Damian Thompson

Cardinal Nichols this morning faces his biggest crisis since he became Archbishop of Westminster in 2009. On Saturday Bishop Kieran Conry – head of evangelisation for England and Wales – resigned as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton after (at least) two affairs with women became public. Now Conry has told the Mail: In some respects I feel very calm. It is liberating. It is a relief. I have been very careful not to make sexual morality a priority [in his sermons]. I don’t think it got in the way of my job, I don’t think people would say I have been a bad bishop. Conry goes on to say that 'I can't defend myself. I did wrong. Full stop.

Update: The Mail has now published its allegations against Bishop Conry. They're much more serious than I imagined. He appears to have behaved disgracefully; by his own admission there is more than one woman involved. I'll quote only the last paragraph, which goes to heart of the matter: the responsibility of the Catholic Church for allowing this man to run an important diocese during years of rumours, well-founded in at least two cases.

The other day someone tweeted at me the words 'J£w$ Got Mon€¥'. And I was just about to tweet back: 'Get stuffed, you anti-Semitic scum'. But I clicked on the link and realised I'd got the wrong end of the stick. The tweet came from Sasha Andreas, who's made a documentary about poor Jews, mostly in New York. It features leaders of Jewish charities talking about a subject so sensitive that their own community is nervous about it – understandably. The words 'Jews' and 'money' are usually joined together by anti-Semites. Also, New York Jews are the wealthiest Jewish diaspora in history. 'Poor Jews' is assumed to be an oxymoron. It isn't.

Just over a week ago I wrote a piece in the Spectator asking if we were on the verge of an anti-Muslim backlash that could spread beyond the strongholds of the aggrieved white working class in Barking and Rochdale and into the home counties. After the gloating videotaped murder of David Haines, a British aid worker, the answer is increasingly likely to be yes. The Telegraph is carrying a piece by the international affairs analyst Shashank Joshi headed: ‘Where does the Islamic State's fetish with beheading people come from?’ He begins: ‘Of course, the practice of beheading is invoked in the Koran, but only the most extreme Islamic militants carry it out in the modern day.’ Really?

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the ebullient Archbishop of New York, has welcomed the 'wise decision' by organisers of the city's St Patrick's Day parade to lift their ban on gay groups marching under their own banners. He has 'no problem with it at all'. His predecessor, Cardinal John O'Connor, who supported the ban in 1990, must be turning in his grave. More to the point, conservative American Catholics feel let down by Dolan, an orthodox and tribal prelate who likes to roll up his sleeves and jab in the direction of the snidely liberal New York Times.

Satan-worshippers are planning to hold a Black Mass in Oklahoma next month. My usual reaction to this news would be: go right ahead. On your own head be it. Those camp Anton LaVey rituals are so 1970s. But there’s a twist – one that truly deserves the adjective ‘satanic’. The nutjobs organising the ceremony on September 21 have got hold of a consecrated Host. It arrived in the mail, they say, purloined from a Catholic church. So it really will be a traditional Black Mass, described by the Catholic World Report as a ‘ritual centred around the desecration of the Eucharist, which is generally done by stealing a consecrated host and using it in a profane sexual ritual, or defecating and urinating on it’.

The Church of England has written to David Cameron accusing him of lacking ‘a coherent or comprehensive approach to Islamic extremism as it is developing across the globe’. The letter, signed by the the Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines, and approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, also reportedly accuses the PM of turning his back on Christians slaughtered or made homeless in northern Iraq – and wonders why Cameron has chosen to concentrate on the plight of the Yazidis instead. These criticisms are spot on. But I’m surprised that the C of E has had the brass neck to make them. For decades, the Anglican and Catholic Churches have ignored the growth of the domestic Islamic extremism that has seen British Muslims travel to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis.