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At a press conference in Rome last week, an ex-nun claiming to have suffered ritual sex abuse at the hands of Fr Marko Rupnik turned the heat on Pope Francis. How much did he know about the stomach-turning charges levelled at the Slovenian mosaic artist, who was a Jesuit until he was thrown out of the order? And, more important, when did he know? Why is Rupnik still a priest? The Pope's allies in the media are desperate for this story to go away. But, as this episode of Holy Smoke argues, the scandal is growing and threatens to engulf Francis himself. 

Can the Church of England escape from the deadly grip of bishops and bureaucrats who spend their entire time genuflecting to the metropolitan Left? Why does Archbishop Justin Welby wade obsessively into secular political battles when his churches are emptying? And do worshippers realise that eye-watering sums of money are being siphoned off from their parishes in order to fund worthless exercises in social engineering? In this episode of Holy Smoke, the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, reveals the scale of the crisis facing the Established Church. His analysis is devastating. Among the subjects he addresses is the cultural cringe that led Welby and gang to value the opinions of Paula Vennells, the disgraced former head of the Post Office who nearly became Bishop of London, over those of qualified theologians and parochial clergy.  Under its current Rector, the ancient parish of St Bart's has become a beacon of hope for proud traditional Anglicans. Marcus tells me how he's reaching out to a new generation of Christians bored out of their minds by episcopal jargon – and also what he thinks of Pope Francis's attempt to crush the Latin Mass. It's a rollercoaster of an interview with one of the great clerics of our age. Don't miss it!

Donald Trump now seems certain to be the Republican presidential candidate in this year's US presidential elections. That's a prospect that horrifies liberal America and quite a few other Americans besides. The former president secured overwhelming support from evangelical Christians in Iowa and New Hampshire and some commentators are speculating that we're seeing a resurgence of the so-called 'religious right'. Does he have born-again Christians to thank for his astonishing progress so far? In this episode of Holy Smoke my guest is Ryan Burge, the American political scientist whose Graphs on Religion substack is an authoritative guide to religious allegiance and voting patterns. You may be surprised by what he has to say. 

Just before Christmas, the Vatican's new doctrinal chief Cardinal Victor ‘Tucho’ Fernandez unveiled a new style of blessing designed to make gay couples feel at home in church without changing the Church's teaching on marriage. The Argentinian Tucho has for years been Pope Francis's protégé – but for how much longer? The new gay blessings, supposedly blessing the couple but not their union, have been decisively rejected by all the Catholic bishops of Africa, forcing Francis to backtrack and say they could ignore Fernandez’s decree. Then, last week, it was revealed that in 1998 Tucho published a book on, of all things, the theology of orgasms. It is jaw-droppingly graphic, has been widely described as ‘creepy’, and has encouraged leading cardinals hoping to succeed Francis to distance themselves from this pontificate. Listen to this episode of Holy Smoke if you want to know about the new crisis tearing apart the Catholic Church – but be warned: the erotic musings of the future Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith are not suitable for children. 

In this festive episode of Holy Smoke, we're taken back to the Christmasses of the 1950s and 60s by Raymond Arroyo, Fox News and EWTN presenter, whose enemies in the Vatican have been trying to silence him for years.  They've failed, thankfully – and now silencing him is even harder. Raymond, who trained in musical theatre, has produced an album entitled Christmas Merry and Bright in which he sings well-loved Christmas songs and carols in spectacular big-band arrangements inspired by one of his musical heroes, Frank Sinatra. And in one track, 'Feliz Navidad', he's joined by its composer – his friend the legendary José Feliciano. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. One thing's for sure: you'll never hear 'White Christmas' the same way after you've heard Raymond tell the story of how it came to be written...

You might imagine that a political project to place modern nation states under the supreme authority of the Catholic Church would stand zero chance of success anywhere in the world, including in traditionally Catholic countries. And you'd be right. Even so, a movement known as Integralism – whose 20th-century incarnations were closely related to fascism – has gripped the imaginations of ultra-conservative Catholics in America, and especially on campuses. The Eastern Orthodox political philosopher Kevin Vallier has written a book, All the Kingdoms of the World, about this bizarre development. It's thoughtful and fair-minded – but Integralists have not taken kindly to his analysis and Vallier has found himself drawn into some unnerving exchanges on social media. I'm all the more grateful to him, therefore, for agreeing to be my guest on this episode of Holy Smoke. 

