Today

22 Jul 2021
Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to form, told his young guests to ‘just think of 700 billion dollars, because that’s all going into our military this year’. And he also said that the White House was an amazing place, in ‘tip-top shape’. The liberal media rolled their eyes about Trump boasting to children about military spending but quickly moved on. The fools! They’d just missed the biggest story since 9/11. The President of the United States had confirmed the existence of an international cabal of child-trafficking psychopaths including Hillary Clinton, George Soros, George W.

Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

Sunday

18 Jul 2021
Holy Smoke
The plot against the Old Rite
13 min listen

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. My colleague Tim Stanley aptly describes it as a reactionary move worthy of Brezhnev, one that ostensibly promotes unity while actually pushing traditionalists towards schism. 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.

The plot against the Old Rite

Tuesday

29 Jun 2021
Holy Smoke
The tyranny of bad hymns
25 min listen

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.

The tyranny of bad hymns

Tuesday

22 Jun 2021
Why do footballers equate health with virtue?

Last Tuesday, the great footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, captain of Portugal, removed two bottles of Coca-Cola from a table in front of him, and tens of millions of pounds of sponsorship money went down the plughole. Ronaldo was at a press conference for the Euro 2021 Championship, in which Coca-Cola had invested heavily – and, as it turned out, pointlessly. It took Ronaldo just seven seconds to make his point: that regular Coca-Cola is stuffed with sugar and if you drink too much of it, or any sugary soft drink, you'd better book an appointment at the diabetes clinic now. Having hidden the fizzy drinks, Ronaldo held up a bottle of water to indicate what his fans should be drinking instead. As it happens, that brand of water is also owned by Coke, but I don't think the company will find that consoling.

Why do footballers equate health with virtue?

Wednesday

9 Jun 2021
Holy Smoke
The Christian mental health crisis
34 min listen

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.

The Christian mental health crisis

Friday

28 May 2021
Holy Smoke
How Biden’s cardinals are trying to shut down free discussion
16 min listen

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.The US conference of bishops is scheduled to address the whole question of the Eucharist at its meeting next month. The plan is to prepare a document that will finally decide whether American bishops will enforce the Vatican's ban on actively pro-abortion Catholics receiving the sacrament while in a state of 'grave sin', as the Church puts it.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.

How Biden’s cardinals are trying to shut down free discussion

Thursday

13 May 2021
Holy Smoke
Why the legal harassment of today’s Christians is the last legacy of the Soviet Union
33 min listen

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. In London last month we witnessed the nasty spectacle of John Sherwood, a 71-year-old Christian pastor, being dragged off the street and surrounded by policeman for public preaching against gay marriage. In Finland, former interior minister Päivi Räsänen, an Evangelical Lutheran, faces a jail sentence because she tweeted out the same view. The authorities took offence, rooted through all her previous statements on Christian topics with Stasi-like zeal and found further evidence of ‘hate speech’ – so those have been added to the charge sheet.

Why the legal harassment of today’s Christians is the last legacy of the Soviet Union

Monday

3 May 2021
Holy Smoke
The magical power of charisma – and why the Churches are ignoring it
38 min listen

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; only the other day I saw an advert for a ‘charismatic chartered accountant’. But its popularity is no accident. ‘Charisma’ is shorthand for one of the most revolutionary – and useful – concepts in intellectual history. Charisma refers to the personal magnetism that binds a leader to his or her followers. Our modern understanding of it is based on an idea, almost a revelation, by the great German social theorist Max Weber, who believed that the display of ‘extraordinary powers’ was one of the driving forces of history. Those powers didn't have to be supernatural. They didn't even have to be demonstrably real, in the sense that they could be measured or proved to exist.

The magical power of charisma – and why the Churches are ignoring it

Monday

12 Apr 2021

Wednesday

7 Apr 2021
Holy Smoke
What the police disruption of a Polish church tells us about post-Christian Britain
35 min listen

The intrusion 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 deeply concerning 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 Ashendon 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. This happened at a service in Balham, South West London last night.

