Church's pastoral approach to divorcees and gay people. Hostilities began during the disastrous Synod of the Family, at which liberal officials gave a press conference implying that the Church was about to admit remarried divorcees to Holy Communion and celebrate the positive aspects of gay unions. The synod fathers, furious at this hijacking of the proceedings, voted down every liberal proposal – leaving the Pope looking foolish. He has since sacked Cardinal Raymond Burke, the most truculent of the conservatives, from his post as prefect of the Vatican's supreme court.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

A hard-Left anarchist tears into Isis and its liberal apologists. Blimey

Update: He's called Martin Wright and you can see a clip of him speaking here at a Class War event in 1985. In it he reveals that he used to support the National Front, which isn't a massive surprise, though he moved away from racism pretty quickly. Click through and you'll discover just how much anarchists hate Owen Jones. Martin – I've yet to discover his surname – is a hard-Left anarchist from the old white working class who hates Britain's liberal media. But not half as much as he hates Isis and its 'Gap Year Jihadists' for whom he won't shed a tear if they're wiped out by a drone. This YouTube video is a few weeks old but pretty compulsive listening. Note that sex gangs in the north of England crack a mention.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Why Christians should stick up for atheists

Christians and Muslims in Egypt are joining forces to address the challenge of atheism, according to this news report. (It reminds me of the old headline from Northern Ireland: 'Catholics and Protestants unite to fight ecumenism'.) Christian churches in Egypt say they are joining forces with Egypt's Al-Azhar, a prominent centre of Sunni Muslim learning, to fight the spread of atheism in the country. 'The Church and the Al-Azhar are drafting a constructive mechanism to address atheism,' Poules Halim, a spokesman for Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church, told Anadolu Agency.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Watch out Pope Francis: the Catholic civil war has begun

‘At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,’ said a prominent Catholic conservative last week. No big deal, you might think. Opponents of Pope Francis have been casting doubt on his leadership abilities for months — and especially since October’s Vatican Synod on the Family, at which liberal cardinals pre-emptively announced a softening of the church’s line on homosexuality and second marriages, only to have their proposals torn up by their colleagues. But it is a big deal. The ‘rudderless’ comment came not from a mischievous traditionalist blogger but from Cardinal Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura — that is, president of the Vatican’s supreme court.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Paedophile crimes should not be used to score points against ‘The Establishment’

Fiona Woolf, as you can probably tell from her Maggie-Smith-in-yet-another-costume-drama photograph above, is a member of The Establishment. She's Lord Mayor of London. And a QC. Plus, she has been at the same social events as former home secretary Lord Brittan and his wife; is even sort of friends with Lady B, in common with hundreds of other well-connected people. That's the thing about being of a certain age and professional eminence – you keep being introduced to each other and occasionally show up at the same dinner parties. Take another example: Baroness Butler-Sloss. Her late brother, Lord Havers, was attorney general when Leon Brittan was in office. So you could say that she 'moved in the same circles' as the Brittans.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

The disgraced bishop and the loyal parish: Catholic double standards at their finest

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales are to hold an inquiry into the case of the Rt Rev Kieran Conry, he of the two (or is it three?) girlfriends, who resigned as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton when he had a crisis of conscience caused by the tabloids knocking on his door. Displaying their celebrated transparency, the bishops have decided to keep the name of the 'chair' of the inquiry secret. The committee will focus on whether Conry breached guidelines on 'vulnerable adults'. I very much doubt whether it will ask why Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor persuaded Rome to make his protégé a bishop when his relationship with a woman was already common knowledge.

Saturday

Damian Thompson

The Vatican cancels its earthquake. This is not Pope Francis’s finest hour

'Thanks be to God', as we Catholic children used to say with heartfelt enthusiasm as Mass was over for another week. The most divisive meeting of Catholic bishops since Vatican II has ended – and no real damage has been done. Except, I'm sorry to say, to the reputation of Pope Francis. No real progress has been made, either. This afternoon the official report of the Synod was released and so far as I can tell it cancelled the 'earthquake' implied by the half-way report of the debates on Monday. This called for the 'gifts and values' of homosexuals to be recognised and of 'valuing' their sexual orientation. This language has disappeared from today's report – a 'working document' for a fuller Synod next year – whose paragraphs were voted on in sections.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The drunk conductor who ruined Rachmaninov’s career

Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted the first performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor? The best of Glazunov’s own neatly carpentered symphonies hover on the verge of greatness. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a toper — swigging from bottles of spirits during lectures at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he was director — they would do more than hover. Unfortunately, his drinking didn’t just screw up his own career. The 23-year-old Sergei Rachmaninov had spent two years working on his first symphony, whose climaxes erupt from melodic cells borrowed from Orthodox chant. Not that Glazunov would have noticed. He barely glanced at the score before the premiere.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Cardinal Kasper: You can’t talk to Africans about homosexuality. Whoops!

Say what you like about H.E. Walter Card. Kasper, he speaks his mind. Normally this suits liberal Catholics. Today they're wishing he had maintained a prudential silence. In an interview with Edward Pentin of ZENIT published just as the fathers of the Carry On Synod on the Family thought things were calming down, the retired German cardinal held forth on Africans and how they don't get it on the subject of homosexuality and really there's no point in talking to them because they're such bigots. I paraphrase. Here is the exchange: Kasper: The problem, as well, is that there are different problems of different continents and different cultures. Africa is totally different from the West.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

This Catholic ‘earthquake’ on homosexuality is splitting the Church

This tweet about the Vatican Synod on the Family has appeared in my timeline and it speaks volumes about the chaos the debates are generating: Cardinal Wilfred Napier, Archbishop of Durban, is a participant at the Synod and sometimes spoken of as the first black Pope. His quote refers not just to the media talk of an 'earthquake' in Catholic attitudes towards homosexuality but also to yesterday's document that produced it. To quote Prof James Hitchcock, writing in the National Catholic Register, 'there are internal tensions at the Synod that have become public, despite efforts to keep them confidential. Some bishops seem to be working to achieve diverse goals, often in opposition to one another.' Hitchcock is one of the world's leading conservative Catholic intellectuals.

