This month marks 800 years since Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone died at the Porziuncola, on the plain below Assisi, on the evening of 3 October 1226. He was about 44, blind, stigmatized and completely worn out. Kenneth Clark, in the third episode of Civilisation, called him a religious genius, “the greatest, I believe, that Europe has ever produced”. What was the genius?

Not doctrine. Francis had almost none, and what he had he got from hearing the Gospel read aloud and taking it literally, which is the one thing the Church has never wanted anyone to do. It was a position on property. The Franciscan Rule of 1223 puts it in a sentence: “Let the brothers not make anything their own, neither house, nor place, nor anything at all.” They are to go through the world “as pilgrims and strangers”, and they are forbidden money in any form. In his “Testament”, dictated in his last weeks, Francis added that the Rule was to be understood “simply and without gloss”, which is to say: do not let the canon lawyers near it.

The distinction the Franciscans drew, and had to keep drawing for a century, was between use and ownership: usus and dominium. A friar eats bread, wears a tunic, sleeps under a roof, but owns none of them. He has, as the theologians put it, the bare use of the thing, usus facti, while every right of property is renounced. The argument reached back way beyond Roman law to Eden, where all things were held common and nothing belonged to anyone. Ownership entered the world with the Fall. To live without property was therefore not a penance but a return: it was to live as human beings had been made to live.

The position was there before the doctrine. In 1206, in the piazza in front of the bishop of Assisi, with his father, a cloth merchant, demanding his money back, the young Francis took off his clothes, folded them, handed them over and walked away naked. There was no Rule yet. The gesture was the Rule.

This is an extremely radical position. It is communism before the word, or anarchism, or both at once, though without a program, a party or the smallest wish to seize anything, since seizing was the whole problem. It was also, as the Church immediately saw, good for business. The friars were mobile, poor, eloquent and wildly popular, and a movement like that is either contained or burned at the stake. Francis was contained. 

The Church took the celebrity and quietly dropped the message. Francis was canonized within two years of his death and the basilica was built in his memory. The Order, meanwhile, was flooded with educated recruits who wanted books, and with gifts of land and buildings from patrons who wanted to be buried in them. By the time the first generation of friars had died, the Order had tens of thousands of members and no longer resembled the man who founded it. It even rewrote him. In 1263 Bonaventure produced the official life of Francis, and in 1266 the Order ordered every earlier life destroyed.

What followed was a hundred years of argument about a single question, and it is worth being clear about the question, because people were killed over it. If the friars own nothing, how do they have libraries, churches, granaries, and a basilica? Two parties formed inside the Order. The majority, later called the Conventuals, were content to let the buildings be held for them by intermediaries, so that the friars used what they technically did not own. The minority, the Spirituals, said this was a lawyer’s trick: the Rule meant poor use, not just use without title, and a friar in a stone convent with a library was no poorer than a bishop. 

The Church kept trying to close the question. In 1230, four years after Francis’s death, Gregory IX ruled that the “Testament”, the deathbed text with its plea for no gloss, was not binding on the Order; the friars were to follow the Rule as the Pope read it, not the founder’s last words. In 1279 Nicholas III settled the ownership problem with an elegant fiction: everything the friars used, down to the bread in their mouths, belonged to the papacy, which held it on their behalf, so the friars had use and the Pope had title. He then forbade anyone to discuss the matter further. They discussed it for another 50 years.

John XXII, a canon jurist with a lawyer’s patience for paradox and love of equivocation, ended the game, in two moves. First he dealt with the Spirituals. In 1317 he ordered them to accept granaries, cellars and ordinary habits like everyone else. Those who refused were handed to the Inquisition as disobedient, which in that world meant heretical, and in May 1318 four of them were burned at Marseille. Then he dealt with the doctrine. In 1322 he renounced the papal fiction of ownership and handed the property back, so that the friars now owned what they used whether they liked it or not, and he made the point that the whole distinction was unreal: when you eat the bread there is no bread left, and a use that destroys the thing is indistinguishable from owning it. 

In 1323 he went for the root. It was declared heresy to say that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing. The whole Franciscan case rested on that claim: if Christ had had property, then poverty was not the imitation of Christ but a private eccentricity. The head of the Order, Michael of Cesena, refused to accept it and in 1328 fled from the papal court at Avignon to the protection of the Emperor, taking the philosopher William of Ockham with him. Both died as excommunicates. The rest of the Order became what it has been ever since: an institution, with houses. This is the world of The Name of the Rose, which Umberto Eco set in 1327 for a reason.

In The Highest Poverty, Giorgio Agamben argues that the Franciscans lost because they fought on the wrong ground. They let poverty be defined juridically, as the negation of a right, and so were always one bull away from refutation. What Francis had actually invented, Agamben thinks, was not a legal doctrine but a form of life, in which one does not apply a rule to a life but lives so that the living produces the rule. The naked man in the piazza is not obeying anything.

More from this author

Harry and Meghan cannot escape their fate

By Simon Critchley

And while the message was being glossed away, the monument kept going up. Each decade of the argument added another layer: the Lower Church in the 1230s, the Upper Church above it, Cimabue in the 1280s, Giotto’s cycle of the saint’s life in the 1290s, so that by the time the Spirituals were burning at Marseille the poor man of Assisi had the most richly painted interior in Italy. Brother Elias, who ran the Order after Francis and had a genius of a different sort, had raised the money and hired the builders. He also hid Francis’s body, so thoroughly that it was not found again until 1818. For nearly six centuries the most visited saint in Christendom was celebrated in a basilica that had, in effect, lost him. The church is a betrayal, of course, but I am glad of it; I would not want a world without the Giotto frescoes. But the contradiction is exact. Francis owned nothing. In death, he became the Order’s principal asset.

At least one person saw the building for what it was: Angela of Foligno, an illiterate widow from a dozen miles down the road. The most wonderfully extreme of all the mystics went on pilgrimage to Assisi in 1291 and, at the door of the basilica, fell down and began to scream, asking love why it had abandoned her. Her confessor, Brother Arnaldo of the Friars Minor, was mortified and told her never to come back. He then spent years writing down everything she said. She was canonized in 2013, by a pope who had just taken the name Francis. Angela did not dispute the Rule. She screamed at the door.

What, then, is a saint? Not a good person; there are plenty of those and no one builds them churches. Not a hero either, who acts, wins and is remembered for the act. A saint is someone whose life has become a form, legible enough that others can live inside it. The saint is the answer to the question “how should I live?” given not as a self-help book but as a being of flesh and blood. This is why saints have bodies and why the bodies matter. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that, for all the fame of his stigmata, Francis is one of only two men in the history of the Church to have claimed all five visible wounds of Christ. The saint’s flesh is a text, and an argument.

It is also why the lives of the saints were, for something like a thousand years, the most read books in Europe after the Bible. The Golden Legend, a Dominican friar’s compendium of saints’ lives arranged by the feast days of the year, compiled around 1260 and read aloud in churches and households across Europe, survives in more manuscripts than almost any other medieval book. Remember what the Order did to the earlier lives of Francis in 1266. It tells you what a saint’s life is for: it is not a record but an instrument, endlessly revised, and the revisions are where the authority lies. Nobody read the Golden Legend for information. They read it the way we read biographies of musicians: to find out whether a certain kind of life could be lived, and what it cost.

What do saints do, then? They demonstrate. They show that a form of existence everybody had agreed was impossible, living without possessions, without violence, without fear of death, is possible, because here is someone doing it, badly fed and in a filthy tunic, on the plain below Assisi. The demonstration does not require that you follow; most readers of the Golden Legend kept their houses. But it changes what the word “impossible” means.

I do not know what to do with the end-times feeling that has settled on everything, the sense that the systems we live inside are at once all-powerful and coming apart, that the weather is wrong and the politics worse and the machines have learned to talk and are about to wipe us out. But the feeling is proprietary. It is the panic of people who own things, or who thought they did, watching their title deeds dissolve: to land, to a future, to their own attention. Francis’s answer to a world that was passing away was not to save it. It was to stop claiming it. Use it, care for it, sing to it (his “Canticle of the Creatures” is the first great poem in Italian, and it is a poem about not owning the sun) and hold none of it as yours. There is a politics in that which neither Left nor Right can presently say aloud, since both are, in the end, arguments about who gets the property.

Who is the Francis of this moment? The honest answer is that you would not be told. Saints are recognized late, usually after they are safely dead, by the institution that spent their lifetime trying to gloss them. The last man to take the name, and to mean something by it, died in the Vatican, which is where popes die, and which is a vast piece of richly arrayed real estate. If there is a Francis now, he or she is doing something we currently regard as impossible, somewhere unimportant, quite possibly with no religion at all, without a rule anyone has written down yet, and is being ignored by exactly the people who will one day lay the foundation stone.

Here’s what fascinates me. Leo’s triumphal progress has been greeted with rather subdued delight by two opposing wings of the Church: hardline liberals and ultra-conservatives. In front of the cameras, they’re all smiles. In private, and reading between the lines of their social media comments, not so much. For different reasons, both were disconcerted by the ferocity of the Pope’s attack on France’s assisted dying law and its constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, which has led to an epidemic of “terminations” of supposedly imperfect babies. Not for nothing did Leo choose six altar servers with Down’s syndrome for his Paris Mass — a gesture more beautiful than any liturgical finery. He doubled down on this in his sermon, in which he said that deciding an embryo’s future by test result was like assisted dying; that it’s thoroughly sinister “programmed death”.

You can understand why liberal Catholics, especially American members of the Democratic Party, were uncomfortable with this. They wanted the first pope from the United States to take a swing at Trump in time for the midterms. They failed. And they wanted him to steer clear of issues such as abortion, on which even Catholic Democrat candidates defy Church teachings. But why were some hardline traditionalist Catholics so disconcerted by both Leo’s statements and the sea of humanity surging around him in France?

I emphasize that we’re only talking about a fanatical rump. Most conservative Catholics were overjoyed by the papal visit, the pro-life exhortations, and Leo’s unexpected homage to the Catholic martyrs of the French Revolution.

And yet, it was precisely these things that wrong-footed the militant “trads”. Leo had deviated from the script they have written for him. Ever since he took office, they have insisted that he’s just Francis in nicer vestments. They look away when he behaves like an old-style pope, singing the Salve Regina until he’s hoarse, or weeping when he celebrates the Eucharist. Instead, they obsess over an ancient grainy photo of the then Fr Prevost praying in front of a indigenous statue in Peru; over an environmental stunt in which he blessed a block of ice; over the continuing (if rare) cancellation of Latin Masses; and over his enthusiasm for “synodality”, which under the last pontificate was shorthand for the hijacking of the Curia by liberal control freaks.

Last weekend’s tour de force undermined the Right-wing caricature of Leo as a mediocre or even malevolent liberal nonentity. Now we can all see that it’s false. And yet even the mean-spirited trads aren’t wrong about everything. The true state of the Catholic Church is always difficult to assess, especially after a papal public relations triumph. Pope John Paul II attracted crowds of more than a million in Poland, the Philippines and Ireland, while Francis’s 2025 Mass in Manila was the largest in papal history — attended by some six million people. Even so, both pontiffs presided over a devastating crisis of morale and, in Europe, collapsing church attendance.

Suggested Reading

Retiring the ‘R-word’ — again

By Sohrab Ahmari

Do we make too much of open-air spectacles? How many bystanders cheering the Holy Father in the streets, or at a one-off mega-Mass, then sat through a service the following Sunday (as the Catholic Church demands on pain of mortal sin)? I suspect the answer would be hard to reconcile with the florid talk of “spiritual hunger” during papal visits.

The truth is complicated and unsatisfactory, if not entirely depressing. Pope Leo is hard to read. He alternates between joyful assertions of the divinity of Christ and synodal jargon that lingers like a bad smell from the Francis era. He simultaneously favors brilliant young orthodox bishops and the greasiest bureaucrats of the ancien regime. Is this any way to run a Church? Until recently it was relatively easy to make the case that the less the new American pope intervened, the sooner he could narrow the factional divide deliberately widened by his Argentinian predecessor. But Leo is no longer a new pope and, a year and a half in, his diplomacy looks increasingly like inertia.

To allow the Traditional Latin Mass to be revived in one place and crushed in another does nothing to promote unity. Likewise, it’s all very well for the Pope to insist on covering up the artwork by the accused serial nun-rapist Fr Marko Rupnik at Lourdes. But scars will not be healed while, inexcusably, the canonical proceedings against Rupnik are bogged down and he remains a priest.

Unfortunately Leo is as hard to read literally as well as metaphorically. He has just published Freedom Under Grace, a collection of his addresses to his fellow Augustinians when he was head of the order. A page-turner it ain’t, and you wouldn’t expect it to be. But it’s still a curious mixture: encouraging and discouraging in roughly equal proportions.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The former Fr Prevost was, to put it politely, politically naive. His “global south” rhetoric was supported by clumsy swipes at neoliberalism, the favored bogeyman of most Catholic clerics ordained in the Eighties. But, since his political views didn’t matter at the time, and still don’t count for much even now he’s pope, we can let that pass. More disturbing is the lack of interest in the numinous aspects of worship that Benedict XVI understood so well. I have no doubt that Leo always celebrated Mass with reverence, and once he was in Latin America there would have been no demand for the liturgical aesthetics that have nurtured the faith of young Westerners. It’s also true that now that he is pope we see fewer of the ceremonial atrocities encouraged by Francis. But decades of attachment to the mind-numbing post-Vatican II liturgical consensus are still a problem.

More from this author

Why traditionalists love the Millennial saint

By Damian Thompson

Leo thinks of the ancient Latin rite as a personal preference rather than as a source of regeneration. And so he permits fanatical liberal bishops to persecute traditionalists, while also allowing trad-friendly bishops freedom to liberate the old Mass. It’s a mess.

On the other hand, the good news found in the formulaic prose of Freedom Under Grace is more significant than those disputes over the liturgy. Robert Prevost’s faith in Jesus is as potent as that of any successor of St Peter. The book blows apart claims by conservative fundamentalists that he is a syncretist or, worse, an indifferentist who believes that all religions lead to salvation. The latter charge could be leveled at Francis, though like a true Peronist he adjusted his orthodoxy to suit his audience or his mood. This pope is unquestionably a Catholic.

Again and again Leo reminds us of, and revels in, the salvific majesty of Christ, and as we saw in France, he does this with a quiet charisma that has already converted some unbelievers. What I don’t think he can do is succeed in his self-declared mission to bring “peace to the Church”. But, sad to say, that would be asking too much of any pope.

Then came this week’s visit by Pope Leo XIV to France, which has been marked by the Bishop of Rome’s constant, special solicitude for those whom medicine once branded “retarded.” Will it spur Christians, and perhaps others, to return the R-word to the realm of taboo? And would such a social shift have any wider positive effect, besides marginally curbing the coarseness of daily language? 

Let us pray. And not just for the sake of being decent. But because in the age of AI and “agentic” machines, a culture that mocks and denigrates human frailty — that reduces worth to intelligence and agency — may soon target many people, including those who today consider themselves gifted and use the R-word with abandon.

Much has been made of the surprising resurgence of French Catholicism, amply on display in the 800,000 souls who attended the Roman pontiff’s Mass at the Place de la Concorde and the long lines of penitents waiting to pour out their troubled consciences to priests in open-air confessionals. Yet if there is a unifying theme to Leo’s French trip, which continues through Monday, it is the inviolable dignity of the vulnerable, including the elderly, the infirm, and people suffering from mental and intellectual disabilities.

More from this author

Pope Leo’s unfashionable universalism

By Sohrab Ahmari

On his way through the streets of Paris, Leo stopped the pope-mobile to bless a severely disabled girl, creating what is likely to be one of the defining images of his reign. At his Paris Mass, the altar servers included six young men with Down syndrome. And speaking at Lourdes, where an apparition of the Virgin Mary has long drawn those seeking healing beyond what medical science can achieve, Leo launched a jeremiad (in the true sense of the word) against abortion and assisted suicide. The former, selective abortion, has all but eliminated people with Down syndrome from some jurisdictions. The latter, assisted suicide and euthanasia, increasingly ensnares people with intellectual disabilities like autism.

“No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity,” the pope told the patients and their carers at Lourdes. “You are not a burden. You are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.” He added: “It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal.  What is legal is not necessarily moral.”

Defending vulnerable life is, of course, nothing new for Catholicism. The Didache — one of the earliest compilations of Church teaching, generally dated to the late first century — includes the injunction: “do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born.” In modern times, that consistent, maddeningly unbending ethic of life has occasioned some of the Church’s most morally heroic moments, even and especially amid its failures. 

In the Nazi period, for example, when too many of the German bishops kept mum about the Holocaust and otherwise failed to resist Hitler, one prelate stood tall for the cause of life. I’m speaking of the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who, on Aug. 3, 1941,  delivered a homily condemning Aktion T4, the Third Reich’s program of involuntary euthanasia targeting the physically and neurologically disabled and mentally ill. 

A massacre of the innocents was afoot, von Galen charged, “because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become ‘unworthy to live,’ because they are classed as ‘unproductive members of the national community.’ Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive?”

That productivity aspect is the heart of the problem today. In the postwar period, overt eugenics and overtly coercive euthanasia were out of the question, having been tainted by association with the Nazis. But the Church now detects the same impulses lurking under the guise of “choice” and “compassion” and the obscene phrase “death with dignity,” used to describe doctors dealing death. Scratch through such cant, the recent pontiffs have argued, and you find the same ideas: that worth lies in productive intelligence, the capacity for autonomous choice or “agentic” activity (to use today’s parlance). The distance isn’t far from that premise to the conclusion that some lives just aren’t worth keeping around. 

In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warned against a “dominant technocratic paradigm” that only finds value in “a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” People with intellectual disabilities frequently fall short of this paradigm, but so do many others. So do babies in gestation and young children. So do the elderly. And so do people undergoing chemotherapy. All of us spend great stretches of our lives in various states of vulnerability and incapacity and unproductivity.

Suggested reading

Why artists choose Catholicism

By Valerie Stivers

Which brings us to Leo XIV. The new pontiff has so far devoted the lion’s share of his teaching to the moral challenges posed by AI. He and the Church aren’t opposed to automation. On the contrary, emancipating man from “arduous, repetitive, or dangerous” labor, as his encyclical on AI put it, has long been an aspiration of classical and Christian civilization. Insofar as AI achieves this emancipation, it is to be welcomed — but not when it intrudes upon distinctly human activities or if it recasts our conception of human worth.

That last danger is already present in practices like selective abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, and is likely to be greatly magnified in the age of AI. Indeed, during his visit to France, Leo explicitly linked the two. Speaking on Friday at a gathering of UNESCO, he commented, “The paradox has become increasingly evident: while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”

A large language model can never replicate human intelligence, which, as Leo has noted, includes wisdom and other depths that are impenetrable to the machine. Yet in terms of raw computation and recall, my Claude app is already far more capable than I. Compared to it, I am a “retard.” Is it that hard to imagine a not-too-distant future in which an LLM in the employ of my insurer decides I should no longer receive medical care in light of my mental shortcomings?

Renouncing the R-word won’t forestall such a future, of course. That will take collective political action. And there are plenty of people who are perfectly polite in ordinary discourse, even as they pursue monstrous ends in politics or business. But each time we do use that word, we not only trample the dignity of some of the most defenseless people among us, but strengthen the technocratic paradigm that, left unchecked, could soon discard many or even most of us.

The Camino de Santiago is the name for over 200 recognized pilgrimage routes mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, which cover anywhere from 60 to 500 miles, though there are 12 primary paths. It is also having a cultural moment, amplified by social media and a stream of TikTok influencers. My motivation for going, however, resisted the internet entirely. I wanted to align myself with the things that really matter: to gain perspective on four chaotic years of college, to process the recent death of my dad, and to refocus before starting a full-time job in the fall. I read all the same popular websites and travel guides as the secular pilgrim, but I quickly noticed that my awareness of the spiritual dimension of the Camino’s routine was unusual. 

I began the Portuguese Way in Vigo, Spain — 15 miles north of the Portuguese border — and walked roughly 86 miles to Santiago de Compostela. I also incorporated a spiritual variant involving a boat ride up the Ulla River — because it was popular, sounded mystical, and I could find an abundance of information about it (online, of course). And I brought to the Camino the prayers and the orientation toward the divine that I had practiced back home. Each day, as my body assumed the posture of the pilgrim — struggling lungs, hinged hips, steady footfalls — this heritage came to my aid. I repeated the Jesus Prayer, a short Orthodox petition for mercy as I walked, and my footsteps joined its rhythm. My backpack bore a ceremonial shell with the sword-cross of Saint James the Apostle, a symbol of the pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, which lightened my burden, reminding me that my journey had been shared by millions throughout the ages. The repetition of the hours — wake, walk, drink an espresso, walk some more, and attend Mass in the evenings — became a kind of prayer of its own — and this habit of prayer was encouraged and reflected by the environment.

Not everyone, however, was on the same journey. The Camino has been circulating on social media in part thanks to the 2023 re-release of Emilio Estevez’s 2010 film The Way, and his concurrent announcement that he is planning a sequel. In the movie, Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, plays a grieving American father traveling to retrieve the body of his estranged son, who was killed while walking the Camino. He is joined by a crew of unlikely companions — each walking for reasons that have nothing to do with God — and ends up completing the pilgrimage himself in a journey of self-discovery. 

Suggested reading

My father went to war with a demon bird

By Ryan Zickgraf

Most of the TikToks and Instagram reels in which influencers now document their “day in the life” on the Way are in the same vein: non-religious, or not explicitly Christian. “Film for the dad lore album,” reads an Instagram caption written by Gabe Escobar, a model and content creator known for his spontaneous travel vlogs, while he stands in front of the journey’s culmination: the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. Escobar has said he’s not religious, though he is drawn to the beauty of the tradition. His daily videos detail the trials of solo hiking — trouble finding food, dehydration, foot pain, loneliness — accompanied by photos of beautiful vistas and happy smiles. 

The numbers reflect the widespread secular interest. In 2025, over 530,000 pilgrims received the Compostela, the certificate of completion given out in Santiago to pilgrims who have completed at least the last 62 miles on foot, a 6% increase from 2024. That figure is nearly ten times the figure from 25 years ago, with over a thousand pilgrims receiving the Compostela every day.

The majority of people I encountered along the Way were secular and wellness pilgrims. And it should be acknowledged that they were generous companions. In the city of Pontevedra, I shared cervezas and pimientos de Padrón with a woman named Catherine, who was willing to discuss matters of the spirit with a sincerity that would embarrass most dinner parties. She had recently quit her job and broken up with her long-term boyfriend, and felt like the Camino would help her make sense of the rupture in her life. She told me all of this within an hour of meeting. Though she was raised Catholic, she rejected the institution of the Church, and described herself as the classic “spiritual but not religious.” 

Another young guy I met at an albergue, who was traveling with his girlfriend, told me he was trying to do every route of the Camino, but that the churches themselves were “problematic” because the iconography of Saint James inside them was “Islamophobic.” He was referring to the representations of Santiago Matamoros — James the Moor-Slayer — which greet the pilgrim inside the cathedral, and in smaller churches all along the route. The apostle is depicted astride a white horse, sword raised above cowering Muslims, an image that originates in the legend of the Battle of Clavijo, in which James was said to have miraculously appeared to lead Catholic forces to victory during the Reconquista, a campaign to take back the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. It is a stark image of violence and conquest, and a sore spot for the Church today, leading some cathedrals along the Camino to remove the statues entirely. 

Doubting the legend or the relics may be chalked up to ordinary skepticism, but rejecting the images inside the church is a different kind of act. To the pilgrim making it, it is a form of moral clarity, a rejection of violence and religious triumphalism, which fits neatly with contemporary commitments to social justice. I heard such claims used as a justification for continuing to walk a route that pilgrims associated with real violence. People are walking the Way in a spirit of resistance. 

The problem, however, is not that fellow pilgrims are not doing the Camino for the right reason — that is between them and God. It is rather that in conversation after conversation, I found a profound mistrust of the Church and the history that had established the route in the first place. The crisis, for me, came in realizing that the kind of personal growth most pilgrims wanted out of the walk was not merely indifferent to but at odds with the union with God that the Way was built to produce. One form of growth asks you to become more fully yourself through self-improvement, while the other asks you to be undone, to surrender as the pathway to transformation.

Self-improvement can be a positive goal, to be sure, and to seek change through transformative experience is not wrong. Saints throughout history have left their belongings and their communities, embarked on pilgrimages, and been transformed — by the desert, the pillar, the monastery, the mountain. There is a desire within most of us, in an age of information overload and the exhaustion it produces, for some shortcut to clarity, and the Camino presents itself as one. But treating this self-knowledge as the goal, rather than the byproduct, is a mistaken understanding of what its transformation is for. 

A challenge for the religious pilgrim, made difficult by the secular pilgrim’s logic, is not to confuse self-knowledge, however hard-won it may be, with knowledge of God and being in communion with Him. The pilgrimage, done well, prioritizes these two things properly. It strips away the routine of comfort that binds us to the material — through fatigue, blisters, hunger, loneliness, and thirst — so that what is left can be aligned with the vertical axis of the divine rather than the horizontal axis of the self. What I saw on the road, again and again, was pilgrims seeking the horizontal, when the route had been built to point upwards.

Unbelievers are helped in their skepticism by the status of the Camino as legend. The Apostle James was martyred in Jerusalem, beheaded, as recorded in the Book of Acts. The Camino commemorates a legend, not confirmed by the historical record, that his disciples carried his body by boat to Spain, near what is now Santiago de Compostela. This legend appeared only in the 9th century, when a hermit named Pelagius reported following a field of unusual stars to an abandoned Roman-era burial ground and found remains that the local bishop, Theodomir, declared to be James’s and those of his two disciples. In 1075, King Alfonso VI began building a church over the spot to house the relics, and pilgrims have been walking to it ever since. My path along the Ulla River is said to be the one they took. 

This background makes for a kind of plausible deniability employed by both Catholic and secular pilgrims. One can walk the entire route and arrive at the cathedral without having to affirm that the bones inside are real, providing a means of transformation without any demands of belief attached. And for the pilgrim already inclined to distrust institutional religion, the issues surrounding Santiago Matamoros offer a clean exit. 

Suggested reading

Why artists choose Catholicism

By Valerie Stivers

And yet the Way did not work only on the religious pilgrim — it was a kind of gift to all who embarked on it, even the unbelievers, and this might be the strongest evidence for what the Camino still is, underneath what it has become. One day, I walked with a woman who had done the Camino before. She told me she no longer believed James’s body is actually in the cathedral, and yet, upon arriving, found herself overwhelmed by it regardless. She lacked adequate explanation, though she tried. On another day, I met a woman who said she had been raised Catholic but was now agnostic. She told me that she had been reading the same poem — a Polish poem called “Pilgrim” — to herself each morning since the second day of the walk, unsure why she had started or why she continued. I also kept meeting a Polish family, first at the airport, again in the port city of Vigo, then at a roadside cafeteria, who told me that in Polish custom, meeting the same people three times means you must share a coffee. I felt something of the Camino’s own logic in that: by coincidence or by choice, in sharing a story, a coffee, or a bunk bed in an albergue, we found a kind of communion with each other, as if we were all simply meeting again, somewhere along the way, coming home.

The Camino raises a question that secular pilgrims don’t expect to be asked, one gesturing toward an encounter that can’t be conveyed through the internet.

I felt this acutely on my final day of walking. My body was running on too little communal albergue sleep, and the last of my reserves ran dry with roughly six uphill miles still to go. I ducked into a chapel in the historic town of Padrón, to rest my legs, pray, and rehydrate. While I was admiring the interior, trying to talk myself into the last stretch, I noticed a small angel holding a heart carved with my dad’s initials. That glimmer of the familiar, on a day I had nothing left, carried me the rest of the way.

It was a reminder that nothing on the Camino is the result of hard work alone. Every step is, in the end, a gift: the body carries you; generous patrons have built and maintained the road; between towns, strangers leave fruit and water. Ultimately, grace keeps you going on the day you would rather stop. The secular pilgrim is attuned to graciousness and hospitality, but as far as I could tell, the secular framework has no category for gift in the deeper sense — it can’t account for the poem the woman reads with no explanation, or the feeling of awe upon arriving at the bones whose authenticity one has doubted. It can account for effort, for achievement, for personal meaning made from an experience, but it has no place for the unearned or the miraculous. Gift is precisely what falls outside the framework of self-transformation, and it is what the Camino keeps insisting on, through nothing more dramatic than daily repetition of walking and fatigue, which regularly calls forth the mercy and friendship of strangers, even to those who did not come looking for it.

I am not Catholic. I attended the Pilgrims’ Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a respectful guest and sat in shared reverence alongside people I had walked with — some for only a few hours, others for days. I did not cry or fall to my knees in awe upon reaching the cathedral. If anything, it felt more like a mixture of gratitude mixed with grief: gratitude for the thing itself, grief that so many arriving with me had been handed so little equipment for understanding what the thing was.

When self-transformation is the destination, the self remains at the center, perhaps to be enlarged, maybe even clarified, but it is still the organizing principle of the journey. The pilgrim returns home more herself, her pack lighter, her tolerance for discomfort improved. This is an accomplishment, right? But it is not what the tradition that built this road had in mind. The great pilgrims of the Church did not walk in order to become more fully themselves. They walked in order to become less themselves, specifically, to arrive at a place where the self, spent and humbled, might finally be available to something other than its own reflection.

The cathedral received us all, believers and unbelievers alike, and this, I suspect, is both the Camino’s great gift and its peculiar danger. It receives everyone. It transforms the terms of no one’s arrival. You have walked the Way, and you have reached the cathedral, and you are offered a next step. Whether to take it or not is up to you.

Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what became Hillbilly Elegy was submitted as a 60-page paper for a class on international business transactions; what exactly it had to do with international business transactions remains unclear. He wanted to use his lived experience to do social-science analysis of the “ills befalling working-class white people”. Swap “white” for any other racial identity, or for “queer” or “trans”, and one is left with the sort of solipsistic, self-indulgent claptrap that conservative intellectuals, Vance’s modern-day cheerleaders, tend to castigate as “woke”.

Hillbilly Elegy was not simply the narration of an exotic and unusual life — as was, say, the memoir of another politically-ambitious 30-something Ivy League graduate, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Vance’s book aspired to be serious political science. It held the key, it was claimed in 2016, the year in which it had the good fortune to be published, to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Even in Britain, where nobody had ever heard of Jackson, Kentucky or tasted Mountain Dew, the lived experience of this cherubic Ohioan was believed to say something meaningful about Brexit and the “Red Wall”.

It is ironic that the people who most dislike the Vice President today, and whom he dislikes the most in return, were exactly the sorts who gave him his start. The Financial Times and the Economist were among Hillbilly Elegy’s biggest evangelists. His message, after all, appealed to them: the “autoethnography” was ultimately in service to an old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps liberalism. Some passages could have been written by Samuel Smiles or Margaret Thatcher. “We spend our way to the poorhouse”, Vance wrote of his hillbilly kinsfolk; “thrift is inimical to our being”.

Vance has been on quite a journey since then, documented in a trickle of personal essays. At long last, he has treated us to a fully-fledged sequel to the book that made his name. Communion is, its subtitle says, about Vance’s return to faith. In fact, it is a broader Apologia pro vita sua, presenting a self-flattering account of his many conversions since 2016. It therefore considers his conversion to MAGA and his conversion to a kind of anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism, alongside his conversion to Roman Catholicism. All these, he makes clear, are closely linked.

Communion is written in the same folksy, syrupy style as Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s first book began with a faux-modest apology, and in Communion he likewise occasionally pleads for his readers’ clemency: “Keep reading”, he says amid one long-winded digression, “there’s a point here, I promise”. The main difference in style arises from Communion’s affected piety. The sweariness of Hillbilly Elegy is toned down. Mamaw, one of the great characters of modern American literature, used to curse like a sailor; at one point she asks a young JD, then questioning his sexuality, if he wants to suck dicks. In Communion, Mamaw has lost some of her edge: now she lamely refers to “effing crooks” and “effing perverts”. The word “bullshit” appears right at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. Clean-mouthed, Ned-Flanders Communion ends with a nauseating “Amen”.

Much of Communion narrates Vance’s shifting relationship with Christianity. It retreads the relevant sections of Hillbilly Elegy, occasionally quoting them at length. After some adolescent Bible-thumping, Vance saw the light of atheism, and combined this in his student years with a love for Ayn Rand. In this, he was fairly typical of young men of this milieu, “freethinkers” who found refuge online from the superstitions that stifled them at home. He still shows a nostalgic familiarity with their main totems, notably Christopher Hitchens and Reddit.

Why, then, did Vance convert? One of his reasons is that religious people are the most rational and sane. His evidence is his lived experience of the presidential election of 2016. He describes seeing people, elite media types, wailing and thrashing about as it became clear that Trump was on course to win. Quite understandably, he concluded that these people “need psychological help”. “If Hillary Clinton had won”, he continued, “my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed, and said, ‘Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared’”.

That comparison called into question his prior assumptions: “I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man…, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people.” There is a glaring problem here, however. When Joe Biden beat Trump in the election of 2020, the prevailing attitude among Trump’s followers was a far cry from “I hope he ain’t as bad as I feared”. Nor was this the attitude of JD Vance himself, then freshly emerged from the baptismal font. In 2021, as his political ambition was brewing, he described Biden’s victory as “unfair”. He was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024 in large part because he cleaves to the dogma of his new faith: that the election was rigged.

Vance offers the President more than just obsequiousness. His youth and intellectual vigor are supposed to balance out his boss’s dotage. Vance hopes to be the first millennial in the White House. Indeed, Communion is a millennial book, through and through, its themes springing straight from the generation’s roster. Aside from “work-life balance”, there’s a jab at something an author of a different bent would call “mansplaining”: those “insufferable tirades by above-average guys who think they’re brilliant”. Vance details his own sub-Seth-Rogenite college years: “Dude”, he asks a friend, “are you in love with this chick?” Once it has moved to more serious political terrain, many of the book’s barbs are aimed at the “Boomer leadership” — a group from which President Trump is curiously exempted.

Suggested reading

JD Vance: My message to Europe

By Sohrab Ahmari

Communion, as a result, preaches a millennial faith. It is telling that Catholicism ends up, in Vance’s life, as a substitute for therapy, a way for him to “deal with his past”. Its politics are of a similar vintage: generic post-Crash progressivism. That may be a strange ideology to impute to a Republican, but there it is. “I’m uninterested in making people servants to the economy”, he says, as though shouting into a megaphone at Occupy Wall Street in 2011: “the economy ought to be serving us”. The part of the book which sets out his political vision — a foretaste, perhaps, of the presidential campaign to come — is awash with such Sandersesque bluster. He repeatedly criticizes his own party for being “far too willing to worship the market”. He anyway seems just as eager to abjure his past Randian libertarianism as his New Atheism.

A Protestant ethic, the ethic of thrift, might have suited the liberalism of Hillbilly Elegy. His new Catholicism likewise suits this postliberal, anti-market shift. In Catholicism he has found some support for his semi-sarcastic, sophomoric suggestion that “maybe economics is just fake”. Vance extols the “skepticism of free market theory” which he finds in the “Catholic Church’s ancient social doctrine”. When he inveighs against the “gods of GDP”, he can cast himself as the inheritor to a venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, critical of “consumerism”, “individualism”, and other vices of modernity, in the mold of Pope Leo XIII, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day.

One can believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, and a sincere postliberal, while also considering some of the more cynical motivations at play. One theme of Communion is the author’s obsession with status. He knows that this used to inform his beliefs and ideas. His past criticism for Trump gave him “social immunity”, allowing him, as a conservative, to get invited to all the right dinner parties. His Ayn Rand phase used to have a similar effect: “tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite”.

What Vance never mentions is that Catholicism is a socially acceptable way to be conservative among the American elite — or, at least, that it grants entry to an elite of its own. At Yale Law School, even in its conservative circles, reversion to the hick evangelicalism in which he was reared would never have been an option. Evangelical churches, with their smoke machines and strobe lighting, their faith-healers and doomsday preachers, lack the gravitas that Vance was after. Protestants used to regard themselves as more serious, more intellectually rigorous, than those sensuous, emotional Papists. But now the stakes are reversed. Austere Presbyterianism isn’t really a thing anymore. Even where evangelicalism is on the up — as in Brazil — this is precisely because of its flashy aesthetics and “prosperity gospel”. Catholicism, on the other hand, provides its initiates with an intricate intellectual pedigree. It gives them the mantle of a storied tradition. It directs them to St Augustine (Vance’s patron) and Thomas Aquinas; it allows its adherents to seem “deep”.

The leading minds on the American Right, especially those which attended to its postliberal and communitarian turn in the late 2010s, are Catholic, whether converts like Adrian Vermeule or cradle Catholics like Patrick Deneen. The same can be said of the robustly Right-wing justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As with any prestigious club, the Catholic Church sets some barriers for entry. Anyone and his dog can become an evangelical Christian. But to become a Catholic means that a suitably learned priest has decided that you are up to it. Vance acknowledges this directly: “I really liked that the Church required you to work a little to join”. Having cleared that hurdle, conversion to Catholicism brought Vance into this more refined set. If he was once drawn to atheism and libertarianism because they offered him a certain cachet, how do we know his Catholicism is any different?

In America, Catholicism possesses another distinct advantage. It was never the dominant religion. It is separate from the elite WASP culture that Vance likes to spurn. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance felt alienated from that culture on the grounds that he was “Scotch-Irish” rather than “Anglo-Saxon”; his conversion to Catholicism has since allowed him to also drop the P in that acronym. Catholicism gives him a certain fellow-feeling with other “white ethnic” hyphenated Americans, historically excluded from the WASP core — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. Those groups used to be part of the Democratic coalition. The Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency as a Democrat in 1928; anti-Catholic prejudice played a part in his defeat. Such prejudice was overcome in 1960, in the election of JFK, and had more or less evaporated completely 60 years later, when the Catholic Joe Biden beat Trump (fair and square). In 2024, buoyed perhaps by Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket, Catholics broke solidly for Trump. Latino Catholics still tend to vote Democratic, but even they are moving Rightwards. This growing alignment between Catholicism and American conservatism, along with its outsider status, doubtless eased Vance’s walk along his road to Damascus.

In a similar vein, Vance seems to like Catholicism because it is an Old World religion — he says that it was “quite literally a foreign religion to me, rooted in Roman influences that I had very little exposure to”. It gives him and his faith a certain sun-baked sophistication. In Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his identity growing up as narrowly American; he lacked what many Americans possess, that feeling of being bound to a “mother country”. But the Catholic Vance has a real stake in Europe; so now he is better-placed to polemicize fervently about its declining fortunes. He describes himself in Communion feeling haunted by an empty cathedral in Burgundy, and “what that said about Europe’s cultural decline and Christianity’s slow evaporation from the continent”. He was overwhelmed by a similar feeling of “dread” in England — where, in a detail that hardly lends credence to the strength of his recollections, he claims that something in his full English breakfast was “oozing blood”.

His general criticisms of Europe have much to do with his criticisms of European religion, or lack thereof: one of the causes célèbres in his famous Munich speech, after all, concerned the arrest of a British man for praying outside an abortion clinic. His criticism of Europe extends even to the Vatican: Communion makes ample room for the author’s frustrations with his Church. He gives an exasperated sigh over the Vatican’s “trite platitudes” about his administration’s immigration policy. The implication here is that Rome is currently doing a poor job of tending to her flock. The energetic Catholic sheepdogs of the New World are called to guide the listless, straying Catholics of the Old.

More from this author

Is Andy Burnham a plastic Papist?

By Samuel Rubinstein

JD Vance became a Catholic rather than a different type of Christian because Catholicism today is the thinking man’s Christianity. As Candace Owens — not, herself, much of a thinking woman — supposedly remarked to Charlie Kirk before he was murdered: “You’re too smart to be a Protestant”. In Communion, Vance describes a friend named Sam, another convert to Catholicism. He would go on “extended rants about the Reformation and immigration”, and thought America’s ills could all be traced to John Calvin. Here is a character familiar to anybody who has rubbed shoulders with young conservatives at elite institutions.

The problem for Vance now, however, is that he cannot only speak for those high-brow Catholic Right-wingers. He may wish, no less fervently than Adrian Mole, to be a Malcolm Muggeridge; but he is also the Hillbilly Vice President, the tribune of the plebs. He cannot leave his own people behind. He has therefore had to fuse his two personas into one. This is why Communion, a book about Catholicism, shows on its front cover a Methodist church. It is why its subtitle talks generically about “finding my way back to faith” — rather than the faith. It is why he describes his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio — whose population is 46% Protestant, 16% Catholic — as an effort to make “more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy”, even though he says these arguments are what attracted him to Catholicism specifically. He probably can’t even play up his Catholicism now too much, lest there be persistent traces, in Middle America, of Protestant chauvinism. He cannot, like his friend Sam, launch into diatribes about Calvin. His political ambition requires him to be ecumenical.

What, then, does Communion mean for America, the country which, two-and-a-half years from now, its author may well be leading? Time and again, reading the book, it struck me that Vance’s ideal society, the America he hopes to build, is sleepy, southern, ancien régime Europe. He wants something like the Portugal of that other Catholic public intellectual turned statesman, Antonio Salazar: a country built on a foundation of Catholic social teaching, one sapped of prosperity and dynamism, but where everybody goes to church. He wants a society where people care less about work; he waxes nostalgic about the “blessings” of being raised in a “multigenerational household”. In Vance’s America, in his crusade against the Protestant Ethic, “GDP” is a dirty word, and the chief problem in Europe is declining church attendance rather than declining wealth. It is difficult to imagine such an America putting a man on Mars. It is also difficult to imagine such a schoolmarmish message resonating with most Americans.

The seeds for Vance’s conversions — both from secularism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to post- or anti-liberalism — were, he suggests in Communion, sown before 2016 and even further from Rome. Revealingly, they first took root in a general denunciation of American culture. As a soldier in Iraq, among Christian and Muslim Arabs, he encountered a “genuinely compelling critique” of that culture in the fear that, if Iraq grew too “Americanized”, it would become too “consumerist and hypersexualized”. He then paints a picture of a contrast between one culture, pious, austere, morally upstanding, and another one, wayward and decadent. “A woman in a niqab was reading the Quran”, he quotes from some fellow Catholic intellectual, “and a man was rocking while praying, and on the TV was Britney Spears dancing in her underwear”. Which of these cultures does JD Vance prefer? Catholic his answer may in fact be; but it does not strike me as very American.

So far, so Ulster. Yet if this warm summer day is like many others in Carrickfergus’s history, commemorating William’s “Royal Landing” at the harbor in the summer of 1690, look a little closer. There, amid the pomp of marching season, is a sight that many visitors might not be expecting: countless young people dressed in orange. There they are, the boys in collerettes and sneakers, the girls, grouped together, swapping the traditional bowler hats for skirts and tights. All walk in lockstep, breaking composure briefly to wave to school friends watching from the outdoor seats at McDonalds. Their lightweight sashes, more sparsely strewn with pins than those of older members, flutter in the breeze.

These youthful cohorts stand in stark contrast to their fellow bandsmen, and what many regard the Orange Order to be: a social club for old men to relive the sectarianism of yesteryear. Yet as the province gears up for “The Twelfth” — the anniversary of William’s final victory over his Catholic enemies on 12 July 1690 — it remains unclear if a more sprightly Order can truly salvage Ulster Unionism.

The Orange Order started life around a century after William’s landing at Carrickfergus. In the 1790s, sectarian violence stalked both Ulster and Ireland as a whole. Drunken brawls were commonplace, fights that often descended into armed conflict, especially as the tensions unleashed by the French Revolution crossed the Irish Sea. In September 1795, following one particularly vicious battle, the victors founded a Protestant defense association: the Orange Order.

Two centuries on, the Order has an international membership body of over 1,400 lodges. Members commit themselves to upholding Unionism, loyalism, broadly conservative beliefs — and, of course, the Protestant faith. Yet despite these long-held values, as well as provocative marches through “contested” neighborhoods with large Catholic populations, membership is surging: particularly among young Protestants. One young member, Tristan Morrow, says that his generation has brought a huge spike to membership of his local lodge. Living in a County Fermanagh village, local numbers have swelled from just 10 in 2002 to over 50 two decades later. Internal figures from the Junior Orange Order show a similar rise: since Covid, they have opened 26 new lodges, with membership increasing by over 70% in the four years from 2021.

More from this author

Northern Ireland’s last huntsmen

By Adam James Pollock

This comes as somewhat of a surprise to outsiders — myself included. The dominant account of Ulster Unionism, repeated ad nauseum in local media and Irish Nationalist politicians, is one of inexorable decline. With the 2021 census in Northern Ireland revealing, for the first time, more Catholics than Protestants, and with Sinn Féin becoming the region’s largest party at the last general election, some suggest that Unionism in Ulster is “dying out”.

In the broader culture, too, the Order has a reputation of being a drinking club for bitter old men, like a working-class equivalent of the Cavalry and Guards Club, albeit for paramilitaries rather than hussars. For people unfamiliar with the organization’s parades, certainly, it’s difficult to distinguish between the Order and the more rowdy, paramilitary-adjacent pipe bands; they all get tarred with the unfortunate brush of drunkenly emptying bladders on the wall of whoever’s house is nearby, or else snorting drugs in full view of bystanders.

Watch the Order in action, though, and things look rather less sordid. Two weeks before this year’s reenactment of the Royal Landing, over 2,000 young members of the Orange Order paraded through Donaghadee, another pretty coastal town not far from Carrickfergus. These young people, many of whom don’t look old enough to have left primary school, marched in jackets and ties. One lodge’s shrunken lambeg drum, processed near the front of the parade, seemed far more manageable than the adult alternatives.

For Joseph Magill, grand master of the Junior Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, this enthusiasm is partly social in nature. “I think the growth we have seen in recent years is largely down to the range of experiences available to boys through the Junior Orange movement,” he says. “Our members take part in competitions, educational initiatives, charitable activities and social events, bringing together boys from across our jurisdiction.”

In a world where so much interaction now happens digitally, these activities are strikingly offline — and old-fashioned. Magill highlights the popularity of lecturing, where young people are taught to recite questions and answers from memory. Given working-class Protestant boys are by far the most disadvantaged demographic in Northern Ireland, these activities have the potential to be useful far beyond the lodge.

Talking of which, religion inevitably plays a role in youthful Orangeism too, though perhaps not in the way you might imagine. There’s a tendency among outsiders to view the Orange Order as reflecting a distinct kind of cultural Protestantism. Just as the general perception of being Catholic in Northern Ireland has morphed from having 10 children and eating fish on Fridays to advocating for abortion and the boycotting of Israeli quinoa, so too does Northern Irish Protestantism have its own stereotypes — mostly involving cheap booze and Rangers.

Yet if Christianity doubtless matters here, Magill sees it less as a politicized label and more as a genuine matter of faith. “Through my involvement I developed a deeper understanding of my faith and a personal relationship with God,” he says, “which has been a positive and important influence throughout my life.” Jay Basra, a young Unionist activist who joined the Orange Order when he turned 18, makes a similar point, noting that his fellow Orangemen help him live a Christian life.

Suggested reading

Can Carna cope with immigration?

