Damian Thompson

This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father’s method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful: … soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all

The aggressively traditionalist Catholic website Rorate Caeli is tonight announcing that Pope Francis has dropped a ‘bombshell’ in an interview with his favourite Italian journalist, Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica. Here’s a PDF of the newspaper’s article and here is Rorate Caeli’s translation of Scalfari: It is true – Pope Francis answered – it is a truth and

This afternoon the Vatican Synod on the Family amended and approved the final document summing up three weeks of chaotic and sometimes poisonous debate – much of it focussing on whether divorced and remarried people should be allowed to receive communion. The majority view of the Synod Fathers is that they don’t want the rules changed.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane is one of the bishops who’ll be voting on the final report of the Synod on the Family at the Vatican tomorrow. He’s ‘quite a character’, I’m told by a priest who knows him. But anyone who’s been reading his startlingly frank and witty diary of the Synod, published on his diocesan

I first saw the YouTube film from which these photographs are taken over a year ago. I’m surprised it hasn’t gained wider currency. It appears to show the future Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, distributing Holy Communion to a crowd at a Mass at San Cayetano, Buenos Aires. On the film, he hands the hosts (i.e., the

Pope Francis yesterday gave an address to the profoundly divided Synod on the Family in which he confirmed his plans to decentralise the Catholic Church – giving local bishops’ conferences more freedom to work out their own solutions to the problems of divorce and homosexuality. This is the nightmare of conservative Catholic cardinals, including – unsurprisingly –

The Catholic Church is this week in the biggest mess it’s been in since the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Francis is to blame. The Vatican cardinals in charge of doctrine, finance and worship are believed to have written to Francis at the beginning of the Synod on the Family – now in its second chaotic

Cardinal George Pell, Prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, has just issued a statement saying there is ‘no possibility’ that the ‘minority’ of Synod Fathers who favour allowing divorced and remarried people to receive Communion will get their way at the chaotic Synod on the Family. His spokesman said: ‘There is strong agreement in

This picture of Pope Francis apparently talking to retired Belgian cardinal Godfried Danneels at the Synod on the Family, which began this week, is circulating on Twitter and disturbing many Catholics. This is what you need to know: 1. Five years ago, Cardinal Danneels tried to cover up a revolting case of family sex abuse. As the National Catholic Reporter revealed on

Pope Francis’s three-week Synod on the Family began on Sunday. Most of the 279 ‘Synod Fathers’ are senior bishops, many of them cardinals. They have no authority to change any aspect of Catholic teaching or pastoral practice. They are discussing the ‘hot button’ issues of communion for the divorced and remarried and the spiritual care

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

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for

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

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