For 75 years, the most anti-Christian regime in modern history has thrown its citizens into prison camps if they are suspected of the slightest dissent. Ten per cent of people live in modern slavery; perhaps 200,000 are behind bars. I'm talking about North Korea, of course – a regime even more abhorrent than Stalinist Russia, but which attracts suspiciously little attention from Western governments and churches unless they feel threatened by its nuclear arsenal.  My guest in this episode of...

In the ancient Syro-Malabar Church of south India, clergy who try to change the liturgy do so at their peril. At St Mary’s Cathedral Basilica in Ernakulam last December, a long-standing dispute over whether the priest should face the people led to scenes in which protestors attacked clergy in the middle of the service, sending the sacred vessels crashing to the ground. As a result, the cathedral was closed – and remains so, six months later. This liturgy war is a hideous embarrassment for...

A charming octogenarian who plays ruthless games with the people who think they're going to succeed him: I reckon Logan Roy would have recognised a kindred spirit in Pope Francis, despite their diametrically opposed politics. Like many of you, I'm heartbroken that Succession has come to an end – but if you're missing the back-stabbing melodrama then you could always start following the real-life struggle to shape the Catholic Church after Francis. Plenty of cardinals would like to swap their...

The Sicilian Mafia is one of the most murderously amoral organisations on the planet – yet babyishly sentimental when it comes to Italian peasant Catholicism. And, like other branches of Italian organised crime, questions exist over whether they have allies in the Vatican, some of whose senior officials are as keen on money-laundering as the Mafia, only not so good at covering their traces.  The relationship between the hitmen and the hierarchy casts an exotic shadow over a new series of...

The Coronation in Westminster Abbey is the only occasion at which our monarch declares himself or herself to be a Protestant, thus ensuring that no Catholic can sit on the throne of the United Kingdom. Yet, paradoxically, the Coronation is the only English Royal ceremony which is replete with Catholic symbolism – the King will even wear robes whose origins lie in the vestments of the Catholic clergy. My guest in this episode of Holy Smoke – the historian Dr Francis Young of Oxford University...

Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, 'I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.' One of his closest friends, Archduke Rudolf of Austria, was made a cardinal (before being ordained priest and bishop, something inconceivable today). To mark Rudolf's enthronement as Archbishop of Olomouc in 1819, Beethoven wrote a great Mass, and took such trouble over the...

This week we heard the unfamiliar sound of one of the Catholic Church's most influential cardinals turning the handle of a door that has remained firmly shut for 2,000 years. It's marked 'Catholic women priests', a development – such is the pace of chaotic change under this pontificate – that is now a real long-term possibility. Pope Francis says he's against this innovation, but he relentlessly promotes bishops who favour it. Until now, they've been discreet about their views. Now, to use a...

The Abrahamic Family House is the name for three giant concrete cubes – a church, a mosque and a synagogue – that have just officially opened their doors in Abu Dhabi. The project is the fruit of a controversial agreement signed there in 2019 by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, that disturbed many Christians with its statement that the existence of separate religions is God's will. But it's a spectacular coup for the government of the United Arab Emirates and will...

Cardinal Arthur Roche, the Pope's famously ambitious liturgy chief, has stepped up his campaign against the Traditional Latin Mass, which he's been trying to suppress ever since he was Bishop of Leeds 15 years ago. This week he persuaded Francis to back his ruling that the ancient Mass can only be celebrated in parish churches with his permission – thus taking the decision out of the hands of the world's bishops, many of whom are furious at being undermined in this way.  Traditionalists are...

The fallout from the death of Benedict XVI has been unexpectedly dramatic. Pope Francis's behaviour at his predecessor's Requiem on Thursday struck many observers as graceless. The liberal Catholic journalist Robert Mickens, a long-time opponent of many of Benedict's policies, wrote that Francis 'looked unpleasant throughout the liturgy and, surprisingly (shockingly, some would say), he did not attend the interment of Benedict's body in the crypt after the Mass. The Vatican did not observe a...

It's time for the Holy Smoke Christmas episode! The studio is decorated like a Dolly Parton festive special c. 1977, and my guest is the fearless and feisty Anglican church organist Lois Letts. Our theme is the urgent need to save children from the agitprop 'worship songs' that crop up in nativity and carol services even in Church of England primary schools, all of which make even Miss Parton's cheesiest numbers sound like Handel's Messiah. But be warned: Lois illustrates her point by singing...

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I interview Fr John Lovell, who is one of a growing number of American Catholic priests who claim to have been suspended from ministry simply because their conservative views offend their bishops. Fr Lovell's Coalition for Cancelled Priests is gathering support among US traditionalists – which is hardly surprising given the Kafkaesque experiences of some priests at the hands of the authorities.  But there’s a problem: some of the coalition's supporters believe...