By Aris Roussinos

This, in itself, is striking. In England, the so-called “quiet revival” is usually seen as a Catholic phenomenon. But in Northern Ireland — by far the most religious region of the United Kingdom — young people are still active adherents to their Protestant denominations. Here, some 46% of people who identify as Protestant attend church at least once per month, with residents aged 18-24 much more likely to hold a positive view of Christianity than their elders. In other ways, too, Protestant belief is much more embedded in ordinary life than elsewhere in the UK. Hundreds of young people attend various Christian youth festivals each year, and it’d be naive to imagine that the Orange Order doesn’t play a role here.

Given all this, it might be tempting to see a correlation between young Orangeism and Unionist politics more generally. But, again, any link isn’t straightforward. “A lot of Northern Ireland’s young people are switched off from constitutional politics, particularly people of a similar age to me,” Jay explains. “Regardless if a young person is in the Orange Order or not, the onus is on political Unionism to engage with them. It is high time Unionism began to fully appreciate that it cannot take young people’s votes for granted.” That’s reflected more broadly: faith in Northern Ireland’s political institutions has hit rock bottom, especially for young people, with knowledge of how the government functions here lower than in any of the other devolved nations.

How to explain this gap? Just look at the news. Jeffrey Donaldson, a household name in Ulster Protestant politics for years, is now a convicted pedophile. Gavin Robinson, the current leader of Donaldson’s erstwhile Democratic Unionists, has admitted it’s “clear” that other figures in the party knew about the abuse but kept it secret. This recent scandal follows a never-ending succession of controversies that defines the incompetent Stormont Assembly, which has only functioned, in the loosest possible sense of the word, for around 60% of the time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed 28 years ago.

For young people keen to express their Unionist beliefs, but who find conventional politics too depressing a vehicle, the Orange Order offers an alternative. In the end, though, it’s hard not to return to the demographic question. As Sam* concedes, part of the reason that Order membership is growing is precisely because some Nationalists think they can secure a united Ireland simply by waiting for Unionism to disappear.

To be fair, the numbers aren’t clear cut. The 2021 Northern Ireland census showed a larger number of Catholics than Protestants for the first time, with 45.7% of the population coming from a culturally Catholic background. Yet this represents an increase of only 0.6% in a decade, casting doubt on whether a majority of the population will ever fit this definition — something proponents of Irish unity often tout as a trigger for a border poll.

Still, some young Unionists would rather not be complacent. That, of course, raises another question: is the Orange Order a political institution after all, albeit one you can’t cast your ballot for? Magill still doesn’t think so. “Boys do not join the Junior Orange movement because of political debates, and we do not exist to promote party politics.”

That’s the formal line. But for other young Orangemen, being part of a lodge is clearly about more than faith or lectures or even sticking it to the DUP. As Sam puts it: “Zoomers will not be the generation to fail Ulster.” And, whatever the numbers say, it’s institutions like the Orange Order that could offer Unionism some hope. Irish Nationalists don’t really have any equivalent organizations, even if their representatives are often as shambolic as their Unionist rivals.

All the while, it’s clear that young people, of both communities, want stability, order, and a basic sense of normalcy in their politics, after decades of violence then decades more of sclerosis. It’s partly for this that people are flocking back towards the moderate embrace of the Ulster Unionist Party, the oldest political party on the island of Ireland, and whose new leader Jon Burrows has shot to the top of opinion polls. And it’s for similar reasons, perhaps, that young Protestants are joining the Orange Order.

Back in Carrickfergus, the parade ends in the late afternoon. Old men, exhausted, remove their dark jackets and wipe sweat from their brows. Their coaches, parked along the main stretch of road leaving town, provide the first seats they’ve sat on since the early morning; several fall asleep before the journey home even starts. Across the road, though, a group of young Orangemen have met up with their friends. They laugh and run back towards the site of William’s landing. For them, the day is still young.

*Name has been changed.

Perhaps England’s beleaguered Protestants have just become inured. Already in the Nineties, Tony Blair was a crypto-Catholic leader, straight out of the pages of 17th-century polemic. As with the Stuart monarchs, or King Ahab, it was the wife what got him. Everyone knew that Cherie took her Catholicism seriously, and that the children were being raised in her faith. But Blair himself, across his 10 years in office, purported to conform to the established Church. He converted just months after leaving Downing Street and one needn’t be Titus Oates to suspect that he had been moving in that direction for a long time. When he prayed on the eve of the Iraq invasion, might he have been thinking unreformed thoughts?

Blair’s reticence on spiritual matters prevented him from claiming the distinction of Britain’s first Catholic prime minister. The distinction is genuinely significant, given that Britain was — and still officially is — a Protestant nation, forged in the crucible of confessional controversy. No, the accolade of being Britain’s “Catholic Obama” descends upon, of all people, Boris Johnson. He cut a different kind of early-modern figure to Blair, a reverse Henry VIII. Baptised a Catholic, he entered the Church of England while at Eton, presumably as part of the High Tory shtick he was then busy cultivating. His first two marriages were not officiated in the Catholic manner. Canon law thus exonerated him on the adultery charges; technically, in the eyes of the Vatican, the two-time divorcé was a lifelong bachelor. Reverting to his childhood faith, he was thus permitted to marry Carrie, his Anne Boleyn, at Westminster Cathedral in 2021.

And now Britain, which has never knowingly elected a Catholic Prime Minister, might soon have another. Andy Burnham was an altar boy. His power base in the Northwest always was a hotbed of Romanism. In the 17th century, Thomas Fuller described the people of western Lancashire as “Popishly affected”. When Sir Henry Spiller went to inspect the county in 1621, he found no fewer than 1,800 recusants. Far from the gaze of Protestant London, it was fertile ground for Jesuits. One priest — a cousin of Guy Fawkes — wrote in 1600 that “Catholics are so numerous that priests can wander through the villages and countryside with the utmost freedom”. Manchester, for its part, was a Jacobite stronghold; it provided the only English regiment in the 1745 rising. The Catholic identity of this part of England was bolstered further in the 19th century by an influx of Irish immigration. Even today, the Northwest remains England’s most Catholic region. If Burnham pulls off the long march from Makerfield to Westminster, he will succeed where Guy Fawkes and Bonnie Prince Charlie failed.

More from this author

Christian Jew-haters are back

By Samuel Rubinstein

Though he might have lost out on being the first Catholic Prime Minister, Burnham will be the first to be meaningfully shaped by the religion, and the first to enter Downing Street with a strong British Catholic identity. A decisive personality in his formative years was Derek Worlock, the liberal, anti-Thatcher, ecumenically-minded archbishop of Liverpool. Burnham once remarked that the “political implementation” of Worlock’s teaching was the Labour Party, which he signed up aged 15. Burnham’s politics and his Catholicism were thus always closely linked.

Burnham, like many on the Left, has nonetheless had his difficulties with the Church. In 2015 he confessed that he was struggling with its “obsession with sexuality”. He waxed nostalgic about the Catholicism of his childhood, of Archbishop Worlock and John Paul II, who visited Liverpool when he was a boy. The Church that he had grown up in was “quite forgiving… quite humane, humorous, irreverent”. Things began to sour in 2005, when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI and brought a “more judgemental mode” to the papal chair. Yet even Ratzinger’s conservatism could not dent Burnham’s long-held belief that the purpose of the Labour Party was to do God’s work on earth. “The basic tenets of the Labour Party and socialism”, he declared during his first leadership bid in 2010, “are one and the same with those of Christianity”.

There, he was giving voice to a longstanding position within British Catholicism. Thanks to the Irish connection, a general feeling of being outsiders, and a traditional suspicion of liberal and capitalist excesses, British Catholics have tended to lean Left. Catholics have broken for Labour in almost every postwar general election. In fact, it is quite surprising that Labour has never had a Catholic leader (putting aside the special case of Blair). Several have come close: Roy Hattersley, the son of a lapsed priest, wrote a history of the Catholics in Britain; John McDonnell, though now an atheist, speaks about the impact of his Catholic upbringing on his worldview. Yet there is a tendency within Labour to view religious Catholics with suspicion. In 2020 Rebecca Long-Bailey landed in some hot water when it became known that she harbored personal views about abortion, rooted in her Catholic faith, which were at odds with those of the Party. Catholic identity — especially an Irish Catholic identity — might go along well with the modern Labour Party; Catholic beliefs, however, generally do not.

Burnham Country was not only the most Catholic part of England; it was also one of the last parts of England where religion continued to matter. It was the region of England most prone to sectarian violence. Liverpool, the city of Burnham’s birth, was the closest England had to a Glasgow or Belfast. In 1819, an Orange procession in the city caused a riot; 90 years later a Catholic procession culminated in hundreds of injuries and 50 arrests. The only Irish Nationalist MP sent to Westminster from a non-Irish constituency was Liverpool’s T.P. O’Connor. These divisions were still festering when Burnham was born. When his non-Catholic father first met the family of his Catholic mother, he was worried that confessional divides would prove an issue. Thankfully, they were able to find common ground in their shared support for Everton FC.

Football, to use that cliché about modern Britain, and Liverpool especially, is really Burnham’s religion. In 2023, reconciled with the Church of his childhood, he beamingly presented the football-mad Pope Francis with a Manchester United shirt, signed by the Argentine center-back Lisandro Martínez. His campaigning material in Makerfield makes much more reference to football than God. Burnham once said that the most important things in his life, apart from family, were “Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church — in that order”.

Is it significant that Everton is traditionally regarded as the “Catholic team” in the Merseyside derby? The idea that the rivalry between Everton and Liverpool mirrored that between Catholic and Protestant — an English “Old Firm” — seems to be a myth. Both teams can be traced to a Methodist congregation in the later 19th century; Everton’s first club president was an Orangeman. Still, the myth was widely believed when Burnham was growing up, and he subscribes to it.

More from this author

It’s time to bring back Blair

By Samuel Rubinstein

The sectarianism that supposedly once clung to the Merseyside derby, Burnham has said, may have “gone with the mists of time”: but still he has never met a Catholic priest who was a Red. The Eighties, the decade of Thatcher and the Hillsborough disaster, witnessed the formation of Burnham’s worldview, based upon a distinct Northwest identity. “In the 1986 final at Wembley” — Liverpool v. Everton — “everybody sang ‘Merseyside’”. His part of England, though divided by football and religion, finds it must unite against a common enemy: “the London media, Thatcher, the establishment”.

All this serves to give the Northwest a Left-wing, anti-establishment identity, which Burnham taps into. This identity is closely linked to the region’s historic Catholicism; and hence, Burnham’s own cultural Catholicism adds to his carefully constructed image. Cilla Black remarked in 2002 that “in Liverpool… most Protestants were Conservative and most Catholics were Labour, just as Everton was the Catholic team and Liverpool the ‘Proddy-Dog’ one”. The second of those ideas might be a fiction; the first definitely isn’t. It was due in part to strong Protestant (and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish) feeling that Liverpool was solidly Tory for much of the 20th century. When Burnham speaks as though the Northwest is uniformly Left-wing, and that Left-wing values are intrinsically Manchester (or Liverpool) values, really he is appealing to a Catholic history and identity.

Either way, England’s Protestant patriots can breathe a sigh of relief: if the Catholic conquest comes, it will not bring with it much by way of doctrine. Indeed, due largely to the triumph of social liberalism within the Labour Party, British Catholics are no longer even a reliable Labour bloc. They struggle to reconcile their conservatism with Labour policy: Long-Bailey’s struggles aside, Stella Creasy’s successful push for the partial decriminalization of abortion, and Kim Leadbeater’s unsuccessful one for the legalization of assisted suicide, were never likely to keep them red. Burnham abstained on euthanasia when he was an MP, but he appears now to lean in favor. If, as prime minister, he reopens that can of worms, we could witness something similar to various episodes from the Biden presidency, where a socially liberal Catholic leader gets into awkward public conflict with the authorities of his own Church. We might then find that a Catholic Labour prime minister does nothing to arrest the trickling away of British Catholics from the Party. The political implications here will, in any case, be narrowly intra-Catholic ones. They will be of no interest to the non-Catholic and non-religious majority. Once a Roman Catholic prime minister would have been met with cries of “No Popery!”; the striking thing today is how little anyone cares. We have become men, and put away childish things.

Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for “a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,” as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.

Put another way: amid the ruins of modernity’s great emancipatory universalisms — liberalism, socialism, “positive science” — Leo is reminding us that there is a much older mode of universal reason, blending revelation and classical philosophy, preserved by the Catholic Church. And that Rome, with its “dynamic approach to the Gospel,” isn’t afraid to acknowledge the achievements of exhausted modernity, nor to collaborate in its renewal today.

That collaborative element — Leo’s tipping of his mitre to the United Nations, multilateralism, abolitionist and labor movements, and the like — renders the encyclical supremely unfashionable. Not least among neo-traditionalists within the Church, for whom the document harks back to the heyday of Vatican II and the midcentury moment that saw theologians and hierarchs embrace projects like global governance.

The Christian malcontents are already tsk-tsking the document for a supposed failure to cite Aquinas (there are several citations to the Angelic Doctor, in fact). They are labeling the pope a UN-besotted “Boomer” (is there a worse epithet today?) and griping that he isn’t radically anti-modern enough.

More from this author

The Pope versus the President

By Sohrab Ahmari

The pope appears to have anticipated the backlash. Blind faith in markets and technology, he suggests, is far from the only latter-day irrationalism. Others include “fundamentalist, identity-based, and nationalistic reactions” that have been stoked by the failure of capitalism and technocracy since the end of the Cold War to “generate prosperity, democracy, and stability.” It isn’t hard to imagine Leo classing ultra-trad Catholics — the type who use the latest iPhone to post online laments about such “modernist” innovations as the Luminous Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary — as one more species of insurgent fanatic.

Yet like it or not, the pope’s approach — combining a classical and Christian account of the human person with openness to modern means for social emancipation — goes back to the previous Pope Leo, Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching with his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

For starters, Leo XIII recognized that the organization of social and economic life implicates the salvific mission of the Church and therefore the Church can’t stand neutral in relation to it. Writing in the teeth of the Industrial Revolution, that earlier Leo beheld around him “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” and a resulting “moral degeneracy.”

More fundamentally, Leo XIII saw modern market societies as characterized by a constitutive antagonism: “social antagonism [that] erupted not in spite of, but as a result of people acting rationally within the rules of the game,” as I’ve written elsewhere. Under industrial conditions, a handful of firms dominated most sectors, giving employers nearly all the bargaining power, with the result that workers didn’t enjoy the freedom promised to them on paper. 

On paper, the employee could always find a better wage or better working conditions elsewhere. In reality, most workers found themselves coerced and cornered as a result of the disparities in power generated by markets. “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves,” Leo observed, “whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

Here Leo XIII’s classical and Christian anthropology came in: workers aren’t just another production input, but human beings with rights due them as a matter of “justice.” These rights, not least the right to a family wage, must be upheld by the state and promoted by associations, the “most important” of which are “workingmen’s associations” — i.e., labor unions. 

Note: a living wage under Catholic Social Teaching is not a matter of charity or the personal virtue or feudal honour of the employer. I mention these other possibilities — charity, virtue, honour — to highlight the way in which the Leonine teaching combines classical and Christian anthropology with modern politics. 

It’s classical in its anthropology: the worker is a human being with a family to maintain and the natural imperative to participate in civil society; if he’s materially desperate, his family falls to immorality and he can’t take part in other societies like church and politics. 

It’s modern in that Leo XIII notably didn’t decry industrial production as such. He didn’t hanker for the restoration of feudal relations or a return to the land or small-producerism or other such fantasies of the Tweed Jacket Class. At some level, he accepted that there is no “going back behind” of modernity. 

The answer for Leo XIII, rather, lay in just wages enforced by the state and in labor organizations mounting what he called “united action” (what we now call “collective action”). In this way, Leo XIII, decades before Vatican II, brought the Catholic Church into conversation and collaboration with modern universalist emancipatory movements: the US New Deal, the British Labour party, and social and Christian democracy in continental Europe all bear his imprint.

His later successor Benedict XVI, often inaccurately framed as an arch-conservative, would bring this synthesis of the classical and the modern to its culmination with his famous 2006 assertion that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Leo XIV is perhaps more cautious. Nevertheless, the same general pattern — an insistence on the human person as possessed of divine dignity; a willingness to engage with modernity in protecting that dignity — is easily discernible in Magnifica Humanitas. 

Suggested reading

Was AI called by Cthulhu?

By Sohrab Ahmari

Citing Leo XIII, the American pope begins with the insistence that “the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.” While there is an “autonomy of worldly affairs” and two distinct communities — the secular and the ecclesiastical — nevertheless the people of God are called to “promote structural reforms.” Why? Because the Church can’t extricate her activities from “social relations,” nor “consider herself a stranger to the forces shaping society.” In short: “There is no authentic evangelisation that does not also affect the structures of human society.”

Scanning the social horizon of the 21st century, Leo XIV doesn’t see only horror and decline. He doesn’t think that ours is a uniquely accursed age: “I am convinced that the concrete way of living out social relationships in the light of the Gospel is not established once and for all, but remains a task entrusted, from generation to generation, to the Christian community. . .  For this reason, I encourage all members of the Church not to be afraid of the present challenges.”

The present challenges, to his mind, are AI and what he calls the “normalization of war” (a geopolitical phenomenon he worries might be exacerbated by AI and other developments in so-called defence-tech). AI, he warns, could lead to the logics of efficiency and profit crowding out all others — a radical acceleration of the “technocratic paradigm.” The symptoms include screen addiction, the potential for mass joblessness, and the imposition of tech bosses’ worldview on the masses under the facade of “objective” information.

At the deepest level, he fears, AI could strengthen an “anti-human vision.” Meaning one in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty, and exerting total control.” The problem with this is that weakness, uncertainty, and finitude are central to what makes us human. They are a source of creativity and of empathy for the vulnerable other (who is finally vulnerable, as we ourselves are).

“A technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can … become an obstacle to change and growth,” he notes in my favourite passage. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”

In the face of these threats, however, you won’t find any calls for a general ban against AI in this encyclical, no fatwas launching a Butlerian Jihad. On the contrary, Magnifica Humanitas is full of praise for AI’s potential to eliminate “arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.” In this, Leo XIV follows Pope Francis, who in one of his final statements as pontiff, was hopeful that AI might “introduce important innovations in agriculture, education, and culture, an improved level of life for entire nations and peoples, and the growth of human fraternity and social friendship.”  

As with manufacturing in Leo XIII’s time, the question is how to orient these “new things” to the dignity of the human person and the common good of the whole. Here, just as Leo XIII didn’t rest content with the virtue of the factory owners, so our Leo insists that a few men in California can’t have unchallenged say-so. Rather, Leo XIV envisions a role for the states as well as the “transnational institutions” that took shape in the wake of the last century’s horrors. The Catholic principles of subsidiarity holds that when a problem is too large for national authorities, it must be addressed at a higher level by some sort of “world authority,” as Saint John XXIII envisioned it in his Cold War encyclical Pacem in Terris.

Such a problem, Leo XIV feels, is AI. Hence, the new encyclical’s unfashionable emphasis on transnational governance and political universalism. Contrary to his critics on the American Catholic Right, neither is a quaint relic of the pope’s Boomer generation. Both, rather, go to the heart of his Catholic political rationality. This is the Church, as Augustine described her: tam antiquam, tam nova!

Trump responded with a long Truth Social rant, in which he slammed the Roman pontiff as “WEAK on crime”, as if he were addressing the Democratic mayor of a coastal city, and fulminated about Leo’s opposition to the Iran War. He followed that up with an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure, miracle-healing an ailing man; the image was later deleted, even as Trump maintained that it was supposed to portray him as a “doctor” (the internet didn’t buy it).

Superficially, this is a disagreement between an unprecedentedly tactless president, on one hand, and the sovereign of a tiny city-state who also happens to be the spiritual leader of some 1.4 billion people, on the other. With his ill-defined Iran War petering out, Trump is lashing out wildly — including at the pope, whom he views as just another politician and, therefore, fair game for the sorts of insults he might fling at (say) the “Palestinian” Sen. Chuck Schumer or the “failing” New York Times.

But one needn’t accept the maxim that all conflicts are theological to notice the deeper theological dimensions of this one: the apparently considered decision of Leo XIV to cast off the hawkish brand of conservative Catholicism that once bridged Washington to Rome. In doing so, the Pope has forced an uncomfortable choice on conservative Catholics: do they stand with the successors of Peter, who’ve imposed increasingly stringent moral limits on warmaking? Or do they stick with a Republican Party that can’t do without wars in the Middle East, even under its supposedly populist guise? The more fundamental problem behind these questions: how should Catholics relate to a country that is presumptively skeptical (at best) of apostolic or historic Christianity?

More from this author

Against the Mad King

By Sohrab Ahmari

Back in the Seventies, and especially in the Reagan-Bush years, the Catholic conservatives supplied one answer to this persistent set of problems: they furnished highbrow Catholic justifications for Republican foreign and domestic policy; presented Catholicism as, in essence, “safe” for the Right’s conception of American order; and even sought to remake Roman thought in the American image.

The impulse was understandable. A century earlier, America’s protestant majority scoffed at the Catholic Church for its pompous, “foreign”-language liturgies; spurned the extra-biblical reasoning of Catholics, with its admixtures of pagan and heathen philosophy; and treated with suspicion a group whose highest loyalty lay with a man in a funny hat in Rome. Those were the days when The Atlantic would publish editorials stating forthrightly that a “loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could never be the US president, for the simple reason that Catholics are beholden first to the man in Rome” (this was in 1927, and the presidential contender in question was New York’s Al Smith).

Things began to change mid-century. That was when the Catholic Church found common cause with American power in the face of a common foe, Soviet Communism. Alongside Mainline Protestantism and Reform Judaism, Catholicism came to form one of the pillars of a stolid cultural consensus. It was left to the Catholics, for example, to draw up Hollywood’s censorship codes: no mentions of abortion; bad behavior must always be shown to lose by the end of the plot, and so on.

A pivotal figure in this transformation was John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest and Vatican II peritus, or expert, who attempted a reconciliation between the faith and the American civic religion of liberal nationalism. Murray argued that when the popes in the 19th century condemned “liberalism”, they had in mind the high-handed, militantly anticlerical liberalism of Continental Europe, and not the American model, which emphasized pluralism and comported with Catholic notions of natural law.

Murray’s maneuver wasn’t without precedent. In the early 19th century, a gathering of the American Catholic bishops in Baltimore had declared that the Founding Fathers had “built better than they knew”: meaning, that although the framers of the Constitution may have been inspired by erroneous liberal doctrines, they had in practice brought forth a regime in which the Church could survive and even thrive. And so it did, throughout the 19th century, notwithstanding the assaults of Know-Nothings and the Klan, but especially in Murray’s day — a high watermark for the American Church in terms of vocations, educational and philanthropic expansion, and sheer cultural influence. Murray said, in effect: They knew and built well.

The conservative Catholics I speak of here are best seen as Murray’s intellectual heirs. These, to be clear, weren’t traditionalists. The “trads” stuck to the old-line anti-liberalism, and some of them fell into schism in reaction against the reforms of Vatican II. The Murray-ites, by contrast, sought to synthesize the faith with American (neo)liberal order, and to help strengthen that order with Catholic scaffolding.

Thus, in his 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, the writer Michael Novak brushed aside longstanding Catholic anxieties about market systems to herald a brand of Catholic neoliberalism. Much as Murray had distinguished (good) Anglo-American liberalism from (bad) Continental liberalism, so Novak argued that the popes’ concerns about market society had been limited to the “industrial tyrannies” of the 19th century. These were far from the “equal opportunity and open social mobility” that supposedly characterized “later” capitalism, ensuring that it was free of coercion.

