Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator
When Ofsted inspectors allegedy asked primary-age girls at Grindon Hall Christian School, Sunderland, whether they knew what lesbians did in bed, they (apparently) received insufficiently detailed answers. Also, pupils displayed scant knowledge of Hindu festivals. Now the free school has been placed in special measures. It may be that Grindon Hall is a nest of Christian
I’ve never been into shoplifting, though I once had a friend who was. And, no, before you ask, I’m not using that old ‘friend’ device to hide my own identity. She was a girl I met at university. Bookshops were her hunting ground. I’m assuming she was driven by some sort of compulsion because she
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
Just before Christmas, virtually unnoticed by the media, the German Catholic bishops made a plea for the readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics (or Catholics married to divorcees) to Holy Communion. That it should be the Germans, led by Cardinal Reinhard Marx – Archbishop of Munich, president of the German bishops’ conference and coordinator of the Vatican’s
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
The Most Rev Philip Tartaglia, Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, is at it again: There is a feeling around that we are in a special moment when we can shape a new Scotland. Our new First Minister, who is happily with us here this afternoon, has proposed a more consensual form of government, less partisan, less
When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and ‘see her lips moving, only to glimpse the beads in her lap. I recall thinking that they slipped through her thumb and forefinger the way cartridges moved into machine guns’. There was nothing unusual about
The two trendiest words in classical music are ‘El Sistema’. That’s the name for the high-intensity programme of instrumental coaching that turned kids from the slums of Venezuela into the thrilling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (SBYO), conducted by hot young maestro Gustavo Dudamel before he was poached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Or so the
Cardinal George Pell, the Australian prelate charged by Pope Francis with cleaning up the Vatican’s murky finances, has decided to speak bluntly about the appalling corrupt mess he found when he started work this year. Writing in the first issue of the Catholic Herald weekly magazine, out tomorrow, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy – an entirely
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo recordings consist of two volumes of the Mozart piano sonatas. That would be understandable if he were 23 years old and the next big thing. But he’s 65. Though he may indeed be the next
A couple of days ago John Bingham, the excellent religious affairs editor of the Telegraph, broke a story that is only now filtering out. I hope he’ll forgive me if I wonder whether he realised just what a big story it was. Bingham wrote: Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England
How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one
In the magazine a couple of weeks ago I asked if we were in the early stages of a Catholic civil war fuelled by confusion over Pope Francis’s apparent willingness to soften the Church’s pastoral approach to divorcees and gay people. Hostilities began during the disastrous Synod of the Family, at which liberal officials gave a press conference
Update: He’s called Martin Wright and you can see a clip of him speaking here at a Class War event in 1985. In it he reveals that he used to support the National Front, which isn’t a massive surprise, though he moved away from racism pretty quickly. Click through and you’ll discover just how much anarchists hate
Christians and Muslims in Egypt are joining forces to address the challenge of atheism, according to this news report. (It reminds me of the old headline from Northern Ireland: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite to fight ecumenism’.) Christian churches in Egypt say they are joining forces with Egypt’s Al-Azhar, a prominent centre of Sunni Muslim learning,
‘At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,’ said a prominent Catholic conservative last week. No big deal, you might think. Opponents of Pope Francis have been casting doubt on his leadership abilities for months — and especially since October’s Vatican Synod on
Fiona Woolf, as you can probably tell from her Maggie-Smith-in-yet-another-costume-drama photograph above, is a member of The Establishment. She’s Lord Mayor of London. And a QC. Plus, she has been at the same social events as former home secretary Lord Brittan and his wife; is even sort of friends with Lady B, in common with
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales are to hold an inquiry into the case of the Rt Rev Kieran Conry, he of the two (or is it three?) girlfriends, who resigned as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton when he had a crisis of conscience caused by the tabloids knocking on his door. Displaying their celebrated transparency,
‘Thanks be to God’, as we Catholic children used to say with heartfelt enthusiasm as Mass was over for another week. The most divisive meeting of Catholic bishops since Vatican II has ended – and no real damage has been done. Except, I’m sorry to say, to the reputation of Pope Francis. No real progress
Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted the first performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor? The best of Glazunov’s own neatly carpentered symphonies hover on the verge of greatness. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a toper — swigging
