Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator
The Synod on the Family in Rome today caused an ‘earthquake’ – the word is being used on Catholic blogs everywhere – when it appeared to tweak the Church’s line on homosexuality and second marriages. ‘Line’, please note, not its teaching on the sinfulness of all sexual acts outside marriage, which it does not have the authority to change
Tory MP Brooks Newmark quits politics after sexting photograph comes to light; talks of depression, needing help, checks into clinic. To which the response of many people will be: Yeah, right. He’s playing the depression card. I hope Spectator readers will think again, however horrified they are by his crazy actions and the pain he has inflicted on
Heywood and Middleton is a far worse result for Labour than for the Tories: we can agree on that, surely. Clacton is grim for Dave, of course, but I’m interested in what happens in the rotten Labour heartlands. Here’s something else for Ed Miliband to worry about: the SNP. Loathsome party, humiliated last month, but so
The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, has agreed to talk to members of Ukip about ‘Magna Carta and the Perfectly Virtuous Pages of our History’. I blogged earlier about the bishop’s bravery in calling on Rome to defend Christians from Islamism, and in the process endorsed the Catholic Ordinariate for ex-Anglicans. But this demonstrates courage of
The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and an evangelical Christian, has delivered a remarkable message to a group of Catholics: ‘Bishop Nazir-Ali said that, with the growth of Islamic militancy and the persecution of Christians worldwide, many people were now looking to Rome as the voice that could stem the tide.
The Vatican Synod of Bishops on the Family begins on Sunday amid a degree of chaos unprecedented in recent Catholic history. And I’m afraid it’s the Pope’s fault. Francis kicked off proceedings in February by asking the retired German Cardinal Walter Kasper to address the world’s cardinals. Kasper used the opportunity to float his proposal – which he’s
On 10 October, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford will host the first concert in ‘the biggest ever celebration of the life and work of Franz Schubert’. Over three weeks, all 650 songs (or thereabouts) will be performed, most of them in England’s oldest concert hall, the Holywell Music Room just around the corner from the
Well! Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian was impressed by David Cameron’s conference speech and no mistake. The campaign for 2015 has begun. On Wednesday, in what may well have been his sharpest, most effective speech since becoming prime minister, David Cameron fired the starting gun. In the process, he lodged at least a couple of
Cardinal Nichols this morning faces his biggest crisis since he became Archbishop of Westminster in 2009. On Saturday Bishop Kieran Conry – head of evangelisation for England and Wales – resigned as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton after (at least) two affairs with women became public. Now Conry has told the Mail: In some respects I
Update: The Mail has now published its allegations against Bishop Conry. They’re much more serious than I imagined. He appears to have behaved disgracefully; by his own admission there is more than one woman involved. I’ll quote only the last paragraph, which goes to heart of the matter: the responsibility of the Catholic Church for allowing
The other day someone tweeted at me the words ‘J£w$ Got Mon€¥’. And I was just about to tweet back: ‘Get stuffed, you anti-Semitic scum’. But I clicked on the link and realised I’d got the wrong end of the stick. The tweet came from Sasha Andreas, who’s made a documentary about poor Jews, mostly
Professor Tom Gallagher, a Scottish Catholic historian, wrote a post here yesterday accusing the Catholic hierarchy of Scotland of covertly supporting the Yes campaign. Now there are two pieces of evidence to support his claim. The first is a letter from Archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow to departing First Minister Alex Salmond. Never have I
Yesterday Pope Francis preached one of the most extraordinary sermons ever delivered by a pope, one that demonstrates the laziness of those commentators who think he is a typical Latin American liberal. It put centre stage a teaching of the Church that I’ve never heard discussed in a Catholic homily: the physical resurrection of all saved Christians
Here is a picture of Cardinal Raymond Burke, whose grand title of Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura is matched only by the magnificence of his ecclesiastical dress. He is famous for his willingness to don the cappa magna, the astonishingly long silk cloak often worn by bishops before the Second Vatican Council but now confined
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the Telegraph, married the beautiful Lida Mirzaii, his girlfriend since university. The service was in Wardour Chapel in Wiltshire, a neoclassical masterpiece described by Pevsner as ‘so grand in its decoration that it seems consciously to
Just over a week ago I wrote a piece in the Spectator asking if we were on the verge of an anti-Muslim backlash that could spread beyond the strongholds of the aggrieved white working class in Barking and Rochdale and into the home counties. After the gloating videotaped murder of David Haines, a British aid worker, the
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the ebullient Archbishop of New York, has welcomed the ‘wise decision’ by organisers of the city’s St Patrick’s Day parade to lift their ban on gay groups marching under their own banners. He has ‘no problem with it at all’. His predecessor, Cardinal John O’Connor, who supported the ban in 1990, must be
British public opinion has never really turned against Muslims. According to Pew’s 2014 Global Attitudes survey, 26 per cent of us have ‘unfavourable’ attitudes towards Muslims in this country; compare that to 46 per cent in Spain, 53 per cent in Greece and 63 per cent in Italy. Our national tolerance has, so far, proved
Satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, said Tom Lehrer. Now irony has followed it to the grave. GQ’s Philanthropist of the Year is Tony Blair. And no, this isn’t some cunning wind-up by the magazine. They gave the former PM a bauble at a ceremony last night. I’d like to say that
I rejoiced at the news of Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip. Not because I’m a Ukip supporter (I haven’t made up my mind) but because it highlights the slippery dishonesty of the Tories’ modernisation programme – ‘the political equivalent of botox’, as Charles Moore puts it in today’s Telegraph: The pattern of the leader’s actions conveys a message