Novak, however, merely recapitulated the shop-worn arguments that the previous Leo pope — Leo XIII — had confronted in Rerum novarum, his landmark 1891 encyclical that inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching. In Leo XIII’s time, too, defenders of the unrestrained market insisted that the elements of choice and consent meant that no one was coerced under capitalism. Leo disagreed. Given the lopsided distribution of power and wealth generated by markets, “the richer class have many ways of shielding themselves… whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

The “freedom” touted market fundamentalists in his time — and by Novak nearly a century later — was thus illusory. Real freedom and justice, Leo XIII taught, would be found in “united action” of the kind promoted by “workingmen’s associations”, and by the government promoting “balance in the social body” between labor and capital.

Novak barely mentioned organized labor in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism; when he did, it was to lament the corruption of union leaders. Of course, there have been corrupt union leaders. It was shocking, all the same, for a book on Catholic political economy to offer such a pinched account of labor and its rights.

In translating the Catholic tradition for Reagan-era America, Novak rendered it perfectly inoffensive. There was nothing wrong with an individualistic system that couldn’t be fixed with more individualism, bootstrapping enterprise, and a robust “public moral culture” — a pet phrase of the Murrayites. Yet in their telling, the culture or morality was completely innocent of political-economic and other structural dynamics. They were loud about restricting abortion, as Catholic doctrine insists, but refused to notice how a ruthless, efficiency-maximizing order might come to treat the unborn (and the disabled and the elderly) as disposable. More than any other sector of elite opinion, they contributed to the development of a conservatism that would police the bedroom, but never the boardroom.

Suggested reading

Is America fighting a holy war?

By Mary Harrington

Novak and his confrère played an equally important role in applying a Catholic veneer to GOP belligerence in the twilight years of the Cold War and, especially, in the wake of 9/11. Toiling in Right-wing think tanks, and later clustered around the religious journal First Things, they attacked a “presumption against war” that had taken hold among the Catholic bishops, as the writer George Weigel put it. Read that again. Weigel was unhappy that the successors of the Apostles — followers of the author of the Sermon on the Mount — had developed an undue presumption against war.

Weigel’s deeper critique, in fairness, was that the Church’s just-war tradition must be viewed as a public normative framework for the upkeep of peace, understood as the “tranquility of order”, rather than the mere absence of conflict. Under such a framework, he argued, the determination of a just war can’t be reduced to a check list or a matter of private conscience alone (since the public magistrate is under obligation to his public to secure them against threats).

Perhaps this had some salience in the Eighties, when Weigel first floated his hawkish theories. He did so in response to a statement of the American bishops that called for nuclear disarmament and the reconsideration of Washington’s first-use posture, while declaring nuclear attacks on cities to be immoral. Such statements, Weigel warned, ignored the reality that nuclear deterrence can make war less likely. More than that, they risked collapsing the Catholic position on war and peace into an outright pacifist one, and that couldn’t have been right: if the Church has cultivated a just-war tradition over centuries, it must follow that some wars are … just.

But by the early post-9/11 years — when Weigel had reached the apogee of his influence, thanks mainly to a blockbuster biography of John Paul II — his position had hardened into an undue presumption for war. In a 2004 essay for First Things, the author contended that the same “presumption against war” had also animated the “many warnings of catastrophe from religious leaders that preceded the … the most recent Iraq war.”

The “most recent Iraq war” was in reference to George W. Bush’s misadventure, which indeed proved catastrophic, and for which Weigel, Novak, and First Things founding editor Father Richard John Neuhaus campaigned vigorously. Their efforts even reached the Apostolic Palace, where they repeatedly sought a papal blessing for the war. John Paul II refused. More than that, the pope in the leadup to the Iraq invasion urged world leaders to “extinguish the ominous smoldering of a conflict which, with the joint efforts of all, can be avoideds”. Afterwards, his successor, then-doctrinal chief Josef Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), insisted: “It was right to resist the war and its threats of destruction.” And on another occasion: “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq.”

Weigel would go on to gripe about the American bishops over their supposedly insufficient enthusiasm for the Iraq War. Just-war theory, he asserted in the early days of the Iraq War, “lives more vigorously … at the higher levels of the Pentagon than … in certain offices at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” This made it seem as if the bishops were in rebellion against the magisterium — subtly eliding the fact it was Weigel himself who dissented from John Paul II’s and Ratzinger’s stance against the war.

In years to come, Weigel would explicitly criticize a magisterial document — Saint John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris — for insufficient hawkishness and an overly expansive account of human rights. The cohort represented by Novak, Weigel, and Neuhaus — only Weigel is still alive — thus nurtured a conservatism with clear purposes: to safely position Catholicism within the matrix of GOP hawkism and neoliberal political economy; to clear the air of any lingering doubts that the faith might pose a moral challenge.

The populist uprisings that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in the mid-2010s offered the chance for a rethink. The scale of voters’ discontent with the pre-populist consensus was an index of the intellectual opportunity. Why not reach deep inside the Church’s repository of ideas for sources of renewal? And indeed, there were some gestures in this direction. I should know. It was right at this moment of flux that I entered the Catholic Church. Having launched my career within conventional, Weigel-style conservatism, I was at first unsettled and then enrapt by the possibilities: new journals; a new-old language for discussing culture and society; group manifestos outlining new politics; the thrill of iconoclasm.

This was still, technically speaking, the world of conservative Catholicism: the same tweed jackets, the same boozy galas, the same literary coordinates, the same closet cases. But in those years, they — we — were permitted to question free trade and call ourselves “pro-life New Dealers” or “anti-abortion Catholic socialists” or even “integralists”. We could even admit that George W. Bush’s wars had turned out disastrously and that “domestic reconsolidation” should be the order of the day, as current First Things editor R. R. Reno repeatedly did.

Yet, with about a decade in the rear-view mirror, it’s doubtful that a true renewal will arise in these quarters. Although today’s Catholic conservatives have differences with the Weigels and Novaks, the mold those men cast has finally proved too rigid to reshape. Too many of the figures in this sphere spent the past decade opposing Pope Francis, thoroughly alienating the late Argentine pontiff from the Right. This, when Francis’s critiques of Enlightenment rationality and soulless capitalism might have fortified their mental armories. That attitude habituated yet another generation of conservative Catholics to bend their faith to GOP imperatives, rather than the other way around. Hence, the convert JD Vance’s recent admonishment that Pope Leo “stick to morals” — as if his boss’s talk of erasing a whole civilization didn’t implicate the gravest moral concerns.

Further proof: as of this writing, more than 48 hours after the fact, First Things has yet to raise a critical peep about Trump’s anti-Leo harangue. More significantly, Reno was quick to defend the Iran War in just-war terms, even if with much less enthusiasm than Weigel mustered for Iraq. “When Trump announced ‘major combat operations’ against Iran,” Reno wrote, “he was not so much declaring war as recognizing the failure of the most recent tacit ceasefire.” Which is only a slightly more highbrow version of the Fox News talking point that “Trump didn’t start a war; he ended one.”

Likewise, many of the Catholic Republicans in my social networks appear more anxious about their relationship with the party, the White House, and the conservative world in the wake of the Leo spat than they are about the honor of the Roman pontiff. Indeed, MAGA Republicans are alienated from Roman authority to a degree that would have been unthinkable to the Murray-ites in their heyday.

Those men were solidly in the ecclesiastical mainstream, especially during the reign of John Paul II, even if they couldn’t bring him onside over the Iraq War. And they took pains to align themselves with papal and conciliar teaching, while carefully distinguishing away the inconvenient bits (just as liberal and progressive Catholics sometimes do). The characteristic MAGA posture, by contrast, is open rebellion, importing the populist and paranoid style into their relations with the Church: “not my pope!” “Leo is a communist!”

Again, all this is at least partly understandable as a sort of compromise formation for Catholics caught between Rome’s claims and American order. But is the compromise as necessary today as it was in the 20th century? Mid-century Catholics like Murray, after all, were responding to a highly coherent American order whose counterpoint was Communist totalitarianism. Today’s American order, by contrast, is far more messy and internally incoherent.

Is it necessary to compromise with a pro-Israel hawkism that that faces a negative-47-point favorability deficit among men under 50? Doesn’t it make sense, rather, to offer a Catholic conceptual framework and practical cooperation to rising progressive forces whose economic and geopolitical vision is more congenial to Rome’s? Why should disagreements on some issues prevent such collaboration, when differences with the Right didn’t prevent the formation of an alliance that lasted some 70 years?

Leo can’t force a rethink of the Iran War in Washington. But he has already sounded the death knell for Catholic conservatism of the kind which flourished in the late 20th century and, especially, the post-9/11 years; and which still guides a narrow but influential corridor of Right-wing Catholic punditry and the donors who maintain it. It’s up to American Catholics to figure out how to replace the old compromise.

Leo has been increasingly explicit, over recent weeks, about condemning the conflict in Iran. His Palm Sunday words have been interpreted as a rebuke specifically to those within the Trump administration who seem keen to accord the conflict a religious edge. I can see how people might think so when Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was recently reported praying: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation”, and imploring God to grant his soldiers “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.

Was this what prompted the Pope to tell the crowd in St Peter’s Square, on Sunday, that “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: ‘God is love! Have mercy!’”? In other contexts, the Pope has been happy to address military personnel, such as Italy’s Military Ordinariate; Roman Catholicism also has a lengthy and well-developed theory on what comprises “just war”.

But several notable Catholic Americans, considerably more Right-aligned than Pope Leo, have also expressed concerns over the justice of this war: either reserving judgment, or outright condemning it. What, in turn, this points to is a fairly recent but important change, internal to a bloc that American secular liberals used to treat as monolithic and also, they hoped, moribund: conservative Christians. Specifically, the growing influence of Catholics on the American Right — and in particular, theological differences that risk widening into real-world political fissures, catalyzed by the war in Iran.

The relationship between Roman Catholicism and America has never been entirely comfortable. The original Pilgrim Fathers were Puritan radicals, and the newly founded United States inherited their aversion to papal authority. Tensions reached boiling point in the 19th century, with a large influx of Catholic migrants to the USA from Germany and Ireland, leading to animosity and some anti-Catholic violence. Though this later eased, an era of relative indifference to Catholic Americans arguably just reflected their largely working-class status, and hence comparative lack of political clout.

Suggested reading

Will there be boots on the ground in Iran?

By James Newport

More recently, though, elite conservative America has grown steadily more Catholic, both in its politicians and also its intelligentsia. Vice-President JD Vance is a Catholic convert; Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a cradle Catholic. Six of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices are Catholic. A number of the influential New Right thinkers whose ideas have powered the Trumpist caucus, such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, are also Catholic.

And as highly educated, politically agentic Catholics have grown more numerous and influential in the USA, so the most influential Catholic of all is now also American: Leo XIV. But this sense of tentative rapprochement between the Church of Rome and the most constitutively Protestant of modern polities is now showing signs of tension — especially as it encroaches on the political instincts of the nation’s heartland Evangelical Christians.

This faultline has been thrown into relief by the war in Iran. From the outset, that conflict has been a joint US-Israeli operation, founded on the longstanding alliance between these nations. And while this is driven partly by resource and security concerns, in the view of many Evangelical Christians it also has a religious dimension. The secular liberal press has been keen to play this up, publishing pieces highlighting the religious views of Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, presumably with the aim of painting him as an irrational fanatic. But there’s also a grain of truth to it, in the sense that many Evangelical American Christians view Israel as having a special prophetic significance.

The suggested real-world corollary of this varies accordingly, but has often helped to underpin American support for Israel. Perhaps most prominently, the Dispensationalist method of Biblical exegesis, popularized in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby, interpreted the nation of Israel as a key centerpiece in the prophetic narrative of Jesus’ second coming. 

There are variations on dispensationalism, but the core of it is that Scripture should be interpreted literally, and God’s plan for the world is twin-track: one destiny for the elect of the church, and another for the nation of Israel, which will unfold once the elect are taken up in the Rapture. After this, a great struggle will ensue with Antichrist, in which the existing geopolitical nations will play an important role — especially Israel. This epic final struggle will end in the return of Jesus, with his already-raptured saints, to lead a thousand-year earthly reign as prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

It’s hard to say how many American Christians hold to some part of this worldview. The prophetic sensibility, and the millenarian feel, has arguably been baked in since the pilgrim days of Protestant radicalism. But, importantly, for the most part this broader strain of Christian thought tends to view Israel as both a legitimate state and people, with a right to exist, and also as having sacred significance.

A great many real-world political consequences flow from this. For example, in 2018, Hegseth suggested that a Jewish temple might one day be rebuilt on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was statement clearly referencing prophecies in both Jewish and Christian traditions — but challenging to Muslims given this is currently the site of Al-Aqsa mosque, a sacred site in Islam. Prophecies concerning the destruction and reconstruction of temples in this location form an ongoing religious backbeat to conflict in the region. Hegseth has reportedly moved away from dispensationalism, toward more “postmilennial” views, but is likely to be aware of such narratives.

By contrast, the Roman Catholic view on Middle Eastern geopolitics tends to take a less prescriptive, or literalist line. As formalized in the Catechism published after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a special theological link exists between the historic peoples of Israel and the Catholic Church. But, importantly, within Catholic thought the theological descent from Judaism has not generally been taken to imply specific political obligations, or prophecies concerning events in the temporal world. The modern Church is emphatic about condemning any policy that might legitimize antisemitic bigotry, but stops short of the prophetic account of Israel embraced, for example, by dispensationalists.

Thus, there is often more reticence among Roman Catholics than Evangelicals on the matter of active political involvement in the Middle East. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, for example, that JD Vance is widely viewed as the most skeptical voice in Trump’s administration as regards ongoing American involvement in Iran.

This is where Pope Leo appears to be coming from when he speaks out against the war. Explicitly: that Christians ought to aspire to peace and brotherhood, not war. And, perhaps, implicitly: that there is nothing of special Biblical significance about this war. It’s just a war, and peace is better.

The challenge for faithful Catholics in this context is treading the acutely politicized line between prophetic accounts of real-world politics, and allowing reticence to slip, due to crude thinking or lack of charity, into hostility toward Jewish people. In the case of the commentator Candace Owens, a Catholic convert, this appears to have become highly conspiratorial, albeit by now at best ambivalently Catholic (Leo XIV has spoken out repeatedly against giving harbor to antisemitism).

More from this author

Trump's betrayal of his base

By Mary Harrington

Recently, too, the former Miss USA Carrie Prejean Boller was removed from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after a heated argument with a Jewish commission member on Zionism. Boller is a recent Catholic convert from Evangelical Christianity, but was later taken to task by the conservative American bishop Robert Barron, also a member of that commission, for her intemperate behavior.

Perhaps in a spirit of seeking to resolve these tensions, not long after the Boller brouhaha Jay Richards, a Heritage Foundation fellow (and another Catholic convert) published a careful effort at disambiguation, in a DC Catholic publication, on the various types of Zionism. If this all sounds too inside-baseball for words, the takeaway should be that an American Right that was once overwhelmingly Evangelical or WASP is now adapting, on the hoof, to the presence and considerable influence of homegrown American Catholics, whose perspective on long-settled matters interacts in sometimes surprising ways with existing currents of American Christian belief.

Careful bridge-building of Richards’ kind may yet achieve a new accommodation. But one thing that seems likely as a consequence of this is ongoing internal disagreement within the American Right on how literally, or indeed militarily, Biblical prophecy should be pursued in the Holy Land. In his article on Zionism, Richards suggests the apocalyptic account of Israel that emerged from dispensational cultures is viewed among other Christian denominations as “over-reading, if not misreading, of often cryptic biblical texts”. This careful phrasing, by a seasoned Washington philosopher-politico, is the kind of muted admonition that can translate down the line into substantial differences of view on the best course of action.

Historically, as a majority-Protestant nation, America has not accorded much weight to what the Pope says. Should Catholic influence continue to rise within the Land of the Free, might that change? Would this even count for much, set against the calculations on resources and trade routes empires have to make to preserve their might? Who knows.

But it’s not impossible that, should the balance of power continue to shift between Catholic and Evangelical decision-makers, so too in time the American diplomatic stance in relation to the Middle East may also become less interventionist. In the meantime, the bombs keep falling; and I dare say, in Rome, Leo XIV will continue to pray for peace.

Some years before he turned to killing, Dorian had a church-going phase. “He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement”, Wilde tells us. He was fascinated by the “fuming censers” that London’s altar boys, dressed in “lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers”. Confessionals amazed him. Could it really be that modern men and women would pause and whisper “the true story of their lives” to a consecrated stranger? Dorian might have hated the melancholy theatrics of Ash Wednesday, where the living take a mark of death — ashes and dust — on their faces. He had a horror of death. But church was just a phase for him – and having seen it, he changes.

One of the most interesting things about Basil’s death scene is that it never changes, though Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray more than once. First, a 13-chapter version of the novel appeared in an avant-garde American magazine in the summer of 1890. The following year, a 20-chapter version, the one we now read, came out with a London publisher. Recently, much has been made of the fact that Dorian Gray was edited — in part, by Wilde — to keep it out of the Victorian courts. During his calamitous trial in 1895, Wilde’s adversaries called the second version a “purged edition”. That is a hostile description. But it is still fascinating to read The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, based on Wilde’s 13-chapter typescript and handwritten corrections. (He was an early fan of typewriters.) Here, Wilde shines in an unfiltered way. And he still has Basil say, just before he is murdered: “Pray, Dorian, pray.”

More from this author

Ezra Pound’s Yuletide message

By David Lloyd Dusenbury

What is happening here? Why is the smart gentleman who fell in love with Dorian (as we would now say), and painted him because he “worshiped” him (as Basil says), now begging him to pray? “Isn’t there a verse somewhere”, Dorian’s portraitist wonders: “Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them white as snow?” There is, in fact, such a verse. You can find it in the first chapter of the Book of Isaiah. But again, we might ask, what is Wilde’s uncensored aesthete doing quoting a biblical prophet just seconds before Dorian slaughters him?

The answer is that Wilde’s splendidly decadent novel is essentially Christian.

Now, this is not how most Victorian critics read The Picture of Dorian Gray. The St James’s Gazette attacked the novel for its “esoteric prurience”. A similar tone is taken by the Scots Observer. There, Dorian Gray is called “false art”. It “deals with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department”. Meaning? It is not so much a crime novel as a criminal one. And that does seem to be the insinuation. “Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten.” We might call this the normal Victorian reading of Dorian Gray.

But some Victorian Christians read Wilde’s “remarkable novelette” differently. A critic writing for the Christian Leader sees Dorian Gray as a work of “subtle power”. The “gilded paganism” it depicts “has been staining the later years of the Victorian epoch”. But Wilde doesn’t whitewash Victorian hedonism. On the contrary: “In the tragic picture of Dorian Gray’s life, given up to sensuous pleasure, with its mingled culture and corruption, Mr Wilde has performed a service to his age.” Dorian’s fate is a warning, and the Christian Leader’s critic feels that “the motive dominating the writer” is redemptive. Already in the summer of 1890, then, Christians were able to read Dorian Gray as a deliciously atmospheric morality play.

Wilde himself officially denies that his novel is immoral or moral. Irritated by Dorian Gray’s detractors, he wrote a preface to the book in 1891 — a sort of manifesto — in which he famously states that there is “no such thing as a moral or an immoral book”. Whatever wickedness Dorian Gray’s haters might impute to it, the novel contains no “ugly meanings”. It is a “beautiful thing”, and beautiful things are perfectly useless. L’Art is strictly pour l’art. To even ask what a novel does is the mark of a philistine.

Wilde’s manifesto is charming, but not convincing. First, because he confided to friends that Dorian Gray would be “ultimately recognized as a real work of art with a strong ethical lesson inherent in it”. And second, because Dorian Gray is structured by its antihero’s obsession with a “dangerous novel” (in the uncensored version: it later becomes a “poisonous book”). Stereotypically, it is French: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel, Against Nature, is clearly what Wilde has in mind.

If a novel can reorient your soul and subvert your life, as Huysmans’s does Dorian’s, then novels are not useless. Whatever Wilde may say in his Dandyist manifesto, it is not out of place for us to ask: Is The Picture of Dorian Gray a “dangerous novel”? And to my mind, it is. Dangerous, and decadent, and Christian.

The figure of Dorian, a name that hints at “Greek love”, is immensely complex: because Wilde himself is. Dorian is a modern Narcissus; a pathological love of his own youth and beauty, which he senses for the first time in Basil’s painting, binds him “like a revelation”. He is also a Victorian Antinoüs. Dorian’s face, like that of Antinoüs — the Emperor Hadrian’s dashing young lover who drowned in Egypt in the year 130, and was then worshipped throughout the Empire — embodies a cultural epoch. And he is a Decadent icon: Husymans’s sickly French antihero, Des Esseintes, is outshone by his sleek English imitator, Dorian Gray.

Ultimately, though, Dorian is a symbol of doom. Of damnation, we might even say. Or that is what Wilde seems to conclude in his prison cell, half a decade after writing The Picture of Dorian Gray. As he puts it in his tremendous prison-house letter, De Profundis, doom is the “purple thread” that “runs through the gold cloth” of his Gothic novel. And this doom has a specific shape — the shape of two prayers. One that is made, and the other that is not.

There is nothing pious about Dorian’s first prayer. When Dorian sees how attractive he is in Basil’s portrait — and more importantly, how young he is — he cries out (in the uncensored version):

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will always remain young … If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this – for this – I would give everything! Yes: there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!”

It is not so much what is said here, as it what is unsaid, that makes Dorian’s outburst a prayer — or rather, a sort of satanic incantation. For hidden in the phrase “the whole world” is an echo of one of Jesus’s sayings that the debonair cynic, Lord Henry Wotton, calls to mind in the novel’s final pages:

The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. “By the way, Dorian”, he said, after a pause, “‘what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose’ – how does the quotation run? – ‘his own soul’?”

That is pretty much how the quotation runs. No Victorian, however louche, could forget the stern words in which Jesus warned his own decadent age — or, as he put it, his “adulterous and sinful generation” — that everyone has, or rather is, something that can be lost but never exchanged. “For what shall it profit a man”, Jesus asks in the Gospel of Mark, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Dorian’s soul is the thing — or, rather, the only thing in the world which is not a thing — that he offers up when he says: “There is nothing in the whole world I would not give!” It is Dorian’s absolute sincerity which makes his wish a sort of prayer. And Wilde signals what is happening. He does not want us to miss the scene’s occult aspect. So, he tells us that the boy flings himself on Basil’s divan and buries his face in the cushions “as if he were praying”. The nightmare begins here, with a sort of prayer.

From that moment on, Dorian’s soul somehow takes possession of Basil’s picture. The artifact ceases to be a static object and takes on a “monstrous soul-life” of its own. It ceases to radiate Dorian’s boyish innocence and becomes a deteriorating “image of his sin”. Later in the novel, a woman whose life Dorian had ruined — one of many — calls him “the devil’s bargain”. “They say”, she says, “he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face”. With his pretty face, Dorian gains the world of his day — and in the lines and brushstrokes of a once-pretty picture, he watches himself lose his soul.

At first, this horrifies him. But the further Dorian goes into “the madness of pride”, the more pleasure he takes in his picture’s decomposition. Exactly 70 years before Gustav Metzger introduced the concept of “auto-destructive art” in London, in 1961, Wilde gave us a self-destructing portrait. (The Victorians always get there first, I find.) The occult deconstruction of Dorian’s image visualizes “the real degradation of his life”.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a dream of what Wilde calls (in the uncensored version) “the hideousness of sin”. Sin is Dorian’s doom. And the description of his spiritual hideousness, which corrupts his virtual body, seems to have been inspired by leprosy — a real affliction which is common in the Gospels. As Wilde well knew, leprosy is the archetypal sickness that Jesus cures in the four “Gothic novels” that are enshrined in the New Testament. (Are the Gospels “Gothic”? Well, they are not lacking in a sensitive protagonist, tyrannical rulers, demonic possession, preternatural cures, and persecuted innocence — and it is not for nothing that Wilde’s lurid tragedy, Salomé, is set in Jesus’ milieu.) In Wilde’s original typescript of the novel, this is how he describes the self-destruction of Basil’s portrait: “Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were eating the thing away.”

