Holy Smoke

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is fundamentally inspired by his determination to preserve the Orthodox identity of Holy Mother Russia, according to the Rev Giles Fraser, writing for UnHerd today. That's not as preposterous a suggestion as you might think, given that the first mass baptisms in the ancient homeland of 'Rus' took place in Kiev – and that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church recently repudiated the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. But does that mean that Putin's murderous behaviour should be seen in the context of a war of religion? Does the former KGB agent have a religious bone in his body? Is he secretly laughing at those Christian right-wingers who have cast him in the role of defender of Christendom? (Giles Fraser, I should add, is certainly not one of them.) Joining me for this episode of Holy Smoke is Archbishop Nikitas, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Great Britain, who – as you might expect – is deeply sceptical of attempts to ascribe spiritual motives to the Russian dictator. 

In the latest Holy Smoke, I ask the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, about the Church of England's plans to create a new breed of bureaucrat-bishop who will pontificate about climate change, Brexit, Covid or whatever without having to bother looking after a diocese. He also discusses a related proposal to put ordinary bishops on fixed-term contracts that will be renewed only if they toe the party line. If adopted, these ideas would lead to the biggest shake-up in the Church's government since the Reformation – with dreadful consequences for independent-minded bishops and ordinary worshippers. All very worrying for Anglicans – and Catholics, too, since the Vatican's risible 'synodal way' is inspired by the same liberal control-freakery. Don't miss this outspoken episode! 

My dear sister Carmel died aged 57 on November 23, after a three-year cancer ordeal during which she displayed the most astonishing courage. I interviewed her twice on this podcast about her faith, her illness and her unquenchable optimism. I knew at the time that one day I'd have to record an episode paying tribute to her after she died, and here it is.

In this episode of Holy Smoke, Archbishop Nikitas of Thyateira and Great Britain, leader of Britain’s Greek Orthodox, defends sacred Christian tradition with a robustness I’ve never heard from a native British bishop.  The Florida-born Nikitas has exhilarating and controversial things to say on all sorts of topics: the Western Churches’ cosy relationship with secularism, the devastating civil war between Moscow and Constantinople, and the essence of Orthodox mysticism.  Needless to say, I couldn’t resist asking the Archbishop what he makes of Pope Francis’s grim persecution of Latin Mass Catholics. Nikitas is generally a fan of Francis – but I doubt that the Vatican will be reassured by his wise and candid comments on this topic. 

Pope Francis renewed his campaign against the Latin Mass this month, permitting his liturgy chief Archbishop Arthur Roche to issue all manner of threats to clergy celebrating the ancient liturgy. This 'clarification' has been greeted with horror by bishops around the world, including many who aren't keen on the old rite.  This episode of Holy Smoke puts this outrage in the context of what one distinguished priest calls the 'Wild West' of the Bergoglio pontificate. Never have I known such widespread despair among all but the most hardline liberal clergy. That this should be happening at Christmas underlines the grim unfairness of it all – and the desperate need for regime change in the Church. And if that means the Vatican as we know it ceases to exist, perhaps that isn't such a bad thing. 

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I interview Julia Meloni, author of The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church. It's the first detailed study of the self-described 'mafia' of liberal cardinals who worked tirelessly to prevent and then undermine the pontificate of Benedict XVI.  The book contains many disconcerting revelations, and also well-sourced speculation that the group's founder, the Jesuit scholar Cardinal Martini of Milan, may have visited Benedict shortly before his own death in order to pressure him to resign. By 2013, when that happened, Martini was dead, but he had given his blessing to a St Gallen candidate: his fellow Jesuit Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, whose initiatives as pope – and particularly the vicious attempt to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass – coincide very closely with Martini's own agenda.  Do listen to my conversation with Julia, formerly one of Pope Francis's biggest fans. I promise you won't forget it in a hurry. 

The University of Nottingham has been forced to abandon its sinister attempt to ban Fr David Palmer from becoming its Catholic chaplain because his defence of unborn life might upset snowflakes. In this episode of Holy Smoke, I talk to one of Fr Palmer's key allies, Ryan Christopher, UK director of Alliance Defending Freedom, about that appalling episode and its backdrop: a sneaky culture of below-the-radar censorship driven in large part by student unions. Needless to say, the latter are furious that this government is passing legislation to protect free speech on campuses. Ryan has the details. 

