Catholic church

Apologies for the picture quality (it’s from live coverage by ABC News), but this shot of Pope Francis cracking up as he sees a baby dressed as a pope is just the sort of image that his conservative critics dread. That’s because it undermines their attempts to stop Francis waving through what they regard as a dangerous watering-down of Catholic teaching. The Pope’s visit to the US, which has just ended, has been a public relations triumph. Meaning: a triumph, full stop. Francis was eloquent, relaxed and amazingly youthful for a man heading for 80. He tilted in a liberal direction, but not far enough to create anxiety among most churchgoing Catholics anywhere in the world. Maybe they

Pope Francis today made sweeping changes to the procedures by which Catholics get their marriages annulled – that is, receive official permission to marry again because their first marriage was invalid. Here’s part of a news story by Reuters Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella: Pope Francis on Tuesday made it simpler and swifter for Catholics to secure a marriage annulment, the most radical such reform for 250 years, and told bishops to be more welcoming to divorced couples. Under the old norms, it often took years to win an annulment, with hefty legal fees attached. Francis said the procedure should be free and the new rules mean that a marriage might be

The headline on page 33 of today’s Times reads: ‘Repent and we will forgive abortions, Pope tells women’. It’s a bad headline, because the Church already grants absolution to women who repent of their abortions. CNN did much better: ‘Pope Francis says all priests can forgive women who’ve had abortions’. (In fact, the Church teaches that God does the forgiving, but ‘priests can forgive women’ is OK as shorthand.) That said, headlines aren’t written by reporters, so you’d expect the Times article to set the record straight. On the contrary: Tom Kington, the author, litters his piece with ignorant misrepresentations of Francis’s ruling. When you consider what a sensitive subject this is, and that the

Pope Francis, unpredictable as ever, has just announced that during the forthcoming ‘Year of Mercy’, Catholics can receive absolution from priests of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), which has illicitly ordained its own bishops and doesn’t recognise the Second Vatican Council. He’s also given all priests permission to absolve anyone who truly repents of the sin of having or procuring an abortion – which they could already, though they might need the permission of the local bishop since it incurs automatic excommunication. So this isn’t such big news. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-91) was the arch-reactionary who, defying Pope John Paul II, ordained four bishops including the Holocaust-denying nutjob

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments written on two tablets of stone. ‘And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot…

Ireland, for so long the most overtly Catholic state in Western Europe, has voted for gay marriage by a stupendous margin – 62 per cent. Never before has a country legalised the practice by popular vote. It would be naive to ask: how could this happen? Hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland, thanks not only to the paedophile scandals but also to the joyless quasi-Jansenist character of the Irish Church, which was handed complete control of education in the Free State after partition in 1922. (Many of its priests were outstandingly holy and charitable, but you’ll get your head bitten off if you suggest that in today’s

Ed Miliband could still win the general election, but what would happen next? On the latest View from 22 podcast, The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges discusses this week’s Spectator cover feature on what to expect from a Miliband premiership with George Eaton of the New Statesman. Would Miliband manage to take his lofty ideas about reshaping capitalism into No.10? Or would he be more pragmatic in power? Like his mentor Gordon Brown, could Miliband’s indecisiveness turn out to be a fatal flaw? James Forsyth and Alex Massie also discuss the current madness of Scottish politics. As we saw during the two Scottish leaders’ debates, it appears there is nothing that can dent the SNP’s popularity — even a leaked memo about Nicola Sturgeon’s desire to keep David Cameron in No.10 has been

[Update: On looking more closely at the list of priests, I’m astonished by some of the names I see there – clergy I wouldn’t have described as conservatives, let alone traditionalists. It reinforces my sense that vast numbers of priests, however much they admire Pope Francis, are worried about the direction of this pontificate – or, rather, its lack of direction.] Cardinal Vincent Nichols has slapped down nearly 500 priests who signed a letter to the Catholic Herald expressing concern about the Synod on the Family this October, which is to debate sensitive questions of sexual morality. This is a significant blunder by the Cardinal that exposes both the inflexibility of his

I’ll keep this brief, but can the BBC please replace Ed Stourton as presenter of Radio 4’s Sunday programme? He is an old Amplefordian from one of the great recusant families who, like many elderly Catholic toffs, holds ‘progressive’ views on faith and morals (though not education – he sent his sons to Eton). Fair enough, but he might at least go through the motions of hiding his bias when addressing Catholic issues on his dreary programme. Stourton has a particular downer on Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, one of only two non-Magic Circle bishops who slipped through Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s net (the other is Mark Davies of Shrewsbury). Ed is a friend

Ever since Cardinal George Pell was appointed by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican’s finances, I knew a hit job was coming; and I was doubly certain when he spoke up for orthodox cardinals when their views were being trashed by the liberal organisers of the chaotic ‘Carry On Synod’ on the Family. The Sydney Morning Herald, no fan of Pell in his days as Archbishop of Sydney, has accused him of ‘living it up at the Holy See’s expense’. They cite leaked documents purporting to show he rented an office and apartment in Rome at a cost of £2,580 a month – which, unless I’ve got the figures wrong, isn’t very expensive.

Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth. I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses

Catholics should not breed like rabbits and gender theory is a bit like the Hitler Youth. Yup, the Supreme Pontiff is giving another of his in-flight interviews and yet again he leaves everyone shaking their heads: ‘He said what?’ Now, let’s be clear. Francis reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control (sort of) while observing that ‘God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that – excuse the word – that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.’ I know what he means. I think. Contraception and family planning are fine so long as you don’t artificially block procreation. But the subliminal and unintended messages are (a)

How many of Pope Francis’s spiritual diseases do you suffer from? The pontiff laid out no fewer than 15 of them in an ‘exchange of Christmas greetings’ yesterday. They included ‘spiritual Alzheimers’, ‘existential schizophrenia’, ‘working too much’, ‘planning too much’, ‘working without co-ordination’ and, above all, ‘the terrorism of gossip’. I did a quick check and found two I definitely don’t suffer from: working too much and ‘feeling immortal, immune and indispensable’. It reminds me of the narrator of Three Men in a Boat who, on leafing through a medical dictionary in the British Museum, discovers he suffers from every ghastly malady except housemaid’s knee. A funny way to wish your staff a