Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator

Today

8 Oct 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

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?

Tuesday

6 Oct 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

The sinister Vatican plot against Cardinal Pell

Cardinal George Pell isn’t the sort of man to say ‘so there is a God after all!’ – but plenty of his long-time supporters must be thinking exactly that right now. It was always baffling that until earlier this year Pell seemed certain to die in an Australian jail on the basis of obviously fabricated sex abuse charges. How could a second jury – the first was split– find him unanimously guilty of abusing a teenage altar server in a busy cathedral right after Sunday Mass when he didn’t have either time or the opportunity to commit such a gross act? And on the basis of the testimony of one accuser, his supposed victim? (Another boy had also claimed to have been abused, but confessed that it was a lie before his tragically early death.

The sinister Vatican plot against Cardinal Pell

Tuesday

29 Sep 2020
Holy Smoke

The humiliation of Becciu and the return of Pell: what lies behind this spectacular reversal of fortunes at the Vatican?

24 min listen

The Vatican is this week in the grip of a paranoia reminiscent of the days when Renaissance popes (and their dinner guests) were forced to employ food-tasters. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, until 2018 the sostituto at the Secretariat of State – that is, the Pope's hugely powerful chief of staff – has been sacked by Francis, who has accused him of stealing vast amounts of money. It's now a matter of record that Becciu organised a series of bizarre investments, costing the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars, in a former Harrods warehouse converted into luxury flats and an African oil company. The Pope, who once showered him with favours, stripped Becciu of all the privileges associated with the position of cardinal – a twist of the knife worthy of a Netflix drama, or perhaps one of the Godfather films.

The humiliation of Becciu and the return of Pell: what lies behind this spectacular reversal of fortunes at the Vatican?

Thursday

24 Sep 2020
Holy Smoke

Is it time for Christianity to go underground?

38 min listen

Boris Johnson's package of Covid restrictions announced this week included a rule that weddings will be limited to 15 people and funerals to 30 – numbers plucked out of thin air that will have questionable effect on the transmission of the virus. You might think that a ruling that affects only weddings and funerals isn't such a big deal for the churches, but that is to underestimate the fanatical zeal of their leaders for implementing, and expanding, restrictions on their own worship. The control-freak Archbishop of Canterbury, predictably, seemed quite thrilled by the government's intervention. My own reaction, informed by conversations with many clergy outraged by their bishops' baffling willingness to accept any curtailment of church life, was to wonder whether some Christians will be forced to 'go underground' – that is, find a way of worshipping that quietly disobeys their own leaders.

Is it time for Christianity to go underground?

Monday

14 Sep 2020

Saturday

29 Aug 2020

Friday

7 Aug 2020
Holy Smoke

The Vatican’s sinister deal with Beijing

24 min listen

Next month, the Vatican will talk to Beijing about renewing its 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist Party that effectively allowed President Xi to choose the country's Catholic bishops. He has used this power to force Catholics loyal to Rome to join the puppet Catholic church set up by Chairman Mao in the 1950s. They can no longer refuse on the grounds that they recognise only the Pope's Church because Francis himself has validated the orders of Xi's party stooges.  But the Holy Father has done more than that: he has ostentatiously failed to condemn China's savage assaults on human rights, the worst of which is its attempt to eradicate the country's Muslim Uyghurs ethnic minority by herding them into concentration camps and forcing Uighur women to have abortions.

The Vatican’s sinister deal with Beijing

Friday

17 Jul 2020
Holy Smoke

Why the new Archbishop of York will lead the Church of England even further into the lunacy of wokeness

32 min listen

The Church of England has a new Archbishop of York and a problem on its hands. Or to be more accurate, the problem it already had – senior bishops who speak entirely in progressive jargon – has just got infinitely worse. Archbishop Stephen Cottrell made the headlines even before he was enthroned last week, when he ‘revealed’ that Jesus was black. This came as news to everyone except the far left, race-baiting fanatics of Black Lives Matter, who enjoy dabbling in bizarre ‘Afrocentric’ history. Perhaps Cottrell picked up the idea from them: he seems completely obsessed with racism, especially of the imaginary variety that supposedly poisons the Church of England. In this week’s Holy Smoke podcast I talk to Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, about the implications of this disastrous appointment, which means that for the first time in the history of the Established Church the sees of Canterbury, York and London are all occupied by intellectually challenged bureaucrats with an adolescent enthusiasm for wokeness.