Last week, out of a mixture of curiosity and boredom, I ended up watching an online Church of England Eucharist from a parish church in Hereford. The text of the liturgy was almost identical to that of the Catholic Mass I had attended the night before. We'd even sung the same hymn, and the celebrant’s vestments were indistinguishable from those of a Roman Catholic priest. But the person wearing them was a woman, and it reminded me that since that particular battle ended nearly 30 years ago I...

Ten years ago the Catholic Church happily celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Most people thought it was a good thing – and those who had their doubts were careful to express them diplomatically.  Sixty years on, by contrast, Vatican II is the source of rancorous division in a collapsing Church. Liberals, describing themselves as 'The People of God', are invoking it to propose surreal changes to the doctrine that would have scandalised the Council...

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 and the continuing scandal of sex abuse. Others are being manufactured by a Pope who is allowing a faction of Catholic boomers to push an incoherent 'New Age' agenda. Whether Francis truly supports their ideas is anyone's guess – but he's increasingly willing to spout their inanities. On...

Is western society in the grips of a progressive hysterical epidemic comparable to the Salem Witch Trials?  My guest on Holy Smoke this week, Andrew Doyle, argues precisely that in his book The New Puritans. He suggests that gender ideology, and particularly the dogmas of trans activists, together with the fantasies of Critical Race Theory, are dragging society into an alternative reality that resembles a fanatical religion. But it's one that doesn't have to employ its own ideological...

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I look 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 following allegations of abusive behaviour and financial mismanagement. This year Zanchetta received a lengthy jail sentence for abusing seminarians. But he’s serving his time in a comfortable monastery, while the clergy who investigated him are the targets of a mysterious...

The Catholic Church is half way through a two-year consultation exercise that will culminate in a 'Synod on Synodality' in the Vatican next year. A synod on what? Don't worry if you're confused. No one in Rome seems to be able to define synodality, either. What will the world's bishops discuss? Probably not the figures revealing how many Catholics have taken part in this exercise, because they're acutely embarrassing. The English and Welsh bishops couldn't even get 10 per cent of...

In this week's Holy Smoke I offer some thoughts on the impressive and distinctive Christian faith of the Queen – impressive because it's so refreshingly direct compared to that of many of her politics-obsessed bishops, and distinctive because Elizabeth II is one of a dwindling band of Low Church but not Evangelical Anglicans whose favourite Sunday service is old-fashioned Matins. Questions of churchmanship aside, however, there is no doubting the intensity of her convictions, about which she...

My guest on Holy Smoke this week is, many people believe, a victim of the intolerant progressive ideology currently gripping the Church of England. He's Calvin Robinson, a name possibly familiar to you from the row over the Diocese of London's decision not to ordain him.  Calvin is a young TV presenter with conservative Christian views that conflict with the liberal opinions of the hierarchy. He's been told they are too divisive – which is a bit rich coming from an organisation whose senior...

So Roe vs. Wade is as good as dead. Americans are about to lose their constitutional right to an abortion. Five out of the nine Supreme Court justices have drafted an opinion in their forthcoming ruling on a Mississippi abortion case which strikes down the 1973 Roe ruling as 'egregiously wrong from the start'. As we all know it’s been leaked – but it’s expected to be issued pretty much unchanged in the next few weeks because, even if they wanted to, the justices can't change their votes...

Few things are more depressing than the art, architecture and furnishings of the average modern church. The glorious aesthetic of light and colour of the Middle Ages and Renaissance has been replaced with an infantile modernist decor more suited to a primary school than a place of worship.  In the Catholic Church, especially, bishops who may privately have reasonably good taste happily commission cringeworthy 1970s-style art because they think it's demanded by 'the spirit of Vatican...

My guest on this episode of Holy Smoke was an Anglican bishop for 37 years – one of the Church of England's foremost scholars and its leading witness for persecuted Christians. He was also an evangelical who, as bishop of the ancient see of Rochester, ordained women priests. But, as of this month, his title is Monsignor. I am, of course, talking about the Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali, whose decision to join the Ordinariate has come as an enormous, if surprising, boost to the fortunes...

Did you know that in the last year more Christians have been killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world combined? In 2021, at least 6,000 Christians died for their faith, and 80 per cent of those were Nigerians. Their murderers were – you may not be too shocked to learn – almost to a man Islamists. But, this being Nigeria, a supposedly secular state where northern provinces impose Sharia on their populations, the situation is chaotic.  Four different groups are...

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...