What the police disruption of a Polish church tells us about post-Christian Britain

Thursday

1 Apr 2021
The troubling history of Mormonism

The new three-part Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons is attracting big audiences, and deservedly so. Finally someone has made a major documentary about Mark Hofmann, the squeaky-voiced Mormon nerd who was both the most brilliant document-forger in history and a psychopathic murderer. In the early 1980s, the young Hofmann manufactured a series of documents that portrayed its prophet Joseph Smith — the discoverer of the ‘gold plates’ that supposedly described a great Israelite civilisation in America — as a conman up to his ears in the occult. In 1985, panicking that he was about to be discovered, he blew up two Mormons with pipe bombs, was caught by police and is serving life in jail. Murder Among the Mormons is gripping stuff if you don’t know the story.

The troubling history of Mormonism

Thursday

25 Mar 2021
Holy Smoke
The mystery of Pope Francis’s infallibly good taste in classical music
34 min listen

In this week's Holy Smoke podcast I suggest that Pope Francis has a more profound appreciation of classical music than any of his predecessors. I've been saying this for years and everyone assumes that it’s a wind-up or that I'm confusing him with Benedict XVI. Not so. The Pope doesn't just enjoy listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner: he has strong views on the best recordings of their work, and very sound views they are too. You'll have to listen to the podcast to hear the details, but here's a taster: Francis not only recognises Wilhelm Furtwängler as the supreme interpreter of Wagner's Ring cycle, but he asserts the superiority of the live 1950 La Scala recordings to those taped for Italian radio in 1953.

The mystery of Pope Francis’s infallibly good taste in classical music

Wednesday

10 Mar 2021
Holy Smoke
Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus?
44 min listen

Is Dr Jordan Peterson about to convert to Christianity? If so, it’s a big deal. The earnest but sardonic Canadian psychologist is already the most effective advocate for the moral precepts of Christianity in the English-speaking media. But, until now, his penetrating exposition of the Bible has been inspired more by Jungian symbolism than by actual religious belief. That may be about to change, albeit not in the happiest of circumstances. In recent months Peterson has suffered from a combination of medical conditions that have left him in wretched pain, both physical and psychological. This has left him wondering whether it’s time to submit to the dogmatic assertions of orthodox Christianity. He explains his complex reasoning in an extraordinary podcast, in which he presents himself to his friend Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, as something close to a broken man.

Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus?

Tuesday

2 Mar 2021
Holy Smoke
The Pope’s China deal is falling apart. Why should any persecuted Christians trust him?
18 min listen

Beijing's new rules for clergy of all religions in China have been published in English – and, disastrously for the Vatican, they make no mention of any role for Pope Francis in approving the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops. So it looks as if the Vatican's secret deal with China, which gave the Pope nominal spiritual sovereignty over party stooges operating as bishops, is dead in the water. President Xi appears to have reneged on the agreement – having achieved his aim of breaking the back of the underground Catholic Church in China. Reports of the debacle have come at a very inconvenient moment for the Pope, who this week is planning to visit persecuted Christians in Iraq. My guest this week is Fr Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasrean.

The Pope’s China deal is falling apart. Why should any persecuted Christians trust him?

Friday

19 Feb 2021
Holy Smoke
Can the United States be transported back to Christendom?
26 min listen

This week's Holy Smoke examines the fragmentation of American Catholicism following the election of pro-choice Catholic Joe Biden. It focuses on the strangest current of thought among the many conservative Catholics calling for an urgent change of approach in order to confront what promises to be an authoritarian liberal administration. It's called integralism, a label previously attached to distinctly un-American European Catholic reactionaries such as Action française and General Franco's Falangists. In its US incarnation it's less nationalist but in some ways equally extreme. Its proponents want to turn the United States into a nation in which, in the long run, only Catholics will be full citizens eligible to hold office.

Can the United States be transported back to Christendom?