Why the new Archbishop of York will lead the Church of England even further into the lunacy of wokeness

Thursday

16 Jul 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas were his musical laboratory – here are the best recordings

If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man could write the hummable, easy-listening Septet of 1799 and the scraped dissonances of the 1825 Grosse Fuge, which even today scares Classic FM listeners. It’s the 32 sonatas, not the nine symphonies or 16 string quartets, that join the dots. The symphonies are monuments rather than a guidebook. For example, the Second doesn’t warn you that the Eroica is about to explode in your face. The quartets, meanwhile, jump from the six of Opus 18, in which Beethoven essentially pours new wine into old bottles, to the three Razumovskys of Opus 59, by which time he has moved to another planet. In fact, only seven years separate the two groups of quartets; the change in Beethoven’s musical language seems bewildering unless you know the 13 piano sonatas he published between 1799 and 1806, in which he’s clearly planning to launch into space.

Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas were his musical laboratory – here are the best recordings

Tuesday

7 Jul 2020
Holy Smoke

The next pope: are we facing the nightmare of a Parolin pontificate?

31 min listen

Vatican officials are anxious to get their hands on an advance copy of The Next Pope, a survey of 19 leading contenders to succeed Pope Francis scheduled for publication next month. The author, Edward Pentin, discusses these papable cardinals in today's episode of Holy Smoke. The full list is still under wraps, but inevitably we talk about Cardinal Robert Sarah, the African-born apocalyptic visionary whom liberals most fear. (If you doubt that, read this despicable and semi-literate hatchet job on Sarah by Christopher Lamb in The Tablet.) Equally inevitably, we talk about the charismatic and ambitious Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, formerly Archbishop of Manila and now one of Francis's main allies in the Vatican. But the candidate I was most anxious to ask Edward about is Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who as Secretary of State negotiated the secret and sinister pact with China, staged a coup d'état against the Order of Malta and now faces urgent questions about corrupt property deals.

The next pope: are we facing the nightmare of a Parolin pontificate?

Friday

26 Jun 2020
Holy Smoke

Black Lives Matter: the deadly combination of violent activism and thought police

18 min listen

In the current episode of Holy Smoke, my guest Professor Richard Landes – a historian specialising in apocalyptic movements – explains what is so clever, and so dangerous, about the modus operandi of Black Lives Matter.As he says, it allows people to indulge their own fantasies, even if their visions of the future are incompatible. So millennials, encouraged by intellectually lazy politicians, business leaders and churchmen, can persuade themselves that the toppling of statues will clear space for a multiracial utopia. The far-left thugs of Antifa, meanwhile, can fantasise (more plausibly, alas) about the collapse of capitalist society. And a new generation of black activists can develop their nebulous but unmistakably racist concept of 'Blackness' as an identity that bestows special wisdom on people of a certain skin colour.

Black Lives Matter: the deadly combination of violent activism and thought police

Friday

19 Jun 2020
Holy Smoke

Suicide by secularisation: how the churches are dying

31 min listen

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 is only this year, during the coronavirus pandemic, that we’ve seen just how corrupted church leaders have become by secularisation. The need to close churches for public worship during the lockdown meant that, for the first time in many decades, Anglican and Catholic bishops were able to exercise a small but significant degree of secular power – something they desperately crave. In doing so, they displayed a mixture of ruthlessness, vanity, hypocrisy and stupidity that will accelerate the decline of their own institutions. This episode will tell you things that bishops – in Rome and America as well as Britain – are anxious to conceal from their flocks.

Suicide by secularisation: how the churches are dying

Friday

22 May 2020
Holy Smoke

American Christianity will recover from the virus, but English churches are in big trouble

23 min listen

When the shadow of the coronavirus is finally lifted, the British public will have a long list of people to thank: doctors, nurses, cleaners, shop assistants, charities and – maybe – Boris Johnson. But there won’t be a round of applause for the parish clergy, that’s for sure, and it's not really their fault: the bishops, especially the Catholic ones, have mishandled the Covid crisis spectacularly.One might have guessed as much. For years, the two main churches have been in the hands of mildly spiritual middle-managers who have somehow managed to acquire mitres.And in the United States? To be sure, there are bishops and pastors who, like the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, form a Mafia of the Mediocre. But there is dynamism, too, and it’s interesting to note the extent to which successful Catholic and Protestant parishes share a common culture.