When I was in Rome last month, I watched the 'synod on synodality' fizzle out while the Marko Rupnik sex scandal took another sinister turn (and various Catholic journalists shamefully tried to suppress the story). But don't worry: this episode of Holy Smoke is devoted to more uplifting matters. I visited the ancient little church of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the edge of the Forum, which incorporates the remains of a pagan temple and a secular Roman basilica or meeting place. The contrast between the darkness of one and the light of the other had powerful theological significance for those Roman Christians who were encouraged to build their first official churches by Constantine. And I was lucky to have it explained to me by one of the world's leading architectural historians, Dr Elizabeth Lev. We spoke, sometimes sotto voce, inside the little church, with tour guides and visitors swirling around us. So, apologies for the inevitable background noise, but I hope you'll agree that it doesn't get in the way of Liz's gripping narrative. 

Pope Francis's much-hyped 'synod on synodality' began in Rome this week and to say that it has got off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. On Monday, five leading conservative cardinals bounced Francis into making a highly ambiguous statement apparently opening the door to gay blessings. Meanwhile, and this subject is being played down by certain media outlets, allegations of sexual abuse surrounds one of the Pope's friends. The world-renowned mosaic artist Fr Marko Rupnik has been expelled from the Jesuits after women claimed he sexually abused them – but he remains a priest and for some reason Pope Francis has yet to allow him to be prosecuted canonically. In this episode of Holy Smoke, I look at the basic facts, the possibility of a cover-up and suggest that the subject of Rupnik and what the Pope knew may overshadow the more fashionable topic of blessings for same-sex couples. 

Earlier this week, the Rome correspondent of the Times found himself mugging up on the history of Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, and this is what he reported:  While the empire brought stability, it was created through the large-scale massacre of anyone who refused to submit to Mongol rule, leading to the death of millions. Mongol troops triggered famine in Iran by destroying ancient irrigation systems and catapulted diseased corpses into towns they besieged, a technique which reportedly introduced the Black Death into Europe.Why were the media suddenly writing about blood-crazed 13th-century warriors? Because, incredibly, Pope Francis – on a strange visit to Mongolia's minuscule Catholic community – had just been rhapsodising about the enlightened tolerance of Khan's Empire, without mentioning that its conquests came at the price of 40 million lives. Judged as a proportion of the global population at the time, that's the biggest slaughter in human history.  This came just days after Francis, talking to young Russian Catholics by video link, told them to glory in Russia's imperial past, singling out the figures of Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine II, both of whom were committed to the destruction of the Ukrainian nation and culture. This is the same pope who nurtures delusions of acting as a peacemaker between Moscow and Kyiv. Good luck with that, your Holiness. Ukrainian Catholics feel utterly betrayed by Francis. Putin, on the other hand, was thrilled by the unhinged papal comments. And there's more. In his flight to Mongolia, Pope Francis was allowed to use Chinese air space. Not coincidentally, he has recently surrendered the appointment of official Chinese Catholic Bishops to the Communist Party. Naturally he thanked Beijing effusively and, after Mass in Ulan Bator, departed from his script to send 'a warm greeting to the noble Chinese people' and urged them to be 'good citizens'.  In this episode of Holy Smoke, I try to make sense of these unnerving developments. Why does the Pope feel so warmly towards dictators past and present – and why is he relentless in sniping at American Catholics who have never crushed anyone under their imperial heels? 