Monday

Damian Thompson

‘Earthquake’ in Rome as Vatican synod talks about homosexuality and divorce

The Synod on the Family in Rome today caused an 'earthquake' – the word is being used on Catholic blogs everywhere – when it appeared to tweak the Church's line on homosexuality and second marriages. 'Line', please note, not its teaching on the sinfulness of all sexual acts outside marriage, which it does not have the authority to change and will remain intact long after this pontificate. But the 'line' matters, and here it is, unveiled in an alarmingly haphazard fashion in a document called the relatio post disceptationem – a half-way report on the discussions read aloud in the synod hall this morning.

Sunday

Damian Thompson

Brooks Newmark was in mental agony: I saw it with my own eyes

Tory MP Brooks Newmark quits politics after sexting photograph comes to light; talks of depression, needing help, checks into clinic. To which the response of many people will be: Yeah, right. He's playing the depression card. I hope Spectator readers will think again, however horrified they are by his crazy actions and the pain he has inflicted on his family. He has accepted responsibility for what has happened; he is not raging against the sting that kicked off this scandal. I knew Brooks very, very slightly until a couple of years ago: we have good friends in common. I vaguely remember him from his days as a postgraduate at Oxford. He was an American – it never occurred to me to think of him as English. He was fresh from Harvard.

Friday

Damian Thompson

Ukip is a disaster for Labour. And then there’s Scotland…

Heywood and Middleton is a far worse result for Labour than for the Tories: we can agree on that, surely. Clacton is grim for Dave, of course, but I'm interested in what happens in the rotten Labour heartlands. Here's something else for Ed Miliband to worry about: the SNP. Loathsome party, humiliated last month, but so angry and looking for revenge. The turnout in Scotland come the general election will surely be higher than usual. And much of it will be made up of occasional voters energised by the referendum. The SNP won't take safe Labour seats: they're hugely behind – we're talking 20-point margins. But the electorate has changed. Peter Kellner reckons the Nats could capture 26 seats, which is fanciful.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

Anglican bishop to address Ukip. Now that’s courage for you

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, has agreed to talk to members of Ukip about 'Magna Carta and the Perfectly Virtuous Pages of our History’. I blogged earlier about the bishop's bravery in calling on Rome to defend Christians from Islamism, and in the process endorsed the Catholic Ordinariate for ex-Anglicans. But this demonstrates courage of an entirely different order. The Church of England is divided on the subject of bloodthirsty radical Islam but of one mind when it comes to Ukip: They're the BNP in blazers and that's that. Vicars know perfectly well that members of their congregations will vote for Britain's new third party next year but they'd rather not think about it.

Monday

Damian Thompson

Anglican bishop: Rome must protect Christians from Islamism

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and an evangelical Christian, has delivered a remarkable message to a group of Catholics: 'Bishop Nazir-Ali said that, with the growth of Islamic militancy and the persecution of Christians worldwide, many people were now looking to Rome as the voice that could stem the tide. He said these people included many Evangelicals who never, in the past, would have thought about Rome. 'So the Catholic Church has both a great opportunity and also a great responsibility.' He is right on two counts.

Friday

Damian Thompson

Communion for divorced: Pope Francis has created a crisis

The Vatican Synod of Bishops on the Family begins on Sunday amid a degree of chaos unprecedented in recent Catholic history. And I'm afraid it's the Pope's fault. Francis kicked off proceedings in February by asking the retired German Cardinal Walter Kasper to address the world's cardinals. Kasper used the opportunity to float his proposal – which he's been advocating for years – that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive Holy Communion. Kasper has now told the Catholic News Service: I had the impression the pope is open for a responsible, limited opening of the situation, but he wants a great majority of the bishops behind himself.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

My Schubert marathon

On 10 October, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford will host the first concert in ‘the biggest ever celebration of the life and work of Franz Schubert’. Over three weeks, all 650 songs (or thereabouts) will be performed, most of them in England’s oldest concert hall, the Holywell Music Room just around the corner from the Sheldonian. We’re promised the greatest assembly of Schubert singers in history: they include Sir Thomas Allen, Ian Bostridge, Sarah Connolly, James Gilchrist, Robert Holl, Wolfgang Holzmair, Angelika Kirchschlager, Christopher Maltman, Mark Padmore, Christoph Prégardien — plus the cream of accompanists: Julius Drake, Graham Johnson and Roger Vignoles.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Will Guardian readers hold their noses and vote Tory?

Well! Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian was impressed by David Cameron's conference speech and no mistake. The campaign for 2015 has begun. On Wednesday, in what may well have been his sharpest, most effective speech since becoming prime minister, David Cameron fired the starting gun. In the process, he lodged at least a couple of deadly bullets into the flesh of his Labour opponents. The result – whatever the polls might say – is that after a fortnight of duelling party conferences, Cameron’s Conservative troops believe they are marching towards a contest in which they now hold the advantage. That’s partly down to what the prime minister did in Birmingham. But it owes just as much to what Ed Miliband failed to do a week ago. Indeed, the two are intimately linked.