Pope francis

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

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.3 million ‘undocumented’ immigrants

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

‘The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.’ In that one sentence, Cardinal Pell puts his finger on what is wrong with Laudato Si‘, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. In that document, Francis waded into an argument about climate change and took sides. Moreover, he gave the impression that he was speaking for all Catholics when he did so; and, if by any chance he wasn’t, errant faithful should fall into line. In an interview in Thursday’s Financial Times, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy stepped out of line. See above. It was a brave thing to do: Pell’s wholesale reform of

Home In his Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, slowed the planned rate of bringing in £12 billion of welfare cuts. He forecast a surplus by 2020. The bank levy would be reduced but a surcharge on bank profits imposed. The total of benefits that a family can claim a year would be cut to £23,000 in London and £20,000 outside it. Tax credits for those with more than two children were to be reduced. Local authority and housing association tenants in England who earn more than £30,000 (£40,000 in London) would have to pay more rent. Maintenance grants for students would be turned into loans. Income tax

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.

Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there was an awful lot going on; fun stuff, more fun than looking at a screen. And at that point I broke the habit. It’s a bit like giving up sugar in your tea for Lent: the first time is awful; by the next Lent it’s easier; by the end, it’s normal. And so, term by term,

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

Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123. Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed

Home Launching the Conservative party manifesto, David Cameron, the party leader, told voters he wanted to ‘turn the good news in our economy into a good life for you and your family’. The Tories promised: to eliminate the deficit by the end of the parliament; to provide 30 hours of free child care a week for working parents of three- and four-year-olds; to grant a right for housing association tenants to buy their properties; to increase the inheritance tax threshold for married couples from £650,000 to £1 million (paid for by nobbling tax allowances on pension contributions for those earning £150,000); to raise the threshold of the 40p rate to £50,000 by

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