Holy Smoke

By The SpectatorSociety & Culture Religion & Spirituality Christianity Philosophy Religion

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Holy Smoke episodes

March 02, 2021 Why should persecuted Christians trust Pope Francis?
Beijing's new rules for clergy of all religions in China have been published in English – and, disastrously for the Vatican, they make no mention of any role for Pope Francis in approving the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops. So it looks as if the Vatican's secret deal with China, which gave the Pope nominal spiritual sovereignty over party stooges operating as bishops, is dead in the water. President Xi appears to have reneged on the agreement – having achieved his aim of breaking the back of the underground Catholic Church in China. Reports of the debacle have come at a very inconvenient moment for the Pope, who this week is planning to visit persecuted Christians in Iraq. My guest this week is Fr Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasrean.org, a charity that helps dispossessed religious minorities in the Middle East. He reveals that some Iraqi Christians are worried that Francis will use his trip not to throw a spotlight on the their desperate situation but, instead, to call for 'dialogue' with their Muslim oppressors. Such posturing would make matters worse – rather as the Vatican's chumminess with Beijing has delivered some underground Catholics into the arms of their enemies. Fr Kiely's verdict on Rome's bungling Chinese Ostpolitik is damning and memorable. Don't miss this interview.
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19 min
February 19, 2021 Can the United States be transported back to Christendom?
This week's Holy Smoke examines the fragmentation of American Catholicism following the election of pro-choice Catholic Joe Biden. It focuses on the strangest current of thought among the many conservative Catholics calling for an urgent change of approach in order to confront what promises to be an authoritarian liberal administration.
It's called integralism, a label previously attached to distinctly un-American European Catholic reactionaries such as Action française and General Franco's Falangists. In its US incarnation it's less nationalist but in some ways equally extreme. Its proponents want to turn the United States into a nation in which, in the long run, only Catholics will be full citizens eligible to hold office. This new integralism is a medieval fantasy built around the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. It has been labelled 'clerico-fascist' by its critics – and also, more convincingly to my mind, 'Catholic Sharia'. No one is going to vote for it, of course, but as you'll hear in this episode it could well have an impact on US politics.
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26 min
February 05, 2021 Lockdown and the pandemic of loneliness
In 1930, the American novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote these chilling words: 'The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.'

It's an idea that, for many of us, is harder to shrug off now than it was a year ago. Loneliness has many dimensions and, after nearly a year of intermittent lockdowns, its consequences are piling up. We've talked before on Holy Smoke about the lockdown's devastating effect on churchgoing – but, as my guest Mary Kenny points out, there's been an across-the-board suspension of the small-scale social activities that mean so much in particular for older people. As she says, many Britons in their 70s and 80s are wondering if they'll live to see another coffee morning.

A depressing topic then, but, this being the irrepressible Mary, our conversation veers off in all sorts of quirky directions. The best quote comes from her late husband, the brilliant maverick war correspondent Richard West: 'To be young, penniless, living in Paris, in love and dying of consumption – what could be more wonderful that that?' What on earth did he mean? You'll have to listen to find out.
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33 min
January 28, 2021 How the Vatican tried to suppress criticism of the new president
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the ambitious left-wing archbishop of Chicago, must have imagined that Joe Biden's inauguration last week would be a moment to savour. He and a small number of his liberal colleagues, known as 'the Biden bishops', have been working tremendously hard to make sure that, once their candidate was elected, any mention of his radical support for abortion would be sotto voce and preferably inaudible. They thought they'd succeeded.
But then things went spectacularly wrong. The president of the US bishops' conference, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, drafted a statement on behalf of his colleagues that not only mentioned Biden's pro-choice activism but also drew attention to the fact that the new administration planned to remove certain legal protections or 'conscience rights' from Americans who won't participate in abortions or other affronts to their traditional morality.
The Biden bishops were horrified, and pulled a fast one: they contacted the Vatican's left-leaning Secretariat of State, which ordered that Gomez's statement be spiked until after the inauguration. News of the censorship was immediately leaked – unsurprisingly, since most American bishops agreed with Gomez's statement. A new online publication called The Pillar revealed what had happened – and named the two pro-Biden cardinals who had clashed with Gomez: Cupich of Chicago, who seems to have been the ringleader, and Joseph Tobin of Newark.
At which point Cupich did just about the most stupid thing imaginable: he resorted to Twitter. To find out what he said, and why he's now blotted his copybook in Rome, listen to this week's episode of Holy Smoke.
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29 min
January 20, 2021 The death of the English parish
The English parish has been a source of spiritual consolation, and a certain amount of social comedy, for more than 1,000 years. So it's very old – and, it turns out, frighteningly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Countless parish churches, both Anglican and Catholic, will quietly shut their doors forever over the next few months. Bishops will blame Covid-19, but they bear a heavy responsibility for the fragile state of parish life before it was hit by the epidemic.