Dorian is a spiritual leper. His soul is collapsing in on itself. His essence is decomposing, while his surface glows. And Basil tells him, in the scene with which we began, how his drama of undoing had started: “The prayer of your pride has been answered.” It is, perversely, out of pride that Dorian relinquished his soul. It is out of pride that he chose the “auto-destruction” of his soul over the dissolution of his body. And when the novelist tells us that the “pride of individualism” is “half the fascination of sin”, Wilde is channeling hundreds of years of Christian moral theology.

Suggested Reading

Why artists choose Catholicism

By Valerie Stivers

But if a “prayer of pride” sets Dorian’s doom in motion — what is the other prayer that settles his fate? What is the one he never makes? Basil tells him this, in Wilde’s original draft: “The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.” What Wilde then writes could not be simpler. It could even appear to be flat:

Dorian Gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. “It is too late, Basil.”

Too late to pray? Too late to repent? Too late for a prayer of repentance to be heard? Dorian, who has just told Basil that each of us “has Heaven and Hell in him”, is no longer interested in Heaven. Hell is now his scene. A double possession seems to be at work here. Not only is Basil’s picture possessed in some way by Dorian’s sick soul, but Dorian now has “the eyes of a devil”.

Could he really regain the eyes of an angel, just through prayer? That is the idea. Whatever Wilde may have believed or half-believed or wanted to believe, that is his Christian literary conceit. And it is not original to him.

I feel sure that Dorian’s dull words — “It is too late” — are lifted from a scene in Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, where the “brave doctor” asks his psychic companions — one evil, one good: “Is’t not too late?” The evil angel assures him: “Too late.” But the good angel contradicts: “Never too late, if Faustus will repent.” The good angel’s reply is the radically humanizing idea behind the Gospels and the Faust myth, and the Dorian drama. (In Dorian Gray, Basil is a good angel and Lord Henry a corrupting influence.) It is never too late, if a sinner will repent.

But that is also why Wilde’s decadent, Christian novel is dangerous. “All art is at once surface and symbol”, he writes in his Dandyist manifesto, adding: “Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” The Picture of Dorian Gray can only be read at your peril, because it is a rich dramatization of the strange fact that life can only be lived at your immense peril.

“Art is a symbol”, Wilde somewhere reminds us, “because man is a symbol”. And Dorian is a compelling figure of the weird fact that by the time we become conscious of ourselves, some prayer of pride has already been made. Some sort of fall has already taken place. And the question facing him, and us, through the rest of the drama is just this: Is it really too late for a prayer of repentance?

He was right about the general state of mind of the artist. I, a writer, could attest to that. But Roman Catholicism, the religion of scolds and prudes and patriarchal oppression, seemed unlikely to help anyone. Little did I know that a few weeks later, I would have my own mystical conversion experience and, in 2023, would become a member of Father Paul’s congregation. 

Nor did I realize I would be part of a trend. Catholicism is hip once again, and writers, artists, and intellectuals are converting in droves. One church that draws such an audience, St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, has seen 10-fold growth in conversions in just a few years: more than 100 participants signed up for its catechetical program this year, up from 15 just three years ago. Eighty percent of the congregation’s members are in their 20s and 30s, according to Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican Friar who is a priest at St. Joseph’s. Numbers are similar at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, another Manhattan parish that is, for lack of a better word, cool.  

A new book, Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, by UK-based Irish journalist Melanie McDonagh, addresses a wave of conversions among the artists and intellectuals of the previous century, and incidentally sheds some light on our own time. 

More than half a million people in England and Wales converted to Roman Catholicism between 1910 and 1960, McDonagh reports, including an unusually high concentration of the era’s most influential artists and writers: Aubrey Beardsley, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Anscombe were just a few of the bold-face names. They were going against their country — where the Church of England reigned, and Catholicism was viewed as the superstition of the underclass — and their era, in which religiosity overall was waning. The trend ended abruptly after Vatican II, which, ironically, was the Church’s attempt to modernize and make the religion more accessible and appealing.

More from this author

Enough of the Literary It Girl

By Valerie Stivers

McDonagh’s book is organized chronologically and by artist, starting in the 1890s with Oscar Wilde, who had a lifelong flirtation with Catholicism and converted in 1900 on his death bed. Wilde’s motivations, she says, were similar to those of many of the fin de siècle artists, in terms of being a mixture of mysticism and rebellion. His cohort may have been drawn to religion, but it was also reacting against Victorian elders, who’d embraced science, reason, and a deadening kind of materialism. If it wasn’t Catholicism, it was theosophy à la William Butler Yeats, or the occult.

Catholicism in the early 20th century was also a form of resistance against the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, McDonagh argues. She quotes art historian John Rothenstein’s theory that since the Catholic Church’s primary concern is the salvation of the individual, and since the Church demands the individual take responsibility for his own salvation, Catholicism worked against the “standardizing tendencies inherent in modern society” and offered adherents a kind of autonomy otherwise lacking in their lives. A commune and back-to-the land movement ran alongside the conversion trend, even back then. 

In many ways, Converts gets a slow start with Wilde and his peers. McDonagh is a workmanlike writer, presenting the biographical details without much peering into her subjects’ souls — the matter of greatest interest in a conversion story. We learn that people entered the Church because their friends did, or because they decided it was “the real thing,” or as a matter of reasoned theology. Many were influenced by Cardinal John Henry Newman (now a saint and Doctor of the Church), a former Anglican priest and theologian who first labored to transform the Church of England to be more like Rome, and then abandoned it, at great personal cost, for Rome itself. Newman died in 1890, but his writings led several of McDonagh’s subjects to conclude the truth of Rome’s claim to being the one true Church, the only one that had “continuity with the pre-Reformation Church,” as novelist and Catholic priest Robert Hugh Benson put it. 

Converts renders this profound transformation somewhat bloodlessly — we understand that Newman was instrumental, but don’t quite catch the divine spark. Newman, more than anyone else in the modern era, made the case for a definitive and exclusionary Catholic truth; by rejecting the Church of England, he rejected the Reformation and all of Protestantism. His claim is historical — the Roman church is the only body that can trace an unbroken lineage to the apostles — and metaphysical: there is one truth, not many, and one institution to interpret it. Modern, liberal thinking often attempts to elide the radicalism here, imagining this as just one of many options that “all lead to the same place,” as the cliché goes. But that isn’t how the Catholics see it.

 Even if McDonagh doesn’t quite bring Newman alive, themes emerge after he appears. The converts are looking for this kind of definitive truth. They leave the Church of England because of its Protestant waffling on dogma, or because they’re inspired by a longing for “spiritual order,” as convert and literary critic Maurice Baring said. To acknowledge “reality” was to become free, he wrote. Writer, convert, and Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton explained it thus: “As for the fundamental reasons for a man joining the Catholic Church, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid, objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other is that he seeks liberation from his sins.” 

I joined the Church for neither reason — at least, not explicitly. I knew little of Catholic dogma. However, much of the joy and glory of the past few years has been in watching the world realign along this axis, as I conform my behavior to God’s truth, not my own. I’ve found answers hiding in plain sight to questions I’ve been asking for a lifetime, and it has been liberating. 

Likewise, the stories in the second half of Converts seem to center on Catholicism’s fundamental claims and challenging structure — though, of course, ultimately they center on God. The religion made significant inroads among the English population during World War I. For Catholics, it matters if you have confessed your sins and received absolution before going into battle; the ritual is more than symbolic. Consequently, the Church sent its priests to the front lines to offer such sacramental ministry, while Church of England policy was for clergymen to avoid the fighting. McDonagh quotes Robert Graves’s observation that the enlisted men had “no respect” for stay-behind clerics, who seemed to have little more to offer than a final cigarette. Graves wrote admiringly of a Catholic priest, who “after all the officers had been killed, ‘stripped off his black badges’ and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.” Elsewhere, we read of priests crawling through the rubble during the blitz, to hear confessions and absolve trapped survivors. 

Poet, painter, and engraver David Jones, whom McDonagh describes as “one of the most significant artists of the 20th century,” was first called to the faith during the war, when he had an epiphany after stumbling onto a Catholic mass in the “panorama of desolation” at the front. Jones discovered a reality to the service that he felt had always been missing during the Anglican office. Later, he wrote that artists had to be Catholic, and that “even if the Catholic religion weren’t true, you’d have to, [as an artist] become one … because the whole notion of art … is frightfully like the doctrine of transubstantiation.” A work of art, he believed, fundamentally was two things: an impression of a thing, and a thing itself. Just as the mass wasn’t a mere symbol or memorial of the sacrifice of Christ, but a portal renewing the real thing.  

Suggested reading

The faith in our genes

By Tim DeRoche

The acerbic novelist Evelyn Waugh believed the religion was equally essential for artists, but understood it differently. If an artist didn’t understand the relationship between God and man, the work would be a failure, Waugh thought. In his view, Henry James was the last of the great writers. And modern, secular novelists, he wrote, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character — that of being God’s creatures with a defined purpose.” If the artist didn’t understand the true grounds of man’s existence, Waugh believed the characters could only be “pure abstractions,” a stakeless and boring task for literature.

It’s not a bad theory of what’s happened to books in our increasingly secular age, though a great Catholic novel revival has yet to accompany the 2020s wave of conversions. To understand the trend today, many of the ideas in McDonagh’s book are useful. As at the fin de siècle, we live in a science-ruled, rational, materialist time, one which often seems to have little to offer the deeper human longings. Techno-feudalism is even more oppressive to our individuality than industrialization was. And of course, in a time of ultimate permissiveness, a devout and restrictive religion is a tiny bit contrarian and rebellious. 

Father Teller floated other reasons for the conversion trend to be happening now. “Gen Z is lonely,” he said, noting that the cohort came of age during the pandemic. “And they’re looking to be told who they are, and who cares for them.” He speaks frequently to young artists, musicians, and intellectuals seeking to convert, though they’re not the majority of his flock. Another reason for the appeal, he adds, is that “all the institutions are breaking apart, but the institution of institutions, the Church, remains.” 

A newly traditionalist bent in some parishes (and notably, the popular ones) — less Vatican II, more Latin and “bells and smells” — may also be playing a role. The final chapter of Converts is a sad one, as McDonagh details what the changes of the 1960s wrought upon many of her subjects. She’s careful to disclaim that many people may have liked the new mass and the more accessible format, but those drawn to the Church by authority and tradition did not. The collapse in conversion numbers is not conclusively because of Vatican II, but after it, collapse they did: to 6,046 new adult converts in England and Wales in 1970, down from more than 15,000 a decade earlier In both 2021 and 2022, the number was under 2,000. Still, McDonagh writes, there has been a modest increase lately, and “the story continues.” More artists and communicators should only amplify the trend. 

“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred,” he says, “have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.” If that were the end of it, Vance would be a typical politician of an earlier age, and we likely wouldn’t be sitting down for an interview in his library at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Vance isn’t typical. About to take off for the Christmas vacation, America’s first millennial veep is dressed in a crisp button-down and fleece vest with dark denim. His getup strikes a sharp contrast with his old-timey surroundings, lined with leather-bound books by and about vice presidents. His own memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is among the newer additions; a medieval-style painted crucifix stands out from the shelves.

More to the point, Vance is acutely sensitive to subterranean political and cultural shifts which until recently only registered on the seismometer known as the internet, but which are starting to remake the world aboveground. Fuentes — who has called Second Lady Usha Vance a “jeet” and labeled the vice president a race-traitor for marrying her — is but one jagged spike on the seismic wave. And to Vance, not even an especially pronounced one.

Says Vance: “I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That is, the Hitler-praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.

The debate descended into out and out civil war last week at a gathering of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, with Ben Shapiro denouncing the podcaster and Vance ally Tucker Carlson — and being denounced, in turn, by Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly, representing the insurgent Israel-critical camp. The vice president tells me he hasn’t yet watched the dueling speeches but thinks it’s healthy for the debate to continue. In his own address to TPUSA Sunday, Vance glossed over the controversy, rejecting “purity tests.”

Tucker Carlson, for example, gets a robust defense from Vance. “Tucker’s a friend of mine,” he tells me. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

He goes on: “The idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

What’s really afoot, he thinks, is “gatekeeping”, and people are “trying to settle their own ideological scores” — especially with respect to Washington’s policies in the Middle East.

More from this author

Why Nikki Haley’s son went radical

By Sohrab Ahmari

“I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, and that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on,” Vance says. “But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes.”  

Fuentes thus refracts — and, with his noxious rhetoric, distorts — a legitimate discontent. Says Vance: “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we ought to have that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans are not antisemitic, they’re never going to be antisemitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate.”

What about Fuentes’s promotion of an overt white racial politics, complete with liberal use of the N-word? Is Vance worried by that stuff? Yes — but he believes there have been far worse offenders who got away with racial politics in recent years, because their version of it was aligned with elite prerogatives and progressive moral hierarchies.

“Let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity,” he later adds. “Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family” — not least, Mrs Vance. “Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the past five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good.”

He goes on: “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

Then, too, Right-wing racialism is, in large part, a reaction against bipartisan elites who for decades maintained a porous border, with the flow of newcomers surging to a flood under the Biden administration. “That necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love,” he says. “Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence.”

But wouldn’t Vance’s own children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — be treated with contempt in the Groypers’ ideal America? The difference, for Vance, is once more about possession of actual power to effectuate policy. “If you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power.”

Calling out some of his likely opponents in the 2028 contest, he adds, “It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids ‘jeet,’ and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.” (Khanna, the Indian-American California lawmaker, has said he’d be “fine” with his kids being disadvantaged by race-based affirmative action.)

All of this raises a deeper question: who counts as a “true” American? For many on the hard Right, the fashionable answer is “Heritage Americans”. That category excludes anyone who arrived after the initial wave of Anglo settlement, sometimes defined as narrowly as the Mayflower and its descendants. This treats as lesser citizens not just recent arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also Ellis Islanders like Italians and Jews, possibly even the Scotch-Irish.

What does Vance make of Heritage Americanism? He worries it poses more questions than it answers. “Is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century?,” the vice president asks. He tries to strike a balance between credal nationalism — Americans are people who believe in American ideals like liberty and equal justice — and thicker notions of belonging, emphasizing shared language, culture, and history. Both, he says, have something to them.

The Heritage Americanists, he argues, grant too little to the credal aspect. “We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project,” he says, “a project that is very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being.”

Pure credal nationalists, meanwhile, forget that people are more than their abstract commitments: “Do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for 10 generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it.”

Contra the Heritage Americanists, Vance believes that culture and identity are transmissible over time. “The racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants — what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendants of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s not consistent with American practice, either.”

I ask him if he’d countenance differing legal treatment for the Mayflower descendant versus the person who received his passport 15 minutes ago. “No, no!” he replies. “Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally.”

But: “I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants — even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people — you do change the country in some profound way. . . . The problem with American immigration over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

More from this author

Why the MAGA crowd loves foreign lands

By Sohrab Ahmari

For a much longer span, of course, it was religion that defined Western identity, with Christendom encompassing a patchwork of nations otherwise at each other’s throats. Can faith still serve as a sort of moral glue today, in societies that are fast descending into what used to be called the “Blade Runner scenario”, after director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi dystopia that portrays 21st-century Los Angeles as a city divided among polyglot ethnic formations arrayed tensely against each other?

“When I talk about America having some common culture,” Vance says, “I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians. . . . There’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity.”

And yet, religion often clashes with contemporary politics. Vance’s own spiritual leader as a Roman Catholic, Pope Leo XIV, takes a much more universalist approach to questions of immigration and assimilation, and has reportedly deputized the US bishops to counter the Trump administration’s hawkish border policies. How does Vance reconcile his religious leader with his political positions?

While he welcomes the Vatican’s voice in international affairs, he thinks of its counsels as one moral lens that must be applied alongside other perspectives. The Bishop of Rome “is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on.” The “dignity” of would-be migrants is part of it. So are “the wages of workers” and “the social cohesion of the United States of America.”

“Balkanization and ethnic hatred,” reflected in the rise of the likes of Fuentes & Co., are thus mostly symptoms, to Vance’s mind. Moralizing denunciation, in his telling, will do little to address the underlying disease. Critics will no doubt see his reluctance to draw brighter red lines as a political strategy: taking care of his Right flank ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign. 

He is certainly careful about whom to denounce and on which grounds. Still, I walk away from JD Vance’s home concluding that the position he espouses — the need to renegotiate questions of immigration and belonging to avoid a descent into even worse ethnic strife — is a sincerely held expression of his worldview. Whether it can be translated into a responsible politics will be the big test of the next few years.

UnHerd subscribers can read the full transcript of Sohrab Ahmari’s interview with JD Vance here.

Two weeks earlier, the pope instructed the American bishops to take a stronger stance in defense of migrants caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet. The pontiff suggested that he would “love” to see a statement from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, according to one bishop who attended a meeting with him. Another attendee reported that the pope would like to see the US church speak “forcefully and in unity” on migrants’ rights.

Already, many individual US bishops and Catholic groups are doing just that. Yet for such interventions to prove fruitful, the Church must take a more holistic, nuanced, and, indeed, Catholic approach: one that takes into account not just the needs of people moving out of the Global South, but also the limitations of the Global North; not just the dignity of the migrant, but also that of workers and the poor in recipient countries; not just the threat of Western xenophobia, but the imperative to ensure a decent baseline of cultural cohesion.

To be sure, there is much to object to in Washington’s stance: the White House posting photos on X (formerly Twitter) of  “deportation porn” of rows of men being flown out in shackles; the government’s foot-dragging when ordered by the courts to facilitate the return of a man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador; the difficulties in getting pastoral care to illegal immigrants being held at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida; and much else of the kind. These are among the excesses for which the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts can justly be criticized.

But with immigration enforcement as in other areas, abusus non tollit usum — the abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use. And when we neglect the proper use in order to avoid abuse, we risk falling into an opposite extreme error. 

As the bishops themselves sometimes acknowledge at least in passing, the general policy of enforcing immigration laws is legitimate. And while the Trump administration’s efforts have been excessively harsh at times, the surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden was so massive that any attempt to reverse it was bound to seem draconian by comparison. It is contrary to reason and justice to speak as if only Trump’s critics have a moral leg to stand on.

Suggested reading

How to win American citizenship

By Kat Rosenfield

It is also contrary to the Church’s own longstanding teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations are obliged “to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” But it qualifies this by adding that such nations are obliged to do so only “to the extent they are able.”  

And the Catechism goes on to say: “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

The Church acknowledges, then, that a nation may put conditions on immigration, that it need not take in all those who want to enter it, and that those it does allow in must follow the law. 

The Catechism reflects the longstanding teaching of the popes. For example, Pope Pius XII, while commending the United States for its generosity toward immigrants, observed in 1946 that “it is not surprising that changing circumstances have brought about a certain restriction being placed on foreign immigration. For in this matter, not only the interests of the immigrant but the welfare of the country also must be consulted.”

The economic needs of its own citizens are among the considerations a government may weigh when determining how many immigrants to let in. In a 1996 address, Pope St. John Paul II affirmed that “illegal immigration should be prevented” and that “the supply of foreign labor is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers.” Likewise, in a 2011 address, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that host countries also have a “legitimate concern for security and social coherence” so that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers” and “immigrants … have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.”

And in a 1988 document from the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, we read that “it is up to the public powers who are responsible for the common good to determine the number of refugees or immigrants which their country can accept, taking into consideration its possibilities for employment and its perspectives for development, but also the urgency of the need of other people.” Overly heavy migration waves, the document warns, can lead to “rejection,” especially when “another culture is perceived as directly threatening the identity and customs of the local community that receives them.”

Note that the Church here explicitly affirms that it is not churchmen, but rather “the public powers who are responsible for the common good” who have the right and responsibility to determine how many immigrants to let in. Note, too, that the Church acknowledges that in making this determination, public authorities may take account of economic considerations, as well as those having to do with social and cultural cohesion.

The legitimacy of this concern for national identity is something that has been affirmed repeatedly in the Catholic tradition. In his book Memory and Identity, first published in 2005, John Paul II affirmed that the duty of patriotism is an extension of our obligation to honor our parents, and writes: “Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love.” 

Several popes have been quite frank about the social problems that can develop when a minority cultural group fails to assimilate to the larger culture in which it resides. For example, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope St. John XXIII observed that “these minority groups, in reaction, perhaps, to the enforced hardships of their present situation, or to historical circumstances, frequently tend to magnify unduly characteristics proper to their own people.  They even rate them above those human values which are common to all mankind, as though the good of the entire human family should subserve the interests of their own particular groups.” He went on to call for such groups to associate themselves more closely with the majorities among whom they live, and not to harness their identity to separateness.

Pope Francis, too, acknowledged the problem. In a 2016 press conference, he noted that while “hearts must not be closed to refugees … those who govern need prudence … A political price can be paid for an imprudent judgment, for accepting more than can be integrated.” Non-integration, Francis warned, leads to migrants becoming “a ghetto. A culture that does not develop in relationship with another culture, this is dangerous.”

Most recently, Pope Leo XIV, in an address in which he praised Italy’s generosity to migrants, immediately went on to underscore “the importance of constructively integrating those arriving into the values ​​and traditions of Italian society.” 

Yes, there are yahoos and jingoists who go beyond a healthy love of country to a sinful hostility towards people of other nations. But it is unjust and uncharitable to accuse all of those who are concerned about the cultural cohesion and economic needs of their own country of harboring this dishonorable motivation.

Suggested reading

How American is the Pope?

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

For its part, the Church has treated immigration as it does every other major question of public policy: not just a matter of individual rights and dignity — though these are indeed important — but also of duties to the common good of the whole. Thought of this way, the Catholic position on immigration doesn’t lend itself well to simplistic “pro” or “anti” posturing.

The truth is that there are two, equally Catholic sides in the debate over immigration. One side thinks that the imperative to welcome the migrant is what most needs emphasis today. The other thinks that preserving law and order, and the economic well-being and cultural identity of the nation is what is currently most urgent. Both can appeal to moral premises rooted in the Catholic tradition. Their dispute is about how best to balance the various relevant considerations under contemporary circumstances — a matter of prudential judgment about which reasonable people can disagree.

In the 21st century, that prudential determination must take into account new realities: such as the fact that many of today’s newcomers are economic migrants relying on strained asylum systems to get through borders; and the fact that developed economies are already bereft of high-wage, reliable manufacturing jobs, pushing many native-born workers into service sectors buffeted by even cheaper migrant labor; and the identitarian turmoil wrought by decades of high migration and failed assimilation. 

The bishops have a pastoral obligation to acknowledge the concerns of both sides, rather than speaking as if only one side is truly Catholic. It is precisely when people think their legitimate concerns are not being taken seriously that they are most tempted to fall into extremism. In his essay “A Defense of Patriotism,” G. K. Chesterton warned that when a nation does not cultivate a sober “patriotism of the head and heart,” it will sink instead into a thuggish chauvinism “of its fists and its boots.” 

The remedy to this excess is not to retreat to the opposite error, but to insist on holding the middle ground — the true patriotism described by St. John Paul II as a part of the Fourth Commandment to honor father and mother. “What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous jingoism,” advised Chesterton, “is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly.”

