Holy Smoke

By The SpectatorSociety & Culture Religion & Spirituality Christianity Philosophy Religion

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Holy Smoke episodes

November 03, 2020 'If necessary I'll be arrested': the lockdown defying priest
Has there been a single Covid death as a result of someone attending a socially distanced church service? The answer is no, as you'd expect it to be. But, despite this, the Government will ban public acts of worship from Thursday.
This decision is so perverse that even the Catholic bishops of England and Wales – who fell over each other during the last lockdown in their eagerness to shut churches – have written to the government asking for the scientific evidence indicating that properly supervised Masses pose a threat to the people attending them. So far they haven't received the courtesy of a reply, probably because there is no evidence.
In this episode of Holy Smoke, Fr David Palmer, a Catholic priest from Nottingham, tells me that his church will be open this Sunday, cleverly exploiting a loophole in the government guidelines. If the police try to stop him saying Mass, or administering any other sacrament, then he's willing to be arrested. Other clergy, including some in the Church of England, have taken the same decision.
Listen to the interview and ask yourself: why is the government targeting religious believers in such a cruel and scientifically illiterate fashion? And is it prepared for the backlash?

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20 min
October 23, 2020 A charity that actually transforms lives: Team Domenica
Ask yourself: who are the most vulnerable and marginalised people in British society? My answer would be young adults suffering from learning disabilities, who attract sympathy when they are children but, once they enter their 20s, simply drop off the map of public consciousness The consequences of this are dreadful: 95 per cent of them are unemployed.
But four years ago that situation began to change, when Rosa Monckton founded Team Domenica, named after her daughter, now aged 25, who has Down's syndrome. Domenica was the last godchild of Diana Princess of Wales, who was a close friend of Rosa's. The two women mixed in the same exclusive social circles: Rosa was the Chief Executive of Tiffany, no less, and I remember first meeting her there at an impossibly smart party in their Bond Street store at some point in the 1990s. (To say that I was a fish out of water is putting it mildly.)
Years later I watched her shepherding learning-disabled young people across the streets of Brighton in foul weather before organising games of ping-pong in a cheerless church hall. But this was just a small part of her big project: to found a charity that places these young adults in paid employment.
That was a massive challenge at the time, and even more now – because the cafés founded by Team Domenica and the internships they managed to secure for their trainees disappeared during the Covid lockdown. So now Rosa and her team have a new mountain to climb, because even after limited re-opening the charity's income is down by 50 per cent.
Please listen to my Holy Smoke interview with Rosa, who is married to The Spectator's brilliant former editor Dominic Lawson. You won't forget it in a hurry – though she wisely declines to comment on my opinion that there's a huge and shameful gulf between Team Domenica and charities like it and virtue-signalling pressure groups that specialise in spending taxpayers' money and generally being fashionable.
And, please, donate to Team Domenica here.
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20 min
October 08, 2020 Is Pope Francis's Vatican turning into Richard Nixon's White House?
There was a point in the Watergate scandal when revelations came so thick and fast that journalists struggled to keep up with them. And we seem to have reached an equivalent point in respect to the scandals engulfing Pope Francis's Vatican. Last week I interviewed Vatican expert Ed Condon about the sacking of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused by the Pope of stealing or misusing unimaginable sums of Church money, something he denies. Since Ed and I spoke, there have been two developments, both in their own way hard to believe. First, Angelo Becciu is now accused of overseeing the transfer of large amounts of money to Australia during the trial on fabricated sex abuse charges of his arch-adversary Cardinal George Pell, who had rumbled him. Second, the Pope has announced the setting up of a commission to decide which Vatican financial transactions should remain confidential. And, incredibly, the man he has asked to run it is Cardinal Kevin Farrell, formerly one of the closest associates of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the pathological sex abuser who was for many years Archbishop of Washington. To quote the title of Lionel Shriver's celebrated novel, we really need to talk about Kevin. Listen to this episode to discover why.
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11 min
September 29, 2020 The humiliation of Becciu and the return of Pell
The Vatican is this week in the grip of a paranoia reminiscent of the days when Renaissance popes (and their dinner guests) were forced to employ food-tasters.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu, until 2018 the sostenuto at the Secretariat of State – that is, the Pope's hugely powerful chief of staff – has been sacked by Francis, who has accused him of stealing vast amounts of money. The Pope, who once showered him with favours, stripped Becciu of all the privileges associated with the position of cardinal – a twist of the knife worthy of a Netflix drama, or perhaps one of the Godfather films.
And now, in an equally extraordinary sequel, Becciu's arch-foe Cardinal George Pell, until recently languishing in an Australian jail cell, is heading back to Rome to advise Francis on resuming the Pell financial reforms that Becciu torpedoed.
My guest for this episode of Holy Smoke is the journalist who can take the most credit for uncovering Becciu's activities: Ed Condon, Washington Bureau Chief of the Catholic News Agency.
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25 min
September 24, 2020 Is it time for Christianity to go underground?
Boris Johnson's package of Covid restrictions announced this week included a rule that weddings will be limited to 15 people and funerals to 30 – numbers plucked out of thin air that will have questionable effect on the transmission of the virus.