If you belong to or care about the Church of England, you may be shocked by some of the things you learn in this episode of Holy Smoke.  I'm not referring to the familiar evidence that the Established Church, in common with all mainstream Christian denominations in Britain, is watching its congregations shrink at a humiliating rate. In 2019, an average of only 690,000 people attended Church of England services on Sundays – 50,000 fewer than in 2016. And that was before Covid. This is what people mean when they talk about churchgoing falling off a cliff, and it’s a desperate problem for a church facing the impossible challenge of maintaining 16,000 buildings, many of them Grade I listed. What shocked me was what my guest, the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, revealed about the horrors of the C of E’s insatiably greedy and tediously right-on bureaucracy. An ever-growing army of administrators and busybodies – he describes their numbers as ‘astronomical’ – is raid

Say what you like about Pope Francis, but he's incapable of giving a boring in-flight interview. On Wednesday, coming back from Hungary and Slovakia, he was asked about the problem of pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Holy Communion. He immediately launched into a ferocious denunciation of abortion, describing it as homicide, saying there was no middle way and stating that support for abortion was grounds for 'excommunication'.  Francis then slightly qualified this by explaining that these 'excommunicated' Catholics needed to be lovingly shown the error of their ways, but it was hard to escape the obvious conclusion. The Pope regards the President as barred from Communion – which drives a horse and cart through the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of Biden's own bishop, Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington.  In this week's Holy Smoke, Dr Ed Condon, canon lawyer and editor of the brilliant Catholic website The Pillar, offers us an admirably lucid 'explainer' on this complicated topic. His conclusion

Religious freedom is already being mercilessly attacked in Taliban-run Afghanistan: Muslim women in particular face a living hell unless they're happy to submit to their new rulers' psychotic brand of Sharia.  The United States is required by its own laws to do everything it can to champion religious liberty around the world. But Afghan's moderate Muslims, China's Uighurs, Myanmar's Rohynga and Christians in dozens of countries would be foolish to trust President Joe Biden, whose administration can't wait to dismantle the First Amendment Rights of conservative Christians back home.  My guest is Andrea Picciotti-Bayer of the Washington-based Conscience Project, which speaks up for people of faith who commit the thought crime of not subscribing to liberal gender ideology. Like many people, she's worried by Biden's partisan choice of personnel for US international religious freedom posts. None of them are Christians. It's an enlightening but alarming discussion. Don't miss it. 

In the last episode of Holy Smoke, I discussed Pope Francis's brutal and petty new document which seeks to ban as many Latin Masses as possible. This week we look at the other recent developments, which are arguably just as disturbing: two criminal prosecutions in which close allies of the Pope are accused of a range of hair-raising offences – and the question of how much Francis knew about their activities still hasn't been answered, either by the Vatican or its tame press corps.. Also, I touch on a new explanation for Rome's dreadful pact with China. Did the Pope's Secretary of State sign away the freedom of Chinese Catholics because Beijing was threatening to release data relating to the use of the gay hook-up app Grindr inside the walls of the Vatican? We may never find out. But one day there will be a new pope. Is it too much to hope that the college of cardinals will learn from the disasters of the past eight years? 

Traditionalist Catholics are still reeling from the Pope's imposition of ferocious new rules limiting the celebration of the old Latin Mass. On Friday, he tore up Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI's document rehabilitating the pre-Vatican II ceremonies — and he did so while his predecessor was still alive. Francis's replacement, Traditionis Custodes, and the letter that accompanies it, relegate Latin Mass Catholics to that of second-class citizens. Their priests must now seek permission from their bishops before using the Old Rite. It's a shocking development, and the subject of today's Holy Smoke podcast, which asks how traditionalists should respond to what amounts to a poison-pen letter from the pontiff. 

Christian music lovers of all denominations – Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, whatever – know only too well that they enter their local churches at their peril. In this week's episode I talk to the irrepressible Lois Letts, a wedding and funeral organist for C of E churches in rural Herefordshire, about bad hymns. The funerals are appropriate, since when I first met Lois she wrote obituaries for the Times. Pity the wet vicar who tries to force her to play a bad hymn! We don't mince our words: our discussion is a euphemism-free zone and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And there's a musical coda, a treat in store for those many Holy Smoke listeners who are devoted to the memory of Dame Clara Butt.

Is the mental health of Christians beginning to collapse under the strain not just of Covid and its effect on worship but also the bottomless contempt of progressive ideology for religious belief? This week's Holy Smoke is a conversation with theologian Dr Gavin Ashenden about a crisis of morale that is robbing some Christians of the will to live. One former churchgoer told me last week that he'd be perfectly happy not to wake up the next morning – and I knew exactly how he felt. But in conclusion Gavin suggests a way of breaking out of this existential nightmare. So, as they say on the BBC, if you're affected by any of the issues raised in this programme, make sure to listen through to the end.

