Damian Thompson | The Spectator columnists & writers

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.

Holy Smoke

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

34 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus?

44 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

18 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Can the United States be transported back to Christendom?

26 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

How the Vatican tried to suppress criticism of the new president

28 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

27 min listen

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.

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.

Holy Smoke

The problem of paranoia on the Catholic Right

25 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland

46 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Beethoven’s spirituality: a conversation with Sir James MacMillan

34 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Should devout Christians be scared of a Joe Biden presidency?

17 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Why the fantasy narrative of the Vatican’s McCarrick report is already falling apart

16 min listen

Holy Smoke

Why the fantasy narrative of the Vatican’s McCarrick report is already falling apart

16 min listen

In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson says the Vatican's report on allegations of sexual assault by Theodore McCarrick is a whitewash.

Holy Smoke

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

20 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

19 min listen

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.

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.

Holy Smoke

Is Pope Francis’s Vatican turning into Richard Nixon’s White House?

11 min listen

Holy Smoke

Is Pope Francis’s Vatican turning into Richard Nixon’s White House?

11 min listen

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.

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

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.

Holy Smoke

Is it time for Christianity to go underground?

38 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Westminster Cathedral and an act of spiritual vandalism

17 min listen

Holy Smoke

Westminster Cathedral and an act of spiritual vandalism

17 min listen

Damian Thompson is joined by Dr Gavin Ashenden, regular Holy Smoke contributor, former chaplain to the Queen and former boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. Damian considers the ongoing row in Westminster Cathedral over a small number of new admissions, and asks why the quality of its music has declined in recent years.

Holy Smoke

Are the Habsburgs evidence of Catholicism’s relevance today?

30 min listen

Holy Smoke

Are the Habsburgs evidence of Catholicism’s relevance today?

30 min listen

Damian Thompson is joined by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary's ambassador to the Holy See. A member of one of Europe's most historically influential families, Eduard explains how his religious practices have adapted to the acceleration of new technologies, and tells Damian how the Habsburgs keep in contact.

Holy Smoke

The Vatican’s sinister deal with Beijing

24 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

32 min listen

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.

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.

Holy Smoke

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

31 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

18 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

Suicide by secularisation: how the churches are dying

31 min listen

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.

Holy Smoke

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

23 min listen

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.