American Christianity will recover from the virus, but English churches are in big trouble

Wednesday

13 May 2020
Holy Smoke

Is this the dawn of a new totalitarianism?

20 min listen

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the strange and unstable world created by digital technology: one in which distinguishing between truth and falsehood is becoming almost impossible. It’s a follow-up to an article I wrote in The Spectator last week in which I argued that, trapped between populist conspiracy theories and liberal media bias, and confronted by thousands of sources of dubious information on YouTube, people are discovering that ’the more we know, the less we know’.This is the environment in which the churches are trying to survive – and failing miserably, because they don’t understand the Internet and don't know how to talk to people. But this episode is more about civil society than religion. My guest is the American journalist and businessman Robert Wargas, who lives in Washington and has experience of both the ‘elite liberal bubble’ and DC’s Catholic conservative bubble.

Is this the dawn of a new totalitarianism?

Thursday

7 May 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’. Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in our midst, producing a pandemic of counterknowledge.

Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Holy Smoke

Have the churches been betrayed by their bishops?

23 min listen

Last week I was sent a copy of a devastating 7,000-word letter accusing the Catholic bishops of England and Wales of grossly mishandling the coronavirus crisis by lobbying the government for a complete shutdown of their own churches, even for private prayer. The author called herself (or, more than likely, himself) ‘Fiona McDonald’ – and used a heavily encrypted email service in order to avoid being tracked down. McDonald claimed that the bureaucrats of the Bishops’ Conference were sending out misleading and even untruthful messages about the church lockdown, claiming that it was forced on them by the government. It quoted a letter from Richard Moth, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, which contradicted this. Writing to his priests, Bishop Moth reported that ministers only agreed to the blanket closure of churches after Jim McManus, the Catholic bishops’ healthcare adviser, begged them to do so.

Have the churches been betrayed by their bishops?

Saturday

11 Apr 2020
Holy Smoke

My sister has cancer - here’s her recipe for enjoying life in lockdown

32 min listen

In this week’s episode of Holy Smoke, I get to interview my personal heroine – my younger sister, Carmel Thompson. She was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer in November 2018. She’s now undergoing a second round of chemotherapy after coming out of remission. And she’s enjoying life. In our conversation she explains how the Coronavirus pandemic presents us with an opportunity to treasure the simple things in life – a lesson she learned the (very) hard way. She also talks about the two women saints who have given her strength – the ‘two Theresas’, St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Teresa of Avila. The drawing above is by the phenomenal Brazilian artist Ritchelly Oliveira (check out his Instagram account). It captures her indomitable spirit to perfection – though, in fact, it was drawn from a photograph of Carmel waiting impatiently for her brother to come out of a vape shop.

My sister has cancer - here’s her recipe for enjoying life in lockdown

Tuesday

7 Apr 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

Cardinal George Pell is the victim of a shameful miscarriage of justice

The High Court of Australia has unanimously overturned the conviction of Cardinal George Pell for alleged acts of child sex abuse that could not possibly have taken place. He has been acquitted and the prosecution cannot appeal. The 78-year-old cardinal, formerly head of the Vatican’s finances, now emerges in his true colours: as a Christian of heroic fortitude who was the victim of one of the most despicable miscarriages of justice in the history of Australia. For the past five years, Catholics and countless impartial observers all over the world have watched in horror as Pell was accused by the State of Victoria and then convicted on the basis of evidence riddled with implausibilities and impossibilities. This week’s High Court’s ruling could not be clearer.

Cardinal George Pell is the victim of a shameful miscarriage of justice

Friday

3 Apr 2020
Holy Smoke

Unlock the churches!

26 min listen

Harry Mount, the editor of The Oldie, is appalled that thanks to the coronavirus regulations, he can't seek spiritual comfort in any of Britain's glorious churches. And he's not a religious believer. Last week he wrote a short but withering piece on his magazine's website, with the headline 'Unlock the churches!' It began: At a time of national crisis, if only there were some big, empty buildings where people could go and reflect, in an atmosphere of beauty and calm. If only they were so big that you would automatically practise social distancing because there are so many chairs and so few people.Oh, hang on! Like magic, these buildings do exist in every village, town and city in the country. They're called churches – and yet both the Anglican and Catholic Churches have, in their infinite wisdom, closed them down.