America's Catholic bishops are furiously divided among themselves this week, after a liberal faction led by the Biden loyalists Cardinals Cupich of Chicago and Wilton Gregory of Washington tried to stop them discussing the question of whether the radically pro-choice president of the United States should be allowed to receive Holy Communion.   As I say in the new episode of Holy Smoke, It looks as if most of the 290 active bishops are ready to enforce such a ban – goaded by Joe Biden's increasingly hardline support for completely unrestricted abortions, and his plans to remove constitutional protection for pro-life public employees.   The controversy is particularly nerve-wracking for the US bishops because they don't know where the Pope stands on this question. Francis is a big fan of the current Argentine President, Alberto Fernandez, who has recently legalised abortion in the country. When the Pope and the President met in Rome this month, the subject apparently didn't even come up.   For more thought on t

Today’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the increasingly brutal bullying and silencing of people – especially Christians – who hold the ‘wrong’ opinions on controversial topics. A culture of censorship is becoming ever more deeply embedded in public institutions not just in Britain but also throughout Europe. There is a direct link between Europe's increasingly fanatical attempts to police public opinion and the former Soviet bloc. My guest Paul Coleman, executive director of free-speech legal advocates ADF International, explains that when Moscow and its satellites were involved in drawing up international human rights legislation after the Second World War, they insisted that it should include the criminalisation of speech. One wonders whether Boris Johnson and his ministers are aware of this and, if so, whether they care. As Coleman points out, although European bodies are hunting down heretics with predictable relish, the behaviour of the heavily politicised police forces of post-Brexit Britain is in so

The subject of this week’s Holy Smoke is charisma, which you might think is one of the most hackneyed and devalued words in the language. But its popularity is no accident. ‘Charisma’ is shorthand for one of the most revolutionary – and useful – concepts in intellectual history. The word ‘charisma’ is taken from St Paul, who employed it to describe the gifts that descended on the first Christians at Pentecost. Indeed, Paul may have invented the word. But it was the tortured polymath Weber who suggested that the sudden appearance of men and women who can apparently perform miracles, real or metaphorical, has transformed almost every human society. My guest today is the diplomatic historian Professor John Charmley, whose unflattering biography of Winston Churchill divided opinion when it was published in 1993 – as it was intended to. Professor Charmley is now Pro-Vice Chancellor for academic strategy at St Mary's University, Twickenham, a Catholic university which he wants to root even more firmly in its fa

What were Prince Philip's religious beliefs? The Duke of Edinburgh had Orthodox Christian ancestry, but how was he drawn to its traditions, was he influenced by the Queen's faith, and why was he critical of Catholicism? Damian Thompson speaks to Gavin Ashenden, chaplain to the Queen from 2008 to 2017.

The invasion of the sanctuary of a Polish church in Balham on Good Friday by the Metropolitan police was not only a shocking event but also a sinister piece of history. It can't be interpreted as a premeditated attack on Christianity – but it's evidence of the utter irrelevance of Britain's Christian heritage to the culture of liberal bureaucracy that is fast replacing it.In this week’s Holy Smoke episode, Dr Gavin Ashenden and I talk about the blundering insensitivity of the police officer who marched into the sanctuary of Christ the King Church during the veneration of the Cross without apparently understanding anything of what the ceremony signified. But equally unsettling, in its way, has been the relative silence of Christian leaders when confronted by this outrageous disruption of a service on the grounds that the congregation were not observing social distancing procedures – something that isn't immediately clear from the video footage. In my opinion, Anglican and Catholic bishops are just as passive

As we all know, it’s safe for three people to sing hymns in church, but any more than three is absolutely deadly. Those are the rules as set down by the Church of England, and as a result no one in Anglican services (or Catholic ones) will hear the glorious Good Friday Hymn 'O Sacred Head’ tomorrow in the four-part harmony it requires. But if you stick on a CD of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, you'll hear four separate harmonisations of perhaps the most haunting hymn tune ever written. The Cantor of St Thomas’s Leipzig was obsessed with this tune, originally a popular song with excruciating lyrics by the composer Hans Leo Hassler. Bach’s older contemporary Dietrich Buxtehude had fun with it, as did Paul Simon – enchantingly, in his 1974 song ‘America’.  This episode of Holy Smoke tells the story of the piece, and reveals some of the miraculous things Bach did with it in his other settings. He has a way of dive-bombing a movement with it that can make you jump out of your seat the first time you hear it. Or, in