This rhetoric — by turns timorous and aggressive — blurs once vital distinctions between Christian confessions and denominations. Miriam Cates, a former Tory MP and evangelical Anglican, called on “British Christians” to drop their suspicion of Kirk, she employed a collective noun with which few churchgoers would have been comfortable in previous decades, when rifts between the Church of England and nonconformist chapel, Catholic and Protestant ran deep. In the United States, the veneration of Kirk has been a strangely ecumenical matter. 

Kirk, after all, was a Bible-bashing evangelical Protestant who condemned the Papacy. His funeral resembled a glitzy megachurch service. Yet, Roman Catholics have been his most emotional eulogists. Cardinal Dolan of New York likened his speaking tours to the missionary journeys of Saint Paul. Bishop Robert Barron, an energetic podcaster, was reminded of the philosophical method of Socrates and Aristotle. The images of a saintly, smiling Kirk proliferating across America oddly resemble Carlo Acutis, the Millennial influencer recently canonized by the Church for seeking to rescue the young for religion.

More from this author

The myth of Scouse exceptionalism

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

Christianity in this charged moment is no longer an intricate constellation of disputed beliefs but something easier to grasp: an identity. To be a Christian is to commit oneself to a concentric circle of values — the family, the nation, the West, civilization itself — that are under attack. Those who oppose this Rightward tilt are ironically just as confident in offering capsule definitions of what being a Christian is. Rowan Williams headed the signatories of an open letter against Tommy Robinson’s march, protesting that “the cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other” and should not be used to incite division: “Jesus calls us to love both our neighbors and our enemies and to welcome the stranger.” The Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals who signed alongside the former Archbishop of Canterbury would once have regarded his church as an impediment to the gospel and at worst a corrupt institution. He would have seen their fervent biblicism as pretty naive.

The historian Udi Greenberg reminds us in a thoughtful recent book that this is hardly the first time that basic conceptions of mere Christianity have served as banners in culture wars. Though the political instrumentalization of faith now seems archetypally American, the crucible of the transformation he discusses was Western Europe in the early and mid-20th centuries, when the rising fear of Communism overcame earlier divisions between churches and confessions. The legacy of the Reformation ensured that these ran deep. Right down to the 20th century, Protestants and Catholics believed and worshiped in sharply and sometimes bitterly opposed ways from which they derived very different social and moral doctrines.

Since the Reformation, no one in this fractured Christendom had been able to agree on what counted as a Christian family. Protestant propagandists claimed that the celibate clergy of Rome came between man and wife by forcing women to spill their intimate secrets in the confessional booth. Catholics riposted that Martin Luther had destroyed the sanctity of marriage when he had allowed divorce. There was no more unanimity when it came to the security or prosperity of nations. Protestants used the developing science of statistics to allege that the oppressive Roman priesthood made their flocks criminal and dishonest. Was it any wonder that in superstitious, Popish Naples there was one murder per 2,750 people, but only one per 270,000 in thrifty Presbyterian Scotland? 

It took a shared enemy to overcome these animosities. By the time of the First World War, Protestants and Catholics were converging in fear of socialism and feminism. When feminists said there was more to life than raising children — work or emotional and sexual fulfillment for instance — Protestant and Catholic writers borrowed one another’s arguments for their natural subordination and domesticity of women. In particular, they now began to identify Christianity not with a set of disputed dogmas but rather a basic defense of the nuclear family against the menace of selfish and “animalistic” pleasure. Their politicians joined in passing vice laws that cracked down on pornographic books or racy plays that undermined the sanctity of the home. In the Netherlands, for example, Catholics and Protestants teamed up in 1911 to close brothels and ramp up censorship.

The defense of a Christian culture could be progressive as well as puritanical. Protestants and Catholics built the first welfare states. Though Otto von Bismarck had once initiated a fierce “culture war” against the Roman Catholic Church, he worked in the 1880s with both Protestant and Catholic legislators to introduce unemployment and accident insurance for workers. The state and the churches would insulate workers against the temptations of socialism by tempering the worst cruelties of capitalism. 

In the aftermath of the First World War though, the continuing dread of socialism would push the churches into some terrible mistakes. The credible fear that the spread of Communism would initiate the same kind of ruthless dechristianization that was evident in Soviet Russia pushed leading Protestants and Catholics into collaboration with fascist and authoritarian governments. In Germany, both Protestant and Catholic theologians fell for Adolf Hitler’s airy claim that he stood for “positive Christianity” against “Judeo-Bolshevism”. According to the Catholic theologian Robert Grosche, Germany was now a “sacred space” in which confessional differences counted for less than race: the Germans formed a “community of blood” through which all believers came to Christ. They were so impressed by Nazism’s willingness to confront Soviet Russia that they barely noticed its viciousness, especially when it was exercised against groups such as the Jews who did not belong to their racial or religious community. What did bother them about the Nazis were trivial sins against family values: the “tendency toward nudism” of its youth organizations or the wartime policy of running brothels to service the troops.

Suggested Reading

The hagiography of Charlie Kirk

By Darren McGarvey

This hollowed out conception of Christian civilization, which provided rhetorical cover for wars of aggression and the mass murder of the Holocaust, should have collapsed with the Third Reich. Yet Christian theologians of all persuasions gamely pressed on with the defense of Christianity thereafter, dodging their share of responsibility for the Second World War with the implausible claim that believers “suffered more under the Nazis than others”. The defeat of Fascism allowed Christians to concentrate on what remained the real enemy: atheistic Soviet Communism, which now threatened to mount a “barbarian invasion” of the West. Catholics and Protestants mingled in Christian parties: one good example is West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, which hoped that revived democracies could prop up family life and the natural inequalities of capitalism. 

The defenders of Christianity slightly modernized it to make it more appealing to war-weary Europeans. They allowed that being a Christian was no obstacle to enjoying the economic miracle of postwar affluence. The opposite was true: once everyone could afford cars and televisions, exclaimed one Dutch Protestant, they would find it easier to be good Christian neighbors. Western politicians influenced by ecumenical thinkers presented human rights not just as a bastion against Soviet totalitarianism but as a precious bequest from Christianity. 

Winston Churchill described the European Convention on Human Rights which is so unpopular with Right-leaning Britons today as vital to the “health of… Christendom”. Catholic and Protestants agreed that they should now present marriage not as a brake on eroticism but a means to its highest fulfillment. In bestselling books, formerly stern theologians became marriage guidance counselors, urging Christian couples to chase mutual orgasms and try out multiple positions, allowing that there was much more to sex than procreation. The French Catholic sexologist Marc Oraison urged Christian men to “follow the beat of the woman’s rhythm” to “synchronize the climax”.

All this sex positivity did not stop Christians from collaborating against people whose tastes and practices did not fit their definitions of good clean fun. They supported a renewed drive to prosecute homosexuals in postwar Europe for example. In Africa and South East Asia, Protestant and Catholic missionaries reacted to the swift disintegration of Europe’s disintegrating colonial empires by suggesting that Christianity might advance economic and social development. Yet they also pressed on with campaigns against polygamy, which they denounced as a “consequence of original sin”. And they intensified their hostility to Islam, which in their minds joined Communism as a materialist threat to the still fragile advance of Christian civilization. As a Catholic bishop in Tanzania put it in 1959, Protestants and Catholics must overcome the “scandal” of their divisions so that they could take on the “totalitarian” threat of Islam.

This complacent sense that Christianity was the sanctification of the nuclear family and social market capitalism did not survive the spiritual tumult of the Sixties and Seventies. The radical theologians of those decades did still seek a simple definition of Christianity to which both Europeans and the people of their former colonies could subscribe. They just tried to smash the social conservatism of their predecessors by killing off the authoritarian God they had worshipped. Christianity must now become a “religionless” faith: one that respected Jesus as the “outcast” who had dreamed of overturning society but had no need for his Father. Protestants and Catholics competed to see who could break most decisively with the dusty devotions of former times. Dorothee Sölle, a German Catholic feminist, urged her readers to live as the crucified Jesus had done, as if God did not exist.

The most important thing about this religionless ecumenicism in Greenberg’s eyes is that it failed. If radical theology did not cause the plunges in churchgoing and membership that set in across Europe at that time, it did nothing to prevent them. This means that when European politicians speak about a common Christian civilization today, they have fallen back on the conservative and authoritarian ecumenicism of earlier decades. This is a zombie Christianity: which has little to do with the actual worship or beliefs of dwindling churches. When Giorgia Meloni speaks of being “a Christian”, she nods at but hardly bows to Italian Catholicism: she is a single mother who is happier to quote Tolkien than Saint Paul. What has not changed is that talk of Christian civilization still rallies support against the enemies supposedly pressing at its borders or already plotting against it from within, even if they are no longer the Bolsheviks of old. Benjamin Netanyahu’s praise of Kirk for standing “tall for Judeo-Christian civilization” would have surprised interwar propagandists, who saw Jews as outsiders to or adversaries of Christendom. But they would have understood his strategy, which is to bind Israel and the West in a struggle against Islamism.

Greenberg’s account of interwar ecumenicism is meant more as a cautionary tale to Western countries today than as a precise diagnosis of our present moment, in which America has supplanted Europe as the main battlefield for spiritual culture wars. Americans got to their equally blurry talk about a Christian nation and a Judeo-Christian civilization by different paths than Europeans. The Second World War played an equally formative but very different role: American propaganda urged Catholic, Protestant and Jewish men to enlist as equal members of a “tri-faith nation” in the combat against the godless Nazis. The rhetoric was pluralist and egalitarian rather than conservative and defensive, which suited what was then an expansive and firmly democratic nation. Greenberg all the same wants to remind us that when Christians feel the urge to unite against their enemies, they should first ask whether they don’t stand to undermine what they once thought precious or distinctive about their own faiths.

Perhaps these fears seem overblown. After all, it is doubtful that the cult of Charlie Kirk will last longer than any other of MAGA’s fitful passions. Yet the journalists and thinkers who have hailed it as a “milestone” in the public resurgence of religion risk discrediting the Christianity for which they speak. Greenberg’s book is a somber reminder that past efforts by Europeans to defend Christian values did little to help churches but much to excuse the lawless abuse of state power. The few Christian thinkers who did mount a vital opposition to fascism, such as the Catholic humanist Jacques Maritain, sharply distinguished their faith from the visceral, binary loyalties that tie us to a people or a state. Maritain’s fervent pluralism, in which historic creeds can agree to disagree on everything but the inherent dignity of human persons, offers Christians more today than politicians who claim to defend a faith they might struggle to define.

But we can now say confidently that Yang didn’t get it quite right. Woke-ism, for lack of a better term, no longer seems to be ascendent. Those ideas remain common, maybe even dominant, in many elite institutions, from academe to media and even some houses of worship. But somehow, they seem stale now. When Malcolm Gladwell starts talking like J.K. Rowling, it’s safe to say that mainstream culture is somewhere past “peak woke.”

What, then, is the real Successor Ideology? The short answer might be faith — the old-fashioned kind.

We seem to be in the beginning stages of a Christian revival in the West. About 10 years ago, a new group of secular thinkers, led by the historian Tom Holland and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, began defending the civilizational value of Christianity, noting its contributions to peace, tolerance, and civil rights. After decades of more and more people coming to regard Christianity as a set of repressive superstitions, it suddenly became conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Christianity is good for people and societies.

Then, surprisingly, a number of high-profile artists and intellectuals, many of them British, started announcing their conversion (or return) to Christianity: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Russell Brand, and Nick Cave. What’s more, YouTube has exploded with Christian-curious seekers making and watching videos about “the meaning crisis.”

The open question has been this: Is this just another celebrity-fueled online fad, like cold plunges or Ozempic? Or will the people actually return to the pews? Charlie Kirk made the case on Facebook just six days before his assassination: “There is revival in the Christian church. Churches are growing. Young people are flocking to faith in God.” But this is the kind of thing that Christians are so desperate to see after decades of decline. It’s possible they’re seeing what they want to see.

Still, some data suggest the ferment is real. Consider a new report from the Bible Society purporting to show that church attendance in England and Wales has surged in recent years. Survey data from The Quiet Revival, as the report was titled, suggests that the number of churchgoing Christians in England and Wales increased to nearly 6 million last year, up from about 4 million in 2018. That’s a 56% explosion in just six years. Perhaps even more surprising, it is young men driving the growth, with 21% of 18-to-24-year-old men reporting that they go to church once a month, compared to only 12% of young women.

More from this author

The cult of kindness

By Tim DeRoche

“In churches across society,” the report proclaims, “something amazing is happening.”

I’m not the first person to be skeptical of the numbers. As Stephen Bullivant pointed out in First Things, the study suggests that five times as many young men are attending church relative to 2018, and at least 500,000 additional worshipers should be in the pews every week. That’s hard to square with reports of lower attendance since the pandemic.

But there is something going on, and it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in the United States. More young men are telling pollsters that they are religious, and Catholic churches are reporting higher numbers of converts. I recently spoke to two friends, a married couple, who work in ministry at a large nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. They report that the church is seeing an influx of hundreds of young people from the local colleges like the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s more men than women,” he reports. “And their faith is unusually authentic,” she adds. About half of the kids seem to come from traditional Christian families, and the other half seem to have followed a path that started online with someone like Jordan Peterson. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”

What’s weird is that secularization is continuing apace. A recent Pew poll found that the Catholic church loses eight of its faithful for every single person that joins. And the mainline Protestant churches remain mired in a precipitous decline.

Here’s a theory: secularization and re-enchantment are happening simultaneously. It’s showing up as a creative churn in the English-speaking world. As young people, especially young men, enter the church, older folks, especially women, are leaving. I wonder if one day we may be forced to retire the haggard stereotype of the “church lady” who drags her reluctant husband and kids to services every Sunday. 

But I also wonder how a church can adapt to a sanctuary filled with “church bros.” Are these men bringing with them a “rad-trad” vision of male-female relations that they picked up online? Or are they rejecting both the nihilism and the macho Nietzscheanism so common in digital spaces? Will young women follow the men back through the church doors? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Not all churches benefit from the churn. While milquetoast suburban congregations founder, two very different types of congregations are seeing growth: the first are more traditional, devout congregations in the sacramental traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy; the second are nondenominational megachurches that emphasize a personal, emotional relationship with Christ. The report from the Bible Society suggests the same thing is happening in England and Wales: Catholics and Pentecostals increase in number, while the Church of England continues to see decline.

On the ground, this can be quite disorienting. Here in Los Angeles, my family attends weekly Mass at a gorgeous Italianate church built in the Twenties. It isn’t the Latin Mass, but there is a lot of Latin in the service, and the choral hymns and organ music are defiantly traditional. On a typical Sunday, the pews are full of young families who have traveled up to an hour for this style of reverent worship. It’s often standing-room-only.

Just 10 minutes away is a nondescript Catholic church building built in the Fifties. My family visited one Sunday last year. There’s hardly any Latin, and a folksy guitar player sings modern worship songs. The vibe is eager-to-please, but whom is it pleasing? Not very many people, frankly. The sanctuary is mostly empty, and the average age is north of 60. As the young seek out tradition and transcendence, it is the older Christian generations who cling to flat modernity.

Is it possible to imagine that some new-old iteration of Christianity could evolve into a Successor Ideology that would hold our body politic together, much like liberal Protestantism did for most of the last century? Sure, it is.

Charlie Kirk’s moving memorial, with pyrotechnics and an altar call, was an unabashed mash-up of a tent revival and a MAGA campaign event. You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president. He may not preach the gospel or live a holy life. But like many a Protestant preacher, he combines elements of the prosperity gospel with the subversive instincts of a great stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings are more sober Catholic men like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

In this transitory time of social fragmentation, however, Christians aren’t the only ones searching for signs. As some look for evidence in the pews, others are looking to the polling places. Consider the joy and optimism that have greeted Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be the mayor of New York. For some Democrats, Mamdani’s win in the primary last June was a harbinger of a new, populist Left that would retain a softer woke-ism in combination with democratic socialism in the style of Bernie Sanders. They seem to imagine that this fusion could produce the true Successor Ideology.

At the same time, we are seeing a zealous, idealistic fervor erupt around artificial intelligence and the new reproductive technologies. It seems that much of Silicon Valley is converging on a kind of techno-utopianism that they envision as the engine of the next age.

Suggested reading

Why Christianity is so radical

By Tim DeRoche

And, finally, as we are constantly reminded, you can also squint your eyes and see in Trump not an embodiment of any Christian spirit, but the prototype of a more autocratic leader tapping into a cult of personality. This path could be quite ugly, even if the risk of real fascism seems remote. And this type of leader, despite his populist promises, might be most likely to use his power to promote the interests of his cronies.

 It may be helpful here to recall what the Successor Ideology was going to replace. Since World War II, at least, the default ideology of the West was basically a form of Christian liberalism. The relative proportions of Christianity and liberalism might have fluctuated up or down a bit, but the basic throughline was there.

 This ideology made two overlapping transcendent promises: eternal life in heaven and infinite progress here on earth, thanks to the onward march of America-inspired liberal democracy. It was Christian liberalism that provided the ideological oomph for that political phenomenon often called neoliberalism.

 Between 1980 and 2010 or so, however, Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever. Its apogee was the legalization of gay marriage which swept the West in the 2010s.

 The current moment of political upheaval and social crisis is a direct result of the failure of that ideology, which eroded institutions and failed to feed the human hunger for communal transcendence. That’s why woke-ism — with its rituals of confession and penance without forgiveness — was so attractive to so many among the urban professional classes, and why it briefly felt like the thing that was going to overtake the world.

From where we stand now, it’s hard to tell exactly where we are headed.  But it’s probably safe to predict that the true Successor Ideology is going to make some sort of transcendent promise. If it is to last, it will also have to renew our institutions and our traditions. In the end, we may be left with the same choices as those who have come before us. Where will we find our transcendence — in God, in the king, in mere government, or in promethean “progress”?

 May we choose wisely.

On the other hand, it’s a racing certainty Spark would have hated Frances Wilson’s new biography of her, Electric Spark, out this week. The novelist just about tolerated being a pawn in God’s divine plan, but flatly refused to do it for anyone else. When an envious former lover tried to capture her essence in various pedestrian literary memoirs, she was sufficiently irritated to write a rather evasive autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, eclipsing his lies with some artful concoctions and half-truths of her own. And having commissioned biographer Martin Stannard in her early 70s, instructing him to “Treat me as though I was dead”, she spent the rest of her life furiously battling with him about his vision of her. Even Wilson sensed a ghostly presence pulling the strings: “She is no longer here to score through my sentences, but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, her control of my hand.”

“There’s nothing I can tell the public about my life that can clarify my books… It’s rather the books that clarify my life”. As Spark’s famous pedagogue Miss Jean Brodie might have told you, the author was fond of the literary device known as antimetabole – a form of chiasmus – in which word order is satisfyingly, symmetrically reversed. And Wilson takes Spark at her word here, mining several of the novels and short stories for clues about the person. The result is illuminating and diverting, though in the end the subject remains satisfyingly elusive.

Spark loved mythmaking about herself. One such myth – which might also have been true – was that she was a lightning rod for coincidences and supernatural happenings, or as she put it, a “magnet for experience”. The world around her would arrange itself so as to provide material for the stories. Sometimes it even seemed that her stories made the world conform to them later. And certainly, the first half of life for this working-class “Gentile Jewess” from Edinburgh was interspersed with the kind of improbable incident that in her fiction would sometimes feel terribly contrived.

Waiting for a boat out of wartime Cape Town after fleeing an unhappy marriage, she meets Freud’s famous analysand, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who charges her with carrying a message to Freud’s daughter Anna. Looking for a job at the Employment Bureau in Ladbroke Grove, the recruiter spots the Ivy Compton-Burnett novel she is carrying, and sends her off to be a secretary at the unit in charge of war propaganda. There, she watches boss Sefton Delmer make up fake radio shows and devise complex legends to undermine Nazi morale, all the while profitably learning about the possibility of messages within messages, hidden “between the lines”.

Suggested reading

Can indie novels save our minds?

By Matthew Gasda

On a train back to London, anticipating the night’s bombing raids, she accepts the invitation of a young au pair to shelter at her employer’s house. That employer turns out to be Louis MacNeice. She creeps around the absent poet’s house like a burglar, opening drawers and venerating objects, then calls a literary agent on his telephone. Next stop on the journey to becoming a proper writer, she edits the Poetry Review, attracts the disapproval of the antediluvian committee with her modernizing, and gets into an escalating war of rude letters with eugenicist birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes. Each of these events will reappear in fictional permutations when she begins writing novels at the age of 37, having switched from poetry and biographical criticism.

At times during this formative period, Spark sounds like the helpless character in Nabokov’s story “Symbols and Signs”, who suffers from “referential mania” and who imagines that “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. (Of course, in a sense, this character is right.) One of her wartime jobs had been to listen to the scrambler telephone, “heavily jammed with jangling caterwauls” and decipher information through the white noise. She takes this habit with her into peacetime, and it is still a bit unclear who is at the other end. Her paranoid phase culminates in a Dexedrine-induced nervous breakdown, during which life becomes too fast and chaotic for her to integrate it properly into a story. She goes to see a play by T.S. Eliot, and though she has never met him, finds it bristling with coded messages written especially for her. As the psychosis advances, she warns friends that the author of The Wasteland is now posing as a window cleaner in order to steal their private papers.

More from this author

The flattening of the human mind

By Kathleen Stock

At the same time, she is converting to Catholicism, which eventually saves her; for it allows her “to see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings”. Rather than simply ventriloquizing others, “nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now” – though you might say she simply opted for ventriloquizing God instead. The novels are full of messages from beyond – characters haunted by the sound of a typewriter; mysterious phone calls; anonymous letters; disembodied voices – with Spark always playfully blurring roles of deity and author. Her “ears had memories”, she said; and along with the Border ballads, Mary Stuart, the Brontës, and John Henry Newman, another obsession was Mary Shelley. A bit like Shelley’s famous doctor, from now on she would be suturing together bits of reality, then vitalizing the whole with the presence of something uncanny or macabre. Even in her most beloved comic work, there is icy betrayal. You end up siding – marginally – with the fascist over the nun.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Spark’s conversion, beautifully drawn out by Wilson in her book, is her changing attitude to the unconscious. As a poet and critic, she had dutifully tried to uncover it, but as a novelist she did her best to get rid of it altogether. Creating order out of chaos, she hoarded every paper and piece of correspondence, meticulously archiving them; these were all the “facts” about her to be found. “Piece by piece Spark cordoned off the parts over which she had no control until she had turned herself inside out; everything that had been cellared became, she hoped, externalized as the vast cloud of unknowing which was the religious experience”, writes Wilson in an insightful passage. 

In getting bored of psychological explanations, Spark seems well ahead of her time, more in step with the contemporary shift towards traditional forms of Christian worship. The psychoanalysts tried to stuff God into the box of the human mind. But all you ended up with was mystical, mystifying psychology, so you might as well just let Him out again. And so Spark did, furnishing a compellingly idiosyncratic fictional world with ghosts, devils, and angels mingling seamlessly with living mortals for good or ill. Not for her the metaphysics of fellow Edinburgh native David Hume, for whom moral judgments were transitory human projections onto real things. For Spark, “good” and “evil” picked out aspects as real as the weather, and she sometimes defined artistry by the ability to perceive them where others could not. “No artist has lived who has not experienced and then recognized something, at first too incredibly evil as to seem real, then so undoubtedly real as to be undoubtedly true”, she has protagonist Fleur say in Loitering With Intent.

Spark admired God for all the miracles and transubstantiation but could take or leave the other stuff. She never went to confession, avoided sermons like the plague, and arrived at Mass only in time for the Eucharist. Her version of God seemed somewhat built in her own image; which is to say, playful, inscrutable, and emotionally disassociated to a near-psychopathic degree. In the brilliant short story that launched her career, “The Seraph and the Zambesi” – in which a colonial children’s ballet recital gets wrecked by the presence of a six-winged, incandescently hot seraph – she ends with another antimetabole: “we watched him ride the Zambesi away from us among the rocks that look like crocodiles and the crocodiles that look like rocks”. For God observing his creations, perhaps rocks are just as interesting as crocodiles and vice versa.

