Holy Smoke

Cardinal George Pell has given a wide-ranging interview to The Spectator's Holy Smoke podcast in which he criticises the Vatican's 2018 deal with Beijing and especially the secrecy surrounding it.  The unpublished pact allows the Chinese Communist Party to choose Catholic bishops, whose appointments are then rubber-stamped by Pope Francis. 'I know high-up people in the Vatican are very dissatisfied with the way things are going,' says Pell, the former Vatican Prefect for the Economy. 'The agreement is there to try to get a bit of space for the Catholics. Obviously that's praiseworthy. [But] I don't think we've gained anything. The persecutions seem to be continuing. In some places they've got worse.' Nobody 'outside a small circle' knows the details of the agreement, 'which seems to me to be quite irregular.' The cardinal was imprisoned in his native Australia on trumped-up sex charges before being acquitted by the country's High Court. It is widely believed that his enemies in the Vatican played a p