Columnist: Damian Thompson
How the People’s Pope Shielded Sexual Predators
When the world's cardinals met in Rome last Monday for the first of their crucial pre-conclave discussions, they raised 'the issue of clerical abuse', according to a Vatican spokesman. The ...
The Extraordinary Scale of the Crisis Facing the Next Pope
The incoming pope will face challenges that dwarf those that confronted any in living memory At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a ...
Americans Should Feel Uneasy About the New Archbishop of Washington
For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most ...
The Ghost of Christmas Past is Haunting Pope Francis
The cardinals are already meeting to discuss who should be the next pope. Some of the liberal ones, who feel safe because they’re in favour with the ailing Pope Francis, ...
The Hidden Scandals Surrounding Pope Francis – and the Battle to Succeed Him
The cardinals are already meeting to discuss who should be the next pope. Some of the liberal ones, who feel safe because they’re in favour with the ailing Pope Francis, ...
Can the Pope Survive the Rupnik Scandal?
It’s the eyes — swollen, dark and merciless — that everyone notices. They stare out from the mosaic walls of some of the most beloved shrines in the Catholic World, ...
Ten Terrible Years of Pope Francis
Ten years ago today, on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 13, 2013, the 115 cardinal-electors of the Catholic Church walked up one after the other to a table in the ...
The Torment of Pope Benedict
It might seem perverse to describe the death of a painfully frail 95-year-old man as a uniquely sad event. But in the case of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI we have ...
LISTEN: The Catholic Church is Falling Apart at the Seams
This headline may seem sensational, but the evidence is overwhelming. The Catholic Church is experiencing a bewildering range of crises, some of them long-term and familiar, such as demographic collapse ...
LISTEN: Is Pope Francis Protecting A Convicted Sex Abuser?
Damian Thompson looks at the ever-deepening mysteries surrounding Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was given a job assessing Vatican finances after he was forced to resign from his diocese in Argentina ...
The Hypocrisy of Pope Francis
Pope Francis is sorry and not sorry. Last week, he was in Canada to deliver an apology for the abuse suffered by indigenous children in schools run by the Catholic ...
LISTEN: Suicide by Secularism
Today’s episode of Holy Smoke exposes the extent to which ordinary Christians have been betrayed by their own bishops. This is a process that began decades ago – but it ...
An Exposé of High-Ranking Gay Catholic Clergy Bears the Fingerprints of Team Francis
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the ...
How the Media are Covering-Up for Pope Francis
If the head of any other organisation were guilty of such complicity, he or she would not only be forced to resign but could also end up in the dock ...