Spark was certainly interested in people; but as she got more famous, it was mostly for the practical support they could lend to her career, or the fictional content she could wring out of them. Other humans became the backdrop to her narcissism, which is also to say, her creative intensity and proper regard for herself as a great artist. Also like God, perhaps, she was a terror for pinioning people for hours when she felt like a chat, “‘electrocuting them down the telephone”, as one recipient put it.

Thankfully, Electric Spark isn’t one of those books that tries to uncover the monster behind the typewriter; not even when it discusses her abandonment of her son, or casually includes the detail in passing of “the death – by neglect – of Bluebell her cat”. Though she is capable of warm and generous portraits – Jean Brodie, Milly the housekeeper in A Far Cry From Kensington, Solly in Loitering With Intent – I love her because of her detachment not in spite of it; and it seems that Wilson might do too. Writing about the Eliot play that sent her temporarily doolally, Spark reminds the reader that a comedy is “a representation of life in which the Will of God is demonstrated to prevail” whereas in a tragedy “the will of man is demonstrated to prevail”. With Muriel in charge of the storyline, life can still be gloriously interesting and funny, despite the villains and mediocrities sent every day to try us.

His nationality is two things at once: not important, but crucial. In recent times, the Vatican has turned to America in financial desperation, no longer able to rely on funding from the German-speaking lands, now that increasing numbers there avoid paying the Church tax. The Americans have obliged. But it has not been a happy relationship. The American Church has bankrolled the Vatican, while the Italians and their allies have continued to use the cash in ways that are hardly transparent. American patience has run out. The election of an American Pope means that from now on, at long last, the Italian way of doing things in the financial sphere, that has led to innumerable scandals, is over. Expect no more stories of the type that involved Italian bankers swinging from under Blackfriars Bridge; rather expect the intervention of corporate America, backed by an American Pope. If this works, and the Italians have ways of fighting back, it will be a new era. And, relatively young in Papal terms, the 69-year-old Leo XIV has perhaps 20 years ahead of him in which to bring this about.

He is American, and yet he is not American: he has a Peruvian passport, and has worked in that country for decades as a missionary. He is in no way aligned to the MAGA Catholicism of JD Vance. Far from it, as their recent spat on X revealed. Leo XIV is pro-immigration, speaks of  bridges not walls, and is all the things that Trump isn’t and Pope Francis was. As he spoke from the balcony he spoke good Italian, and he also spoke in Spanish, mentioning his former diocese in Peru. He is American, but he is firmly rooting himself in the Latin American experience. It has often been said that there could never be a Pope from the world’s only superpower. Well, there is now, and Leo XIV shows how it is done: an American by birth, but one with a very international outlook. In the eyes of MAGA Catholics, he will seem a terrible political Lefty, but in the eyes of most Catholics, of which there are 1.4 billion around the world, this won’t matter. Most of them live in grim circumstances and in challenging countries and are deeply attached to those who speak of the Church’s love for the poor. Mother Teresa of Calcutta remains the most important Catholic of the age. Various photographs have emerged of Leo, as a diocesan bishop in Peru, wading through flood zones in Wellington boots, riding a horse in a country with no roads, and helping out in a soup kitchen. He has actually lived with and worked with the economically disadvantaged: that marks him out, when you think of some of the very grand prince bishops of the Church in the USA, as distinctly un-American. But it is pure Catholic gold.

He was a missionary, and at the same time he has been an administrator; here too, he spans two worlds. As Prior General of the Augustinian Order for two six-year terms, he travelled the world, and ruled a disparate body of men, and no doubt had some tough decisions to make. His most recent job in the Vatican was presiding over the dicastery that appoints, and in some cases disciplines, bishops. In his two years in post, he won respect for the way he did his job. The Vatican machine, the Roman Curia, is widely seen as not fit for purpose, and in need of leadership and reform. Leo XIV, the cardinals must be hoping, is the man to deliver reform.

In his opening speech he name-checked Pope Francis twice. He will not undo his legacy, whatever that legacy was, which is still hard to discern. Leo will continue with the synods on synodality (conferences about having conferences, as they have been called). But he might take the project in a somewhat different direction. Several cardinals, who are not noted conservatives, such as Vincent Nichols and Timothy Dolan, spoke before the Conclave about the need for greater doctrinal clarity and here Leo may well deliver. He name-checked Saint Augustine too, the great theologian and saint who, 1,500 years ago, laid down the parameters of the Church’s relations with the world — in it, but not of it. An Augustinian Pope means an intellectually grounded Pope, a Pope rooted in theological tradition and suspicious of innovation.

There were other signs as well in that opening speech. He gave a special greeting to the people of Rome, to huge cheers, for he is their bishop after all, and to the Italians. He was signaling his intention (John Paul II did it as well) to be a Roman and an Italian by adoption. Rome and Italy will appreciate that hugely. He is theirs, a source of immense pride; he showed he wanted to be theirs and he understood the importance of being theirs. And to underline the point, he mentioned the supplication to the Madonna of Pompei, a traditional prayer to be uttered at noon on that very day. To most, maybe all, people outside Italy, Catholics included, Pompei means ruins, but to Italians it is also an important shrine to Mary. And he concluded with the Hail Mary, the most popular prayer to the Madonna. A Leftist Pope? Sure, but a traditional Italian Pope as well, a Pope of two worlds.

More from this author

The Vatican’s moral decay

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

He is the successor to Pope Francis, the great disruptor, the man who said hagan lio, “make a mess”. Those who were expecting someone to undo the Francis years, at least directly, were always doomed to disappointment: there were not enough votes for that in the Conclave, and besides, it’s awkward trying to explain away the last 12 years as a blip or a mistake in a Church that values consistency of doctrine. But at the same time, there were clear indications that a more orderly way of doing things has returned. He wore the traditional garb of a newly elected Pope, the Apostolic stole and the scarlet mozzetta. Francis refused the latter, saying, according to some, “The carnival is over”: or more likely “I prefer not”. But by donning the mozzetta, Leo indicated that he will be the sort of Pope traditionalists can love. He looks like a Pope — there is a bit of a resemblance to the bespectacled Paul VI — he smiles, he is confident but diffident, and he seems to understand that peace and unity are his mission. The relief, for traditionalist Catholics, is palpable, and came with the first sight of that mozzetta. Never has a piece of silk counted for so much.

How political a Pope will he be? He is worried about climate change and the plight of immigrants, as well as the conflicts around the world; so was Pope Francis, but Pope Leo may handle these themes with more subtlety, with more guarded interventions. One thing already apparent, from the first speech, and the sermon the next day in the Sistine Chapel, is that he does not want to be a nakedly political Pope. The peace he mentioned on the balcony was the peace of the Lord, the peace that comes from faith in God. In the Sistine Chapel he spoke about Jesus Christ and the need for faith, to offset “the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society”. He continued: “Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” These words have political implications, but what is apparent is the bridge he is trying to build between faith and life, the project of Saint Augustine. He may be a political Pope, but he will be so for religious reasons, and religion will not be obscured by politics.

It is too early to tell what will happen, but the indications are good. He is eirenic, even soothing, perhaps a little boring as well; after the excitement of Pope Francis, this is to be welcomed. “Leone! Leone! Leone!” chanted the excited crowd when they heard the name he had given himself. Were they all thinking of the great Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903 after a term of 24 years and who was also elected at a similar age? Or were they thinking of Leo the Great, who saved Rome from Attila the Hun? The more recent Leo steered the Church towards reconciliation with the modern world, and wrote the encyclical De Rerum Novarum (“Concerning New Things”) which dealt with social questions, among them industrialization, poverty and trade unions. Leo XIII led the Church into the modern world, while not forgetting the world from which it came. May Leo XIV, the Pope of two worlds, do the same.

Did you realize this was the most “diverse” conclave in history? Did you know that various enthusiastic people (for which read: childlike peasant types) have waited “all day in the sun” to hear the news? “They certainly know how to do drama, don’t they?” said one supercilious git, apparently unaware that British people might be Roman Catholic too. He banged on: “This place — Rome, Europe! — needs to be challenged by the realities of the developing world; it needs to be shaken out of its complacency.” Only belatedly did he remember to ascribe the sentiment to the late Pope Francis — also described as “a bit of a rockstar” — and not himself.

I tried to ignore the obvious political bias; for it was the satanists who first taught me to drown out irritating worldly intrusions into strictly sacred matters. As a child, my family and I attended a Catholic church on an RAF base leased to the US Navy, set in the foothills of the Grampian mountains. The only available building was a Utilitarian-looking prefab which had to be shared with every other kind of religion there. Shelves at the back of the room contained a dizzying selection of reading material, from pamphlets about lives of the saints, to scientology books by L. Ron Hubbard. Once a month, the devil-worshippers apparently got their turn at the altar. “They are very friendly and polite”, a gently ironical priest from New York once told my father.

Still, our congregation managed to suppress any troubling thoughts of previous occupants for an hour or two every Sunday, as the space was remade into a holy one by the unfolding of the familiar rites. As I remember it, Catholicism is quite at home with the delicate dance between the sacred and the profane. And indeed, as the papal conclave made its way towards its dramatic decision yesterday, a similar sense of focus was probably required.

From one perspective, conclaves are so obviously worldly: full of human flaws, compromise, and opportunism. According to a story circulating this week, newbies to the role watched the new Hollywood film in order to know what to expect. Factions form, votes get switched, and gradually the main contenders start to emerge. In between, there are huddles over dinner, corridor conversations, and whispers in the breakfast queue.

Though it sounds glamorous, in reality I imagine it’s more like some tortuously long academic conference; exhausted introverts continually forced to be sociable, overstimulated by too much caffeine, and unable to hide behind their confiscated smartphones. Apparently they even wear name badges. With all that distraction and pressure, the rhythms of rituals inherited from centuries of conclaves must feel like solid ground.

Back in the Eighties, as I crossed the threshold of my occasional church, the sense of mysterious transformation was compounded by the fact I was also entering a little piece of America, appearing like a crazy hallucination: cursive script on the noticeboards, friendly soccer-mom Sunday School teachers, root beer in the vending machines. It was all very unlike the Scottish world that lay just beyond the gates. And here, too, there was negotiation between the relatively permanent and the ephemeral. Along with the exotic frosted donuts after Mass, the words and gestures of the liturgy were the only real constant.

Suggested reading

The Vatican’s moral decay

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

The base’s mission was to keep track of long-range nuclear missiles. Rotating tours of duty meant some family in the congregation was always arriving, or leaving with a celebratory cake. Every now and again a new naval chaplain with an Irish or an Italian name would pitch up in the tiny rural location, fresh off a gunship or out of a warzone. His subsequent inevitable collapse into bored alcoholism would be studiously ignored by his flock. This church also gave me my first glimpse of that fascinating indeterminate object, a priest in a cassock puffing furiously on a fag.

My early religiosity didn’t last. Relative outsider to the faith as I now am, trying to guess who might become pope was like trying to pick a Grand National winner, based only on horses’ names and the colors of jockey silks. Would it be the powerbroker Parolin; the keffiyeh-sporting Pizzaballa; the austere conservative Erdő, or jolly-looking progressive Tagle? In the end, it was 69-year-old moderate Robert Prevost, an American with a French name who has spent most of his ecclesiastical mission in Peru, and who once argued on X about ordo amoris with J.D. Vance. Symbolically straddling various global currents, this too looked like a canny move. Or as the BBC woman put it: “Let’s be honest; he ticks a lot of boxes.”

But despite the self-interest and unpredictability of group dynamics, for believers, a conclave is directed by God not man. According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, divine will is revealed by a “resonance”: “[I]t can come from a phrase or prayer… a conversation over a meal, a sense that something’s going on here, and it’s those things that count as much as predetermined positions or perspectives.” The sequestration is supposed to enhance openness to God’s will, without any distraction; as is the elaborate formality of solemnly counting, then burning the ballots. In essence, observant Catholics must treat the high drama as directed by a single auteur, while still acknowledging that the actors have a lot of room for improv.

And the same apparently goes for canonization. A fascinating piece in The Economist details the ongoing campaign to make deceased Italian teenager Carlos Acuti the first millennial saint, by fitting him into the requisite mold of “heroic virtue”. Wishing to connect with younger worshippers, the Vatican is apparently in the market for a relatable saint who wore sneakers and looked like he was in a boy band. And so awkward recollections of schoolmates are downplayed; stories of his great piety pushed to the fore; posthumous miracles conveniently found and authenticated.

Suggested reading

There's no dignity in assisted dying

By Kathleen Stock

As Kenneth Woodward writes in his book Making Saints: “Each time a new saint is officially recognized by the Church of Rome, it does so in the wider interest of inquiring into the nature of holiness itself.” The same is presumably true of choosing a pope. But still, those in charge believe theirs is a genuine inquiry. They are discovering the right answer as dictated by God, rather than finessing history to fit the desired narrative. Whether aspects of Leo XIV’s back story require some finessing remains to be seen.

A few decades ago, pointing out the apparently earthbound, arbitrary element of religious procedures would be offered by triumphant rationalists as proof of hollowness. I’m sure I once took it that way too. Seeing what tawdry motivations lay behind the curtain seemed like an effective antidote to faith. In a defensive response to all the scrutiny and mockery, many Christian institutions dialed down the mysticism and got rid of tradition and formality, selling off the family pews and bringing us the cringe of the acoustic guitar, the Alpha course, and the rave in the nave instead. But now, Catholic churches are filling up again, and particularly with young people — even in the absence of relatable millennial saints. They don’t appear to be put off by the Tridentine Mass, women wearing mantillas, or the burning of palms for Ash Wednesday. In fact, they seem to rather like these things.

Of course, this might too be a passing fashion: a pendulum swing away from decades of mirthless, flat-voiced rationalism. It is perhaps compounded by being buffeted about aimlessly in the vortex of hyper-liberal values, eventually giving rise to a desire for firmer footing. But from the perspective of the believer, even fads for Christianity don’t happen on their own. The universe’s most successful influencer is also involved in their co-production. Between nature, God, and man, the background causal metaphysics may be murky, but no weirder than thinking that Mother Earth is hurting, or that sexed bodies get changed with words.

Life is coming at us fast these days, and we need all the help we can get. I’m glad that the words of the liturgy create a space to appreciate the sacred, even when uttered by inebriated naval chaplains in competition for space with satanists. And it is beautiful that the papal conclave still unfolds with meditative, ritualized solemnity, even as backroom deals get made, BBC commentators sneer, and shy clerics long for their smartphones.

Now an adult, and via a stint at Goldman Sachs, DiSanto has seriously scaled up his service to the church. In 2018, he co-founded Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app that has been downloaded over 20 million times. Securing investment funding of over $157 million, with notable investors including Peter Thiel and JD Vance, Hallow has gone on to be the most successful piece of religious digital technology ever. Following an ad during the Super Bowl, in February last year, it became the most downloaded app on the Apple store, ahead of ChatGPT, Google and Netflix.

“It aired in 15 markets during the big game,” Fox Business explained. “God is doing incredible things,” added Alex Jones, the CEO of Hallow. “All glory and credit and praise belongs to him.” The company doesn’t publish profits, but the former rapper and actor Mark Wahlberg has denied that he received $20 million for fronting the Super Bowl slot. It’s hard to follow the money, but there is certainly a lot of it sloshing around.

I have been on Hallow for a week now, and I can see why it is popular. There is a lot of nice stuff here. The interface is clean, the functionality great. And the theology is pretty mainstream Roman Catholic stuff, with cameos from well-known Catholic commentators like Bishop Barron, and even the old Pope. There is a bit of a meditation feel to some of it, which is fine if that’s your thing. There are parts of the app to help you sleep, someone whispering Bible verses almost as lullabies.

More from this author

Happy Easter, losers

By Giles Fraser

The Examen technique, developed by the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola, is used to help people review their day. The Lectio Divina, often ascribed to St Benedict, is used to encourage people to read the Bible in a more meditative way. The app feels a bit bossy to me, reminding me when to pray and how to pray. The more I stay on Hallow, the more I feel I am being managed. Today, I received an email from Hallow inviting me to join the waiting list for the Conclave Prayer Challenge. Oh sod off, I thought. I also really hate it when people try to supply too much meaning in their voice when they talk breathlessly of God.

That’s all a personal reaction. But what I can’t get my head round is why someone might spend $69.99 a year to have their relationship with God mediated by an app. For such a contemporary phenomenon, this feels like a pretty medieval issue: money, mediation and the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, remember, attacked the Church on two counts. First, that it came to interpose a level of clerical intermediaries between the individual believer and God. Second, that it came to monetize this role in the form of indulgences.

Hallow isn’t doing anything as crude as trying to sell you time off from purgatory. But certainly, to European sensibilities, the obscurity of Hallow finances raises considerable alarm bells. How much money is it OK to make from religion? $15 a funeral? My $29,000-ish-a-year stipend? Hallow’s estimated $51.4 million income? I told all this to a mate of mine who is in finance. “How do we get into this game, Giles?” he laughed, only half-jokingly. St Francis told his followers not to even touch money, lest they become corrupted by it. “Money is the devil’s dung,” advised St Basil of Caesarea. Pope Francis repeated the idea too, though I can’t find any of that in Hallow.

Selling people prayer time is a bit like when they started to sell you water. You can get it straight out of the tap, but such is the dark genius of marketing that they can persuade us to pay silly money for something that is free already. Actually, it is worse than selling fancy water, because prayer isn’t the sort of thing that fits comfortably alongside technology. Fundamentally, it is the most low-tech thing there is: just you and God and time. You don’t need to join a waiting list. Just find some silence and sit in it.

At base, the values of modern technology and the values of ancient prayer seem deeply antithetical. Technology is fundamentally about efficiency: achieving things more quickly, more effectively, with less hassle and disruption. You don’t have to be Thomas Merton to work out that prayer doesn’t operate with this logic. It is not just another way of getting things done in the world. Prayer is not useful. It is not, to reference Foucault, just another form of self-management. Prayer is more like play. You do it for the sheer hell of it — though I appreciate that’s not really the best way of expressing things. You do it for itself, not because of any particular benefit it might bring. At its best, it is a state of being, not a means to an end.

More from this author

Burn down the Church Machine

By Giles Fraser

I used to think that being a priest was the most AI-resistant job you could imagine. How could a machine or an algorithm take confession or celebrate the eucharist? Totally ridiculous, right? Hallow doesn’t quite give you that, though it travels some way down the road. And, with the app church, you don’t have to sit next to other annoying people in the pews. You don’t have to get up early and pray in the cold; everything is made easy for you. It’s cheaper than church and less demanding. So our relationship with God is being automated, digitized, and with that shaped and manipulated. Prayer is being forced down a narrow weir of ones and zeroes.

Despite being a catholic Christian myself, albeit of the Anglican kind, all this whizzy digital mediation brings out my deepest inner Martin Luther. Broadly speaking, the theology is perfectly fine. But the medium is also the message, and the medium is highly problematic. For unlike Luther, who through the printing press harnessed the power of new technology for evangelistic purposes, it is now young Catholics who have mastered the latest technology. They have brought to bear the power of finance, social media and advertising to turn God into some slick new product, something to be marketed and sold. But however much Hallow plasters its digital platform with improving quotes from Holy Scripture, the place still feels cold and Godless to me. More a digital temple to wellbeing than a place to encounter the living God.

Part of the attraction of Pope Francis, even to professional literal communists online, comes from negative space. He was all the more impressive because of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a corrupt power-hungry operator like the Borgia and Medici popes, nor was he a stern conservative patriarch like Pope Pius IX.  But this was also part of the problem, one that cuts through to the heart of the Church and its very survival in the West at least, where its attendances and number of churches are in general decline. This was the Pope as a progressively tinged statesman, and the Church a kind of spiritualized NGO. There’s nothing that indicates an organization in peril or doubt more than when it feels the need to justify its existence. It did help that Pope Francis followed Pope Benedict XVI who, in public image terms, had the bedside manner of Darth Sidious and was seen as a heavyweight conservative theologian upholding tradition against the evils of modernity.

By contrast, Pope Francis represented a break from the past and a swing to the Left. He named himself after St Francis of Assisi, champion of the poor and patron saint of animals and adopted the motto Miserando Atque Eligendo meaning “Lowly but Chosen”. Clad in white, Pope Francis rejected the regal pomp Popes had long adopted, placing themselves aristocratically above their flock. This, along with his preferred acts of humility — the kissing of feet, the embracing of the marginalized, advocacy for those brutalized by poverty and war, begging on his knees for peace — resonated with recovering Catholics like myself who had come, via the Church’s many sins and cover-ups, to see it not as something noble and exalted, and more akin to the hellish screaming popes of Francis Bacon.

All this symbolism was key to Pope Francis’s image as a radical. He certainly appeared to be a reformer. He was a vocal critic of the worst excesses of neoliberalism, and materialism generally. He advocated continually for the developing world, the poor, migrants, prisoners and interfaith dialogue. He highlighted the brutalities inflicted upon children, and civilians and advocated for peace at times and places against the mainstream narrative. He even stated, during a hastily backtracked interview, that “a hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists”. At every juncture, he was met with opposition from the Church’s more reactionary elements.

Suggested reading

The mystery of Pope Francis

By Thomas of Celano

The actual meaningful impact he made upon the Church itself, structurally or theologically, is questionable. This is partly due to the intransigent Byzantine bureaucracy within the Vatican. But also a large part of it is because, beyond symbolism, Pope Francis was not the radical pope he is often touted as. On the majority of topics, he ultimately toed the line with established Church orthodoxy. They were often presented with the gloss of “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there was still little doubt sin was involved. Take the issue of contraception. The Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has been ruinous, even callous, especially in AIDS-stricken parts of the developing world. Pope Francis changed little.

The closest predecessor to Pope Francis, in spirit, was the “Good Pope” (“Il Papa Buono”) John XXIII. They shared a similar temperament, charismatic, modest, with an affable ease with the public and an intellectual openness. Yet their differences are illustrative. The “Good Pope” set off major liberalizing changes in the church by calling the Second Vatican Council. He had previously wielded his influence and the apparatus at his disposal as nuncio to help save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. These were remarkable actions at an abyssal time, and comparisons may be partly unfair. Pope Francis’s efforts to highlight the cruelties and injustices inflicted in today’s world are undoubtedly noble. Whether they represent the maximum use of the Vatican’s diplomatic and economic power is more debatable. Man shall not live on symbolism alone. The world has little need of a patron saint for the increasingly grim and ineffectual spectacle of “raising awareness”.

Much was initially made of his being the first Jesuit to become Pope — it was a controversial appointment, as they are often seen as rebellious troublemakers, frequently clashing with the Vatican to the point of once being banned. But for all his professed dedication and pastoral ministry to the poor, Bergoglio was an unusual Jesuit. He came to prominence during the Argentinian dictatorship, when it was a dangerous time to be an advocate of the dispossessed. The military junta was paranoid and sadistic towards anyone they suspected or could frame as being communist. It was a time of massacres, death flights, rape and torture chambers, murder squads and disappearances.

At the time, Liberation Theology had emerged as a truly radical strain of Christianity, focusing not just on poverty but those who created and profited from it. And the authorities, either in Buenos Aires or Rome, saw them as heretical pseudo-Marxists. The Argentinian form of Liberation Theology soon had the junta’s attention, and the murder of clergy commenced.