You might think that a ruling that affects only weddings and funerals isn't such a big deal for the churches, but that is to underestimate the fanatical zeal of their leaders for implementing, and expanding, restrictions on their own worship. The control-freak Archbishop of Canterbury, predictably, seemed quite thrilled by the government's intervention.

My own reaction, informed by conversations with many clergy outraged by their bishops' baffling willingness to accept any curtailment of church life, was to wonder whether some Christians will be forced to 'go underground' – that is, find a way of worshipping that quietly disobeys their own leaders. To an extent this is already happening: at the height of the pandemic, Catholics were holding secret Masses that reminded me of their ancestors' defiance of Protestant penal laws. I didn't report it because I didn't want them hunted down by their own 'fathers in God', the local bishops.

So that's the subject of this week's Holy Smoke, a very wide-ranging conversation with Dr Gavin Ashenden of the sort that you would never hear on the BBC.
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38 min
September 14, 2020 Westminster Cathedral and an act of spiritual vandalism
The row over the evisceration of Westminster Cathedral Choir has erupted again. The cathedral's excellent music administrator, Madeline Smith, has resigned from her post, accusing the choir school – which, incredibly, is the ultimate source of the threat to the choir's musical standards – of misleading parents and creating a 'toxic' atmosphere that drove out the master of music, Martin Baker. This week's Holy Smoke gives you the background to the story and argues that the downgrading of Westminster Cathedral Choir is an act of spiritual as well as musical vandalism. There's a powerful contribution from Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen and former chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. The choir isn't singing at the moment, because of Covid: Westminster Cathedral has been predictably craven in its response to the pandemic, embracing and adding to the Government's control-freakery. When services resume, we can expect the long-planned dumbing down of the world's premier Catholic choir to be blamed on the virus. Don't believe a word of it – and please listen to the podcast.
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18 min
August 29, 2020 Are the Habsburgs evidence of Catholicism's relevance today?
Damian Thompson is joined by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary's ambassador to the Holy See. A member of one of Europe's most historically influential families, Eduard explains how his religious practices have adapted to the acceleration of new technologies, and tells Damian how the Habsburgs keep in contact.
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31 min
August 07, 2020 The Vatican's sinister deal with Beijing
Next month, the Vatican will talk to Beijing about renewing its 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist Party that effectively allowed President Xi to choose the country's Catholic bishops. He has used this power to force Catholics loyal to Rome to join the puppet Catholic church set up by Chairman Mao in the 1950s. They can no longer refuse on the grounds that they recognise only the Pope's Church because Francis himself has validated the orders of Xi's party stooges.
But the Holy Father has done more than that: he has ostentatiously failed to condemn China's savage assaults on human rights, the worst of which is its attempt to eradicate the country's Muslim Uyghurs ethnic minority by herding them into concentration camps and forcing Uighur women to have abortions.
As I say in this episode of Holy Smoke, the Pope's behaviour is not just a disgrace but also a mystery. The Catholic Church has gained nothing from the 2018 pact. On the contrary, it has given Beijing a handy excuse to intensify its harassment of Catholics. So why is the Vatican apparently keen to renew a deal that so badly reflects on it?
One plausible explanation is money. Rome hasn't got any. China enjoys nothing more than buying influence. This year, claims surfaced that the Communist Party is quietly slipping the Vatican £1.6 billion a year in order to buy the Pope's silence about the Uyghurs, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the demolition of churches. But no evidence has been produced to support this conspiracy theory.
My guests are the journalist Catherine Lafferty and Fr Benedict Kiely, a campaigner on behalf of persecuted religious minorities.
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24 min
July 28, 2020 How a ‘biblically illiterate’ generation can discover Christian art
The new Holy Smoke episode is a significant departure from our usual formula. It’s a discussion about the profound and neglected meaning of Christian art. Professor Ben Quash of King’s College London is interviewed not by me but by Carmel Thompson – my sister, who has appeared twice on Holy Smoke to talk about her battle with ovarian cancer but is determined not to be defined by her illness.

This is a truly engrossing episode inspired by Carmel’s conviction that art depicting Christian subjects – and that includes most of the great art produced in the West up to and including the Renaissance – is too often examined from a purely aesthetic point of view.

Obviously you’ll get far more out of this discussion if you can see what Carmel and Ben are talking about with such infectious enthusiasm, so here are the artworks chosen by Ben.
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39 min
July 17, 2020 The woke new Archbishop of York
Archbishop Stephen Cottrell made the headlines even before he was enthroned last week, when he ‘revealed’ that Jesus was black. This came as news to everyone except the far left, race-baiting fanatics of Black Lives Matter.
This week, I talk to Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, about the implications of this disastrous appointment, which means that for the first time in the history of the Established Church the sees of Canterbury York and the London are all occupied by intellectually challenged bureaucrats with an adolescence enthusiasm for wokeness.

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32 min