Pope francis

It’s filthy wet weather in Tuscany, so I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon reading through the Italian newspapers. They are full of stuff about Pope Francis — how his humility, his simplicity, and his reforming zeal are breathing new life into the Roman Catholic Church. They say that the long decline in church attendance in Italy has been reversed in the few months since a previously little-known bishop from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected to the papacy. His public appearances at the Vatican are also drawing enormous crowds. He is, in short, a superstar, and by no means in Italy alone. Everywhere in the world, including Britain,

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of

Pope Francis I’s statement about homosexual clergymen remains extraordinary; no matter how often one reads it. ‘If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?’ He also said: ‘The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well. It says they should not be marginalised because of this (orientation) but that they must be integrated into society…’ And there was more, perhaps a little less extraordinary in tone and content: ‘The problem is not having this orientation. We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the

The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in Rome more than 40 years ago, I was constantly assured by its citizens that the Pope not only had the evil eye but was known for a fact to be living secretly in the Vatican with a male ballet dancer. These were absurd rumours. Not only did Paul VI have rather dull eyes; he was also a cautious, unexciting fellow, a dry bureaucrat who had served for decades in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State before becoming archbishop of Milan and, after that, pope. I doubt if he had ever met

It’s a few weeks after the election of Pope Francis, and a notoriously leaky church source is talking about the revolution to come. The new leader of the faithful is a sharp operator who finds himself surrounded by ‘a medieval court system of hopeless characters, each jealously guarding their own silos of activity. There’s lots of crap people in key positions.’ Meanwhile, away from the court, bureaucrats churn out windy memos. They may not know it yet, but the process of ‘clearing out the weeds’ will start soon — possibly as early as this August. That might seem over-ambitious, but we’re not talking about the sleepy Vatican. The source is

There’s excitement in Christian circles today about the first meeting of Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby. The two men have important things in common. Both reached their positions of power from unusual backgrounds: Welby from the evangelical HTB movement; Francis from the Society of Jesus. Both have spent quite a lot of time attacking unregulated financial capitalism. Both shun traditional pomp. They both speak to a charismatic Christianity, modern and global, which stresses social justice and proselytisation above theological rigour and tradition. They are also Christians with whom secular liberals can do business. But will having such apparently compatible leaders make any meaningful difference to Catholic-Anglican relations? The Catholic blogger William

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, flew to Sochi, on the Black Sea, to talk with President Vladimir Putin, principally about Syria. He then flew to Washington, to support the American tour by Prince Harry and hold talks with President Barack Obama. They said that Britain and America wanted to strengthen the moderate opposition in Syria somehow. In a joint press conference, Mr Obama also said: ‘The UK’s participation in the EU is an expression of its influence.’ Mr Cameron tried to placate Tory MPs by rushing out a draft EU referendum bill, in the face of an amendment in the Queen’s Speech debate expressing regret at the absence of

A rather charming and typically self-deprecating Easter sermon from Archbishop Justin at Canterbury Cathedral; I’m beginning to like him. His subject was the inevitability of disillusion with things like governments and councils and ‘regulatory bodies’ and indeed Archbishops of Canterbury who are all bound, in the end, to be fucking useless (although this was not how he put it). I was seated in one of the pleb pews and rather hoped he might have taken a leaf out of that Argentine left-footer’s book and wandered over and washed my feet. They’ve become unaccountably scaly of late and for some reason now resemble the claws of a Galapagos tortoise; a bit

Just a year ago on this page I was writing about Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother Georg and how, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to his celebrated sibling, he contrived at the same time to make him look too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In a book, My Brother, the Pope, this old priest from Bavaria said that his younger brother had never wanted the job, was too physically frail for it, and found it a tremendous strain. Georg Ratzinger must now be feeling somewhat vindicated, but at the time he was ‘off message’, for the Vatican was insistent that the pope was on

It is surely too early to demand a pogrom against Roman Catholics, as some now wish, simply because the church now has an Argie pope. It is true that Pope Frankie is committed to the “return” of the Falkland Islands to his homeland and has spoken in the manner of a banana republic dictator about the war against the British: ‘We come to pray for all who have fallen, sons of the homeland who went out to defend their mother, the homeland, and to reclaim what is theirs, that is of the homeland, and it was usurped.’ But it is solipsistic to believe that the Vatican chose Jorge Borgoglio simply

Some striking facts about Pope Francis. Fact one: the Cardinals have elected a 76-year-old with only one lung. This undermines the idea that Pope Benedict stepped aside so that a younger, dynamic CEO-style figure would take charge, someone who could handle the exhausting job of running the Church. Instead the Cardinals went for a man of great individual piety who has lived a long and holy life. Fact two: we have the first Jesuit Pope. Traditionally, the Jesuits have been seen as a potential rival power base to the papacy. Now they are the papacy. The Jesuits have been, in recent decades, associated with the left, even the wacky wing