Thursday

28 Jan 2021
Holy Smoke
How the Vatican tried to suppress criticism of the new president
28 min listen

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the ambitious left-wing archbishop of Chicago, must have imagined that Joe Biden's inauguration last week would be a moment to savour. He and a small number of his liberal colleagues, known as 'the Biden bishops', have been working tremendously hard to make sure that, once their candidate was elected, any mention of his radical support for abortion would be sotto voce and preferably inaudible. They thought they'd succeeded.But then things went spectacularly wrong. The president of the US bishops' conference, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, drafted a statement on behalf of his colleagues that not only mentioned Biden's pro-choice activism but also drew attention to the fact that the new administration planned to remove certain legal protections or 'conscience rights' from Americans who won't participate in abortions or other affronts to their traditional morality.

How the Vatican tried to suppress criticism of the new president

Wednesday

20 Jan 2021
Holy Smoke
The death of the English parish – and the politics that killed it
27 min listen

The English parish has been a source of spiritual consolation, and a certain amount of social comedy, for more than 1,000 years. So it's very old – and, it turns out, frighteningly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Countless parish churches, both Anglican and Catholic, will quietly shut their doors forever over the next few months. Bishops will blame Covid-19, but they bear a heavy responsibility for the fragile state of parish life before it was hit by the epidemic. In this episode of Holy Smoke, former Church of England vicar Dr Gavin Ashenden tells us what it was like running a parish, and reveals his strategies for dealing with difficult personalities in the congregation, some of whom really did resemble the stereotypes of British sitcoms.

The death of the English parish – and the politics that killed it

Thursday

14 Jan 2021
Alfred Brendel the Dadaist

How many people are celebrating the fact that, last week, one of Europe’s most inspired writers about music, modern art and aesthetics celebrated his 90th birthday? The answer is relatively few, which might seem surprising. He is a world-renowned authority on the grotesque and the absurd — territory through which he darts mischievously in his poems, originally composed in his native German. But you have to turn to his essays written in English to experience his refined sarcasm, which is either delicious or mortifying, depending on whether you feel incriminated by his strictures against intellectual laziness. He is quirky and rigorous — a combination associated with his beloved Dada, a movement I’d written off as an embarrassment until I read his dazzling essay on the subject in the New York Review of Books.

Alfred Brendel the Dadaist

Wednesday

13 Jan 2021
Holy Smoke
The problem of paranoia on the Catholic Right
25 min listen

Every day there’s some sort conspiracy theory being aired by right-wing Catholics on social media involving the globalist agenda of the Pope’s UN/Chinese/Masonic/Soros foundation puppet-masters. No surprise, perhaps, given the fervour with which the Pope promotes a globalist agenda while his diplomats kowtow to Beijing. Some left-wing Catholics are into the conspiracy business, too: in their imaginations it’s the feisty conservative broadcaster EWTN taking the role of the Soros Foundation.Catholic pundits with furious views have become a major headache for the Vatican – one it richly deserves, you might think, given what Cardinal George Pell describes as the ’Technicolour corruption’ lurking in the Curia, most of which goes unreported by a tame Vatican press corps.

The problem of paranoia on the Catholic Right

Wednesday

23 Dec 2020
Holy Smoke
Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
46 min listen

Rarely has a religious culture collapsed more rapidly than that of Catholic Ireland, which just 30 years ago seemed indestructible. Incredibly, it looks as if the Irish Church will have ordained more bishops than priests in 2020. It goes without saying that the Irish abuse crisis has hugely accelerated the process of secularisation in what was once the most Catholic of countries. Young people in Ireland now refer to the clergy with a withering disdain verging on hatred. My guest today, the celebrated Irish journalist, broadcaster and playwright Mary Kenny, offers a more nuanced analysis of the powerful and paradoxical world in which she grew up: one in which Catholic clergy and lay people could be simultaneously fervently pious, warm-hearted and yet paralysed by petty snobbery.