King Charles III is the first British monarch to inherit a post-Christian kingdom. Less than half of his subjects identify themselves as Christian, and only about one in 20 adults in the UK go to church on Sundays. Since 1980 church attendance has more than halved – and that's broadly the situation in most of Western Europe.  In the traditionally God-fearing United States, in contrast, roughly 20 per cent of people are practising Christians. But there, too, the statistics now point to a steady decline in religious belief; the figures are worrying for American Protestants and catastrophic for American Catholics.  My guest on this episode of Holy Smoke is Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who posts twice-weekly reports on the state of US religion on his Graphs About Religion website. He's also a pastor in one of the least doctrinally conservative Baptist denominations, the American Baptist Church. As you'll hear, he identifies with the enormous number of Americans – probably a clear majority of the population – who feel alienated by an increasingly sectarian 'progressive' atheism and, on the other, by the dogmatic views of many Evangelical and Catholic leaders on the subjects of homosexuality and abortion.  At every stage in our conversation, Ryan produces statistics that socially conservative Christians would rather not think about. Indeed, we know they haven't been paying attention to them because the pro-life movement was so obviously unprepared for the current backlash against the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade even among churchgoing Republicans.  You may not agree with Ryan Burge's opinions, but it's hard to envisage a future for Western Christianity unless believers confront the huge body of research on which they're based. 

Conservative Catholic critics of Pope Francis are referring to 2023 as his 'Year Zero' – a time of revolutionary upheaval initiated by an 86-year-old pontiff who feels liberated by the death of his predecessor Benedict XVI on New Year's Eve.  Events are moving fast. This October, the world's bishops will gather for a synod in which left-wing lay activists have been given an advisory vote by the Pope and permission to discuss ultra-sensitive topics such as women's ordination and blessings for same-sex couples.  It's true that Francis has rejected attempts by the ultra-progressive (and ultra-empty) German church to pursue a liberal Protestant agenda without reference to Rome. That's not surprising: one largely unreported feature of this pontificate is an extreme concentration of power in the papal office. Any alterations to Church teaching and pastoral practice will be initiated by Francis alone – and he has a distinctive modus operandi. Rather than proposing specific changes, he rarely misses an opportunity to undermine the historic guardians of orthodoxy. Now he has taken a dramatic and irreversible step. In the past, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now renamed the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has had the job of protecting the Church from heresy and other theological misjudgements. But at the beginning of July the Pope handed control of this doctrinal watchdog to his Argentinian protégé Archbishop (soon to be Cardinal) Victor Manuel Fernandez. And he did so with the instruction that Fernandez should shift its emphasis from rooting out error to more creative endeavours.  Fernandez needed no encouragement. Even before taking office, he has mothballed a ban on same-sex blessings that was issued as recently as 2021 and was assumed to have Francis's full support. In an interview marking his appointment, Fernandez said that 'if a blessing is given in such a way that it does not cause that confusion [i.e., does not appear to be a gay wedding], it will have to be analysed and confirmed.' What on earth does that mean? You can see why Fernandez's appointment has alarmed conservative Catholics more than anything else Francis has done, and that includes his notoriously savage restrictions on the celebration of the Latin Mass. The Pope himself describes it as a 'turning point'.  In this week's Holy Smoke I discuss the possible consequences with the moral theologian Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith. He shares my view that an earthquake has hit the Catholic Church – but he also asks: given the indifference of so many Catholics to matters of doctrine, have they even noticed? 

For 75 years, the most anti-Christian regime in modern history has thrown its citizens into prison camps if they are suspected of the slightest dissent. Ten per cent of people live in modern slavery; perhaps 200,000 are behind bars. I'm talking about North Korea, of course – a regime even more abhorrent than Stalinist Russia, but which attracts suspiciously little attention from Western governments and churches unless they feel threatened by its nuclear arsenal.  My guest in this episode of Holy Smoke is Timothy Cho, a Christian human rights activist who escaped from North Korea. Even as a child, he was sentenced to forced labour for the crime of watching a James Bond film. In school he was subjected to hysterical anti-Christian propaganda, but found his faith when he was thrown into a Chinese jail. (North Korean refugees are routinely rounded up by Beijing, which then returns them to the Kim family's giant prison camp.)  Listen to his extraordinary testimony, and then ask yourself: why are Western governments so relaxed about the human rights abuses of this diabolical regime?