Unlock the churches!

Thursday

26 Mar 2020
Holy Smoke

Beethoven’s victory over sickness and fear

21 min listen

This week's Holy Smoke podcast is a celebration of what must surely be the most inspiring piece of music ever written by a sick man recovering from illness – the slow movement of Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 132, which he entitled 'A Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity by a Convalescent'. The relevance of this sublime music hardly needs spelling out. But what makes this episode particularly special is that, when they learned of the plans for the podcast, a brilliant young string quartet based in Kansas City, which calls itself The Opus 76 String Quartet, offered to record it for us. And that's what they did, without charging a fee, in the lovely acoustic of Visitation Parish Church just before it closed its doors because of the virus.

Beethoven’s victory over sickness and fear

Tuesday

17 Mar 2020
Holy Smoke

As we confront mortality, why do our bishops have so little to say?

29 min listen

Do you sense that something is missing in the churches' response to the coronavirus? No one can fault them for ignoring the dangers of spreading the virus: bishop after bishop has taken the difficult decision to suspend public worship, and offered sensible advice about precautionary measures their flocks can take. And, in many cases, that's about it. Indeed, many church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, sound more like health and safety officers than the successors to the apostles.In this week's Holy Smoke episode, Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, argues that the bishop's attitude of 'wash your hands and be nice' reflects the churches' polite surrender to secularisation – but suggests that ordinary believers now have the opportunity to show the public what Christianity really looks like.

As we confront mortality, why do our bishops have so little to say?

Monday

9 Mar 2020
Holy Smoke

Has the Vatican become a mouthpiece for Beijing?

20 min listen

Last week, Pope Francis sent a message to Chinese Christians urging them to be 'true Christians and good citizens'. He didn't mention the growing persecution they face under President Xi's programme of sinicisation, despite the Vatican-China deal of 2018 under which Francis recognised China's puppet Catholic Church in return for state tolerance of 'underground' Catholics faithful to Rome.Conveniently for both sides, the text of the deal has never been made public. Essentially, the Pope kept his part of the deal while Xi has used it to try to force together the official and unofficial Chinese Catholic Churches under the umbrella of – it goes without saying – the Chinese Communist Party.In this week's Holy Smoke episode, I'm joined by regular contributor Ed Condon, Washington bureau chief of the Catholic New Agency.

Has the Vatican become a mouthpiece for Beijing?

Friday

28 Feb 2020

Tuesday

25 Feb 2020

Wednesday

12 Feb 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

The Pope rebuffs his liberal supporters by rejecting married priests

Pope Francis today issued his official response to October’s ‘Amazon Synod’, which discussed a plan to ordain married men in the region. He was expected to endorse it and thus open the door for the ordination of married men throughout the whole Catholic Church. (It’s already permitted in Eastern-rite Churches.) Instead, his apostolic exhortation ignores the subject. The Pope has ‘rejected the proposal’, reports CNN disapprovingly. It adds: ‘The lack of an opening for married priests, or women deacons, is expected to disappoint the Pope’s liberal supporters, particularly in the Americas and Europe.“People are starting to adjust their expectations,” said Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

The Pope rebuffs his liberal supporters by rejecting married priests

Monday

10 Feb 2020

Wednesday

29 Jan 2020
Damian Thompson
Damian Thompson

Westminster Cathedral’s musical heritage is under threat

The Catholic diocese of Westminster announced last week that it is holding 'a strategic review of the role of sacred music in the mission of Westminster Cathedral'. It didn't add: 'because our master of music has walked out in despair, after warning that recent changes to the choir will ruin its sound'. But that is the situation and I suspect the purpose of the review is to extract Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, from the hole he has helped dig for himself. It's a nightmare for Nichols because Westminster owns what you might call the Berlin Philharmonic of Catholic choirs. And even that doesn't do its reputation justice, because there are many orchestras that can claim to be as fine as the Berlin Phil, but very few choirs that can compete with Westminster Cathedral's.

Westminster Cathedral’s musical heritage is under threat

Friday

10 Jan 2020
Useful links
More from The Spectator
About us
Subscribe
Useful links
About us
More from The Spectator
Subscribe