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland

Thursday

17 Dec 2020
Holy Smoke
Beethoven’s spirituality: a conversation with Sir James MacMillan
34 min listen

It's the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven – in my opinion, the greatest creative genius in history and a man of extraordinary moral courage. In this episode of Holy Smoke, I'm joined by his fellow composer Sir James MacMillan to discuss a side of Beethoven that the postmodern artistic establishment prefers to ignore: his unwavering faith in God and the surprisingly strict morality that arose from it. One of the questions I ask Sir James is whether Beethoven was really a Catholic. His answer is a resounding yes. He may not have gone to Mass very often, but before he died he asked to see a priest and during years of intense suffering composed one of the greatest of all settings of the liturgy, the Missa Solemnis.

Beethoven’s spirituality: a conversation with Sir James MacMillan

Wednesday

25 Nov 2020
Holy Smoke
Should devout Christians be scared of a Joe Biden presidency?
17 min listen

The next president of the United States is, we are told, a devout Catholic who scrupulously attends Sunday Mass. This is in sharp contrast to the current president, who has never been more than an occasional churchgoer with, to put it politely, ill-defined religious views. So why are many Christians worried that a Joe Biden presidency poses an unprecedented threat to America’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom?  In this episode of Holy Smoke I talk to Andrea Picciotti Bayer, director of the Washington-based Conscience Project, about the continuing ideological assault by US officialdom on religious believers whose passionately held convictions challenge the closest thing the 21st-century United States has to an official creed – identity politics.

Should devout Christians be scared of a Joe Biden presidency?

Saturday

14 Nov 2020

Tuesday

3 Nov 2020
Holy Smoke
‘If necessary I’ll be arrested’: the lockdown defying priest
20 min listen

Has there been a single Covid death as a result of someone attending a socially distanced church service? The answer is no, as you'd expect it to be. But, despite this, the Government will ban public acts of worship from Thursday. This decision is so perverse that even the Catholic bishops of England and Wales – who fell over each other during the last lockdown in their eagerness to shut churches – have written to the government asking for the scientific evidence indicating that properly supervised Masses pose a threat to the people attending them. So far they haven't received the courtesy of a reply, probably because there is no evidence.In this episode of Holy Smoke, Fr David Palmer, a Catholic priest from Nottingham, tells me that his church will be open this Sunday, cleverly exploiting a loophole in the government guidelines.

‘If necessary I’ll be arrested’: the lockdown defying priest

Friday

23 Oct 2020
Holy Smoke
While other charities virtue-signal, here’s one that transforms lives: Team Domenica
19 min listen

Ask yourself: who are the most vulnerable and marginalised people in British society? My answer would be young adults suffering from learning disabilities, who attract sympathy when they are children but, once they enter their 20s, simply drop off the map of public consciousness The consequences of this are dreadful: 95 per cent of them are unemployed. But four years ago that situation began to change, when Rosa Monckton founded Team Domenica, named after her daughter, now aged 25, who has Down's syndrome. Domenica was the last godchild of Diana Princess of Wales, who was a close friend of Rosa's. The two women mixed in the same exclusive social circles: Rosa was the Chief Executive of Tiffany, no less, and I remember first meeting her there at an impossibly smart party in their Bond Street store at some point in the 1990s.

While other charities virtue-signal, here’s one that transforms lives: Team Domenica

Thursday

8 Oct 2020
Why did Balakirev’s beautiful, inventive works go out of fashion?

Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served. How had it died? Balakirev — mentor of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and regarded as the founder of the Russian nationalist school of music — would want to know. If the fish had perished on a hook, then he wouldn’t touch it. But if it had been clubbed on the head, fine. The many eccentricities of Balakirev (1837–1910) were regarded with amusement, horror and dismay by his contemporaries. Though, to be fair, the fish thing wasn’t a mad obsession of his own. Formerly an atheist, in his thirties he converted to an ultra-strict Russian Orthodox sect with firm views on the proper way to kill fish. Unfortunately this wasn’t the only subject on which it was inflexible.

Why did Balakirev’s beautiful, inventive works go out of fashion?
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