In this episode of Holy Smoke, former Church of England vicar Dr Gavin Ashenden tells us what it was like running a parish, and reveals his strategies for dealing with difficult personalities in the congregation, some of whom really did resemble the stereotypes of British sitcoms. He's convinced that many parish churches have effectively been killed by their bishops' uninspiring management techniques, and more recently their embarrassing infatuation with woke culture.

But you may be surprised and comforted by the optimism that breaks in at the end of our discussion. So don't miss it!
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28 min
January 13, 2021 The problem of paranoia on the Catholic Right
Every day there’s some sort conspiracy theory being aired by right-wing Catholics on social media involving the globalist agenda of the Pope’s UN/Chinese/Masonic/Soros foundation puppet-masters. No surprise, perhaps, given the fervour with which the Pope promotes a globalist agenda while his diplomats kowtow to Beijing. Some left-wing Catholics are into the conspiracy business, too: in their imaginations it’s the feisty conservative broadcaster EWTN taking the role of the Soros Foundation.

Catholic pundits with furious views have become a major headache for the Vatican – one it richly deserves, you might think, given what Cardinal George Pell describes as the ’Technicolour corruption’ lurking in the Curia, most of which goes unreported by a tame Vatican press corps.

But is there any excuse for promoting conspiracy theories? Of course not, especially if a fantasy could have serious consequences for society. So we need to take a close look at the conservative Catholic campaign against coronavirus vaccines, which is informed not only by extreme moral scruples (certain vaccines make use of a ‘cell line’ derived from an abortion 50 years ago, something the Catholic Church isn’t too worried about) but also absurd claims about the vaccines changing our DNA.

Ed Condon, editor of The Pillar, a new Catholic investigative outfit, joins me for this episode, which begins with some rather startling ’news’ about the arrest of Pope Francis amid a shootout at the Vatican.
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25 min
December 23, 2020 Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
Rarely has a religious culture collapsed more rapidly than that of Catholic Ireland, which just 30 years ago seemed indestructible. Incredibly, it looks as if the Irish Church will have ordained more bishops than priests in 2020. It goes without saying that the Irish abuse crisis has hugely accelerated the process of secularisation in what was once the most Catholic of countries. Young people in Ireland now refer to the clergy with a withering disdain verging on hatred.
My guest today, the celebrated Irish journalist, broadcaster and playwright Mary Kenny, offers a more nuanced analysis of the powerful and paradoxical world in which she grew up: one in which Catholic clergy and lay people could be simultaneously fervently pious, warm-hearted and yet paralysed by petty snobbery. She talks about how the Irish Free State handed far too much power to bishops and priests. In effect, they replaced the disappearing Anglo-Irish nobility as the new aristocracy of rural Ireland, exercising an authority over people's lives that could be generous or malevolent and sometimes a mixture of both. I think it's a gripping interview, full of the little details that make Irish short stories so compulsively readable.
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46 min
December 17, 2020 Beethoven’s spirituality: a conversation with Sir James MacMillan
It's the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson is joined by his fellow composer Sir James MacMillan to discuss a side of Beethoven that the postmodern artistic establishment prefers to ignore: his unwavering faith in God and the surprisingly strict morality that arose from it.

Beethoven may not have gone to Mass very often, but before he died he asked to see a priest and during years of intense suffering composed one of the greatest of all settings of the liturgy, the Missa Solemnis. He was more proud of this masterpiece than of any of his symphonies; before he wrote it he meticulously researched the Latin text, and he also plunged into a study of the polyphonic masters of the 16th century.

Sir James MacMillan is currently presenting a Radio 4 series on the religious faith of four composers: Tallis, Wagner, Elgar and Bernstein. If the BBC has the good sense to make another season, then he's planning to do a programme on Beethoven. But you don't have to wait to hear his fascinating reflections on the great man: just listen to this exhilarating episode of Holy Smoke.
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35 min
November 25, 2020 Should devout Christians be scared of a Joe Biden presidency?
The next president of the United States is, we are told, a devout Catholic who scrupulously attends Sunday Mass. This is in sharp contrast to the current president, who has never been more than an occasional churchgoer with, to put it politely, ill-defined religious views. So why are many Christians worried that a Joe Biden presidency poses an unprecedented threat to America’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom?
In this episode of Holy Smoke I talk to Andrea Picciotti Bayer, director of the Washington-based Conscience Project, about the continuing ideological assault by US officialdom on religious believers whose passionately held convictions challenge the closest thing the 21st-century United States has to an official creed – identity politics. For the past four years these believers, mostly Christian, have enjoyed an unusual degree of support from the Trump administration, which has prioritised religious liberty both at home and abroad. But is America’s second Catholic president about to pull the rug from under them? And, if so, why?
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17 min
November 14, 2020 Why the fantasy narrative of the Vatican's McCarrick report is already falling apart
In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson says the Vatican's report on allegations of sexual assault by Theodore McCarrick is a whitewash.
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16 min