The future Pope Francis, though, was critical of Liberation Theology. He initially seemed to think that the Church should address poverty apolitically, as if poverty were not political. The Jesuits did not look favorably upon his opposition to radicalism, and he was gradually alienated within the order. There have been signs that the era weighed heavily on his mind; in one address, he spoke of “the complicit silence of most of society and of the Church”, a tacit acknowledgement of his own wilful ignorance of the crimes taking place then perhaps. It could have been something even worse, with accusations being leveled by a journalist Horacio Verbitsky that Bergoglio effectively threw two Jesuit priests Fathers Yorio and Jalics to the wolves by denying them the protection of their order (Jalics later reconciled with the Pope and said he had not denounced them). In this light, his move towards a more radical position later in life could be contrition, an admission of guilt that he failed to rise when it mattered. Or it could be seen as a rebranding exercise for the Church, a victory of style over substance, a purging not of the Vatican’s sins but their public image, and an appropriation and dilution of radicalism in the process. In either case, Pope Francis was far more of a survivor than a rebel.

More from this author

Netflix is degrading our politics

By Darran Anderson

Where does that leave the Church now with his passing? Despite the lack of substantive change, Pope Francis has shown there is renewed popular appetite for socially conscious religion. His message resounded especially in the developing world where Catholicism is on the rise. Intentionally or otherwise, he has cleared a viable path through the thickets that a genuinely radical pope might be able to move through, by standing up to intransigent Vatican authorities, in principle at least, and showing a relative outsider could preach with greater global impact than a more cloistered insider could. There is an important role for a force of the Vatican’s size and influence to challenge global capital, especially given “the Left” has collapsed into internecine civil warfare of identity politics. Even if you’re pro-choice or in favor of euthanasia, it would be in bad faith to deny there is a vital role for an organization advocating for the rights of unborn children and for those vulnerable towards the end of life, especially given our neoliberal drift to extremes, moral relativism and the abstraction of human lives.

Faced with the contemporary world, there is a temptation for the Church either to retreat into tradition and veer Rightwards (as seems likely), or to dilute itself into abject meaninglessness as Anglicanism has. Both would be a grave existential error. There are paths off the forked road of tradition and modernity, that take stranger more enlightening routes through ethics, technology, vernacular, ecology, the numinous, the syncretic, the gutter and the stars. The Church’s survival depends on deeply engaging with the world, especially at its worst, but also offering a sanctuary from it.

The very fact that the Catholic Church does not fit today is one of its strongest reasons it should exist. This is a place, one of the very few, that is not solely driven by the profit principle, where you can go without spending money, where you can meditate or confess your failings. To sit in a Gothic cathedral is to experience something beyond just the wonder of architecture and craftsmanship. It is an anachronism but not necessarily a retrograde one. Through it, ideas of pilgrimage, ritual, redemption and grace have survived into an age that scorns any practice without monetary value or not beholden to ego. It is one of the few realms where good and evil are still recognized as existing, let alone the divine. “A religion without mystics,” as Francis recognized, “is a philosophy”.

Rather than becoming an obsolete fossil or following relativism into nihilism, the Catholic Church could embrace its innate weirdness. It is completely out of place and thus, at its best, it could be a refuge from late capitalism and a bulwark against it, existing both outside of the world and in its darkest places. It was this that originally gave us the church of the catacombs and the outer fringes, from the Stylites to Celtic Christianity to Santería, which brought light to hard lives in ways both intensely local and cosmic. There is a myriad of alternatives to the centralized vision of the Vatican City, as the Jesuits and others have shown.

What the Church can offer is the precise qualities for which it is dismissed or mocked. Karl Marx wrote that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”. The assumption was that these were dishonest or impossible things. Yet imagine a world that will not allow these to exist or aspire to creating them, even if impossible. If the Church turns away from its surreal miraculous fantasies and supra-modern position, it will be on the same decline as political parties now, beholden to a world that makes everything the same, that deconstructs all loyalties and meaning, where everyone is out for themselves and everything is for sale. “Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the center of our lives,” Francis warned “they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings.” As it is for individuals, so too is it for religious institutions.

C.S. Lewis, who Pope Francis read and quoted, wrote, “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside”. The Church has still not truly faced its past, nor the inequities of the present. Added to this is Christ’s calling to his apostles to give up everything they own and follow him. If the Church ever did these things, they would open that door and exit Hell. Some of us might even be tempted to follow them.

For now, though, there is a battle at the heart of the Church. This did not begin with Pope Francis, nor even the tidal shifts back and forth since the Industrial Revolution. It has always been here. The history of the Church is one of schisms, heresies, dialectics, synods and competing factions. It is not between Left and Right, the past and the present. There is a battle because that is the nature of conscience and guilt and what it is to be human. The Church will have to wrestle with its soul as Pope Francis, a flawed but decent man in indecent times, clearly did. We all must, if we are to remind ourselves that we even have souls. Until the Church rises to the challenge of its own calling, it will have to dwell here with the rest of us in the Inferno, a broken institution in a broken world, with the knowledge there is no one stopping us leaving but ourselves.

Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936 in Flores, a working-class district of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest son of Mario and Regina, immigrants from Piedmont. There were five children in all, one of whom, his sister Maria Elena, survives him, but his relations with his family after he joined the Jesuits remained opaque. He was educated at a Catholic college run by the Salesians, and had several jobs after leaving school. That included being a nightclub bouncer, and an assistant in a laboratory, but at the age of 21 he decided to join the Jesuits, the premier Catholic religious order in those days.

Bergoglio went through the usual course of studies and was ordained a priest in 1969. Soon after he was made novice master, and put in charge of the training of entrants to the order. After that, in 1973, he was appointed provincial, the superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. It was clear that Bergoglio was recognized as a man of great talents and energy, and his promotion had come early, yet his time as provincial was far from happy. He completed his six-year term, before becoming the rector of a theological faculty. After that, he went to Germany for further studies. By 1992, relations between Bergoglio and the Jesuits had completely broken down; on visits to Rome, he never once stayed in the Jesuit house.

That something had gone wrong was clear — and Bergoglio himself has talked of a period of “great interior crisis” and a dark night of the soul occasioned by his broken relationship with the order. Despite the best efforts of biographers, both friendly and hostile, the reason for this estrangement has never been satisfactorily explained. It was perhaps partly personal, partly political. At this time, Argentina was being roiled by the Dirty War, and the Church was divided over its support for the dictatorship.

It still remains unclear where Bergoglio stood on both questions. To his many enemies in the Catholic Church, he was a Marxist and a revolutionary, though there is plenty of evidence that he was actually rather conservative in his religious beliefs and pious tastes. One example is his enthusiasm for folk religion, seen in his deep love for the figure of the Blessed Virgin. In the political sphere, meanwhile, the case of two radical Jesuits remains controversial. Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics were kidnapped by the government in May 1976. Though subsequently freed, they later accused Bergoglio of being complicit in their arrest, though this accusation was later withdrawn by Fr Jalics. Bergoglio himself only spoke of the case once, where he claimed to have worked behind the scenes to secure their release. Bergoglio, at any rate, was not an open opponent of the dictatorship, even as his relationship to Peronism remains characteristically obscure.

His period in the wilderness ended with his appointment as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires in 1992. Five years later, he became the city’s archbishop, and in 2001 was elevated to the College of Cardinals. The initial promotion was dogged by controversy, which once more remains opaque. According to rumor, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Hans Peter Kolvenbach, wrote to Pope John Paul II begging him not to make Bergoglio a bishop, allegedly because he had done such damage to the Jesuits. But the Pope persisted. Both the letter and the Bergoglio file mysteriously vanished from the Vatican archives when Bergoglio became Pope, if indeed they ever existed.

This is just one of many conspiracy theories to dog Bergoglio. Yet given how murky so much of his life remains, it could easily be true. Certainly, his time in Buenos Aires remains hard to judge. He had the confidence of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for he was seen as a man immune to the virus of Liberation Theology then sweeping Latin America. This doctrine, blending Marxist dialectical materialism with Catholic theology, was seen as fatal to the sacramental and transcendental message of the Church. Indeed, one could interpret Bergoglio’s ministry as archbishop as an attempt to outflank the Left.

He was assiduous, as he put it, about going to the margins. That meant founding parishes in the outer suburbs of the city, where the poor and deprived lived, and in promoting a Church closer to people in their actual lived situations. Bergoglio himself renounced many of the trappings of his high office; he was regularly seen using public transport, often accompanied, critics noted, by a photographer. Other acts of humility were well publicized too, notably his visits to prisons for Maundy Thursday foot washing. While admired by many ordinary Porteños, Bergoglio remained an aloof, enigmatic and authoritarian figure to more traditional Catholics.

In December 2011, Bergoglio reached the age of 75, and submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict, in accordance with canon law. But as there was no obvious successor, he was asked to stay on as archbishop for the time being. All the same, his career in the Church seemed to be at an end. Then came the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict, and Bergoglio’s election as Pope in March 2013. For the second time in his life, his career experienced a sudden renaissance.

Suggested reading

The scandals haunting Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

This was a huge surprise. After the death of John Paul II, in 2005, Bergoglio had been considered a candidate for the Chair of St Peter. But now he was 76 years old, and Benedict had resigned in the serene hope that he would be succeeded by Cardinal Angelo Amato (or so rumor had it — everything in the Vatican is rumor, of varying degrees of plausibility). Bergoglio largely owed his election to the so-called St Gallen Mafia. Named after the Swiss town in which it met, and representing progressive cardinals, it encompassed a group of cardinals including England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

They had apparently been meeting for years, plotting a strategy for the next conclave. This is a charge they always denied — influencing a conclave is against canon law — yet it’s clear Bergoglio had allies elsewhere too. One example is a speech given by Cardinal Prosper Grech before the conclave began. He argued for a shift after Pope Benedict, whose pontificate had ended in supposed failure. It was, many cardinals thought, time for a reformer, someone to shake up the sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy and bring the Church into the modern world.

This might well have been the Bergoglio plan. We don’t know for sure: he unsurprisingly never made his agenda clear, though many of his cheerleaders claimed that Pope Francis was determined to change the Church for good. The first real sign of this came during a synod, held over two sessions in 2014 and 2015, which in the end boiled down to the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion. The majority of assembled bishops were against this, appealing to Biblical tradition. Divorce and remarriage were forbidden by Christ himself, who deemed second marriages to be adulterous. Guilty of a serious sin, adulterers were precluded from receiving Holy Communion, unless they repented and confessed first, promising not to sin again.

The solution was a tremendous fudge, rammed through against all opposition and inserted as a footnote in the final document — a footnote that the Pope himself, the document’s author, claimed not to remember. Whatever the specifics, the consequences of this evasion are clear. The Church split. In Germany, those in irregular unions were welcomed to Holy Communion. Across the River Oder in Poland, they were not. Some nations’ conferences of bishops accepted the perceived new dispensation with alacrity, as in Argentina and Malta. In England, the clerics stayed prudently silent. Deep fissures were revealed in the seemingly monolithic Church, challenging the teaching that doctrine develops, but does not change, for the new teaching contradicted that of John Paul II. Was theology, as had long been accepted, a precise discipline? Or was it something more subjective, more ambiguous?

Further battles followed. In 2019, another synod looked set to authorize the ordination of married men, or even of women as deacons. But in the end, it swerved both issues. There was a further synod, in 2023 and 2024, on something called “synodality” and which supposedly made decision-making less centralized. But, at the same time, the Pope issued numerous decrees establishing his authority more firmly than ever. More than any of his predecessors, Francis was an activist, ruling on all sorts of minor matters and interfering in various religious orders and institutions, from contemplative nuns to the Knights of Malta, whose grandmaster was unceremoniously sacked. Bishops and cardinals suffered the same fate, driven to the edge of the Church by the man who claimed to care for the margins.

Suggested reading

Inside the Catholic civil war

By Damian Thompson

When it came to personnel, the Bergoglio papacy showed its least attractive and most damaging side. Favoritism, and its opposite, were much in evidence. Certain clerics, who should have been fired for the most obvious faults, particularly with regard to child abuse and sexual immorality, were protected — even against the very people the Pope had commissioned to clean up the Church’s act. Particularly notorious was the case of Bishop Barros, who was eventually driven out after a long effort by the Pope to keep him in place. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sins caught up with him remarkably slowly, while Bishop Zanchetta of Argentina was sheltered in the Vatican despite facing criminal charges. On the other hand, those who spoke truth to power suffered: Cardinal Raymond Burke was moved on from his Vatican jobs and even evicted from his Rome flat. Other bishops deemed too conservative, most of whom were champions of the Latin Mass, were removed from office. All the while, Francis put Latin worship under ever tighter restrictions.

The men promoted by Francis raised eyebrows too. Several unknowns were made cardinals, and have remained unknown ever since. Consider his pick for the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, an undistinguished Argentine cleric called Víctor Manuel Fernández. His previous writings, particularly a book on the theology of kissing, were found to be rather embarrassing. In diplomacy, meanwhile, matters were left in the hands of Cardinal Parolin, who oversaw a secret treaty with the Chinese government allowing the CCP to appoint Catholic bishops, an unheard-of usurpation of the Church’s independence in the modern age. This move was bitterly criticized by the former bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen, who could only meet the Pope in a public audience. Like so many others who had concerns about the Church’s direction, he was refused a private audience.

Yet if changing the Church irreversibly was indeed Francis’s aim, the plan seemed to falter by the end of the papacy. In December 2023, Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, published a document that allowed for the blessing of gay couples, albeit in deliberately ambiguous language. The reaction was immediate. Conservatives fumed at the thought of the Church blessing sin; many had always suspected the thrust of the Bergoglio papacy was to liberalize Church teaching on homosexuality, and this seemed proof of that. Most importantly, though, the African bishops rose up and condemned the document. Despite saying there would be no clarifications, Fernández remarkably swiftly issued what amounted to a retraction. Amid the verbiage explaining that blessings were of individuals not couples, people detected a defeat for Pope Francis and his chief collaborator.

Vatican experts have long tried to explain Pope Francis — most of them floundering on the poverty of terms like conservative or liberal. Perhaps he was a radical; perhaps a Peronist. His reign was a time of great confusion for believing Catholics, though those outside the Church continued to applaud the way he reached out to the marginalized, while handily ignoring his constant baiting of traditional Catholics. In the end, though, little substantive was achieved. The Vatican finances remain a mess, its income falling steadily over his papacy. The Holy See has still not shown clear leadership around sexual abuse, even if this has started in the lower rungs of the Church. Ordinary clergy are demoralized and bewildered, and the numbers coming forward to be ordained have declined dramatically. As for changing doctrine, or even changing practice, little has happened. Perhaps there is no new model Catholicism in the offing, for the simple reason that none is possible. There is only the Catholicism of the past two millennia. Francis apparently raged against his critics in private, and many of those same critics died before him. Yet the Church itself survives him, just as it has his predecessors.

Gibson, a staunch Catholic, was livid about a ceremony conducted at the Vatican in 2019. During the Amazon Synod, held to discuss the Church in the Amazon region, wooden statues of the Amazonian goddess Pachamama were dotted around the Vatican gardens. At one point, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis led a prayer while facing a small carving of the Pachamama.

For Gibson, who has been appointed Special Envoy to Hollywood by President Trump, this episode represents everything that has gone wrong with the Church. He blames it on “an inside job”. And, in his eyes, it all started at the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II — which took place from 1962 to 1965. Its purpose: to modernize Catholicism. After that, the Church became “something else” entirely, Gibson told Rogan. That something else, as far as he is concerned, is a sham. “I don’t adhere to a post-conciliar Church,” he said.

He doesn’t sound like your ordinary disgruntled Catholic. In fact, Gibson was echoing the key tenets of a ragtag movement known as sedevacantism.

The sedevacantists take their name from the Latin phrase sede vacante, meaning the See of Rome is vacant. The phrase is typically used to describe the period between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, when the papacy is unoccupied. Sedevacantists, however, believe that the papacy has been unoccupied since Vatican II. There have been six popes since then, but none are considered legitimate.

There are at most 30,000 sedevacantists in dozens of distinct organizations worldwide. The movement originated in Mexico in the mid-Sixties, where a priest named Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga came up with its core tenet: the Church post-Vatican II was “headless”. Predictably, that didn’t go down well with His Headless Holiness, and Sáenz y Arriaga was excommunicated. The movement spread in the Seventies, after it was endorsed by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers, a French friar and the personal confessor to Pius XII. As the last pope before Vatican II, Pius is considered the last legitimate pontiff by sedevacantists. This makes Guérard des Lauriers something of a cult hero.

Now, the movement has moved online. The meme-posting page Novus Ordo Watch boasts more than 25,000 followers on X and 13,000 followers on Facebook. Its logo is a sketch of Pius XII (of course), with the tagline: “Unmasking the Modernist Church of Vatican II”.

So, what really happened at this dreadful council that left the sedevacantists stricken? The conventional narrative of Church reform goes like this: Vatican II was called in 1959 by Pope John XXIII, who thought the Church was in dire need of aggiornamento — an update. He believed that if it wanted to thrive in the 20th century, Catholicism would have to ditch dusty dogmas and embrace the modern world. “Through Vatican II, the Church sought to re-engage with an increasingly secularized world,” the historian Jessica Wärnberg told me.

More from this author

Marine Le Pen's favourite far-Right philosopher

By Theo Zenou

This re-engagement crusade took several forms. Vatican II did away with the belief that there was no salvation outside the Church. From then on, non-Catholics could be redeemed. Religious liberty was embraced as the unalienable right of every human being: other religions were to be held in esteem, and antisemitism was denounced.

Vatican II also overhauled the liturgy. Up until then, Mass had been conducted in Latin; the priest had his back to the congregation and faced the altar. But at the council, it was decided that Mass would be conducted in the national language so as to be more inclusive. The priest would face the congregation. The Latin Mass wasn’t abolished, but it became much rarer.

This was a seismic moment for practicing Catholics. For many, it was as if the religion they had followed since childhood, that had given meaning to their lives, had suddenly been taken away from them. The refashioned Mass hit particularly hard. At the time, French President Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked that Vatican II was “the most important event of the century, because you can’t change the prayer of a million men and women without affecting the balance of the planet”.

Millions of conservative Catholics felt aggrieved. Most of them, however, didn’t embrace sedevacantism. It was too radical, too weird, for them. Rather than flee their besieged Church, they chose to stay in it and fight. Their mission: the preservation of the old ways.

These Catholics are usually referred to as traditionalists, and they share many of the same grievances as sedevacantists. They attend Mass in Latin and are critical of the direction of the Church. Yet they stop short of breaking ties with the Holy See, remaining in communion with the Pope. While traditionalists think like reformers, hoping to change the system from within, sedevacantists think like revolutionaries. They want to bring down the whole corrupted system.

Enter a Catholic with chiselled looks named Hutton Gibson, father of Mel. In 1977, he started a newsletter called The War is Now! Think Substack in the analogue age. “This journal has but one purpose: complete recovery of our Church!” Hutton wrote in the first installment. Then, in the hallowed tradition of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, he went after his enemies: “To all who promoted the current deviation… may they roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell!”

Hutton would go on to become one of the leading lights of the sedevacantist movement, writing a series of self-published books. He would argue that Vatican II was actually “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews”, which had rigged the conclave that had elected John XXIII in 1958. In his telling, another cardinal, the arch-conservative Giuseppe Siri, had been elected. But the Jewish-backed Masons had threatened “to atom-bomb Vatican City” if they didn’t get their candidate. John XXIII, a secret Mason, became pope instead.

As Hutton’s tale suggests, sedevacantism is a wonderland of alternative facts, which is another reason why traditionalists steer well clear of it. At its core, sedevacantism isn’t a theological stance; it’s a conspiracy theory. Call it Catholic QAnon, for just like QAnon, it has become a magnet for haters, weirdos, and phonies.

Take Francis Schuckardt, the founder of the Tridentine Latin Rite Church, who in the Seventies crisscrossed America to preach the Bad News: Vatican II had destroyed the Catholic Church. The Pope was demonic, and any Catholic who followed him would be damned — that is, unless they followed Bishop Schuckardt. Hundreds of lost souls fell for it.

The Tridentine Latin Rite Church became a site of horrors. Schuckardt was a sexual predator who regularly assaulted seminarians, according to writer Michael W. Cueno’s The Smoke of Satan. Whenever the nuns were deemed to have misbehaved, they were imprisoned in freezing attics for several weeks. Congregants were mistreated too: nuns once force-fed rotten food to a young girl; after she threw up, she was made to eat her own vomit. “Lick the vomit clean,” one nun yelled while beating her.

The truth was exposed by the press in 1984. Schuckardt took off with his most loyal followers and $250,000 in cash. He tried to get another church off the ground in California, but in 1987 a SWAT team raided his compound. They found drugs, automatic weapons, and gruesome documents about body dismemberment. Schuckardt served a stint in jail and died in 2006.

Another sedevacantist thought leader was Veronica Lueken, a Catholic housewife from Queens, New York. One day in 1968, according to the academic Joseph P. Laycock’s The Seer of Bayside, Lueken started hearing voices. Then the visions began. One time, she saw a giant face in the sky: it was Jesus Christ himself. Soon after that, the Virgin Mary spoke to her from heaven. Surprise, surprise, the Blessed Mother hated Vatican II.

Like a medieval soothsayer, Lueken attracted a sizable following. People from all over the US would flock to Queens to see her in a trance. Her neighbors cursed her. Local restaurateurs thanked the Good Lord for their fortune and set up hot dog stalls for the hungry pilgrims.

In 1975, Mary finally let Lueken in on the secret behind Vatican II. “My child, I bring to you a sad truth, one that must be made known to mankind,” Lueken recalls being told. Paul VI, who promulgated Vatican II, had been replaced by a lookalike. “There is one who is ruling in his place, an impostor, created from the minds of the agents of Satan,” Mary supposedly said. How was that possible? “Plastic surgery, my child — the best of surgeons were used to create this impostor.”

Suggested reading

Will Pope Francis kill the Latin Mass?

By Damian Thompson

Not every sedevacantist would pay homage to Lueken. The movement is divided between a myriad of splinter groups, and each group insists on its particular definition. To complicate matters, a few reject the term sedevacantist and will go ballistic if you call them one. Some prefer the term sedeprivationism, which holds that the popes are popes “materially but not formally”. Others still insist they are simply “true” Catholics who follow the age-old teachings of the Church. But these are marginal distinctions: all ascribe to the same core doctrine. In this, they resemble Leninists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists squabbling over the correct definition of Marxism.

However, just as communists hate the moderate Left, sedevacantists are united in their contempt for traditionalist Catholics. Despite fighting similar battles, the two groups are far from brother in arms, with sedevacantists regarding traditionalists as traitors in the pocket of the Holy See.

One target of sedevacantist ire is the Society of St Pius X — SSPX for connoisseurs — a hardline traditionalist organization which has 600,000 members worldwide. It was founded in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a French archbishop who had led the charge against Vatican II.

Lefebvre often spoke like a sedevacantist. Vatican II was “satanic”. It was the result of an alliance between “the highest authorities of the Church and of masonic lodges”. Therefore, Lefebvre concluded, “this conciliar Church is not Catholic. In so far as the pope, bishops, priests and the faithful adhere to this new Church, they are separating from the Catholic Church.” But Lefebvre never became a sedevacantist. He realized that the Vatican was where the power was, and he always hoped to have more influence within the Church than outside it. He entered into negotiations with Rome several times, to no avail. In the end, Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after ordaining bishops without authorization.

In the eyes of sedevacantists, Lefebvre was a weakling. In 1983, a group of exasperated followers left SSPX, claiming Lefebvre was “far too soft”. In a feat of imagination, they called their new organization the Society of St Pius V, or SSPV. But even SSPV wasn’t hardline enough for the most committed of sedevacantists. In the Nineties, a handful of true believers broke away and joined the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, which was itself a splinter group from the Tridentine Latin Rite Church.

The sedevacantists have no intention of standing by while an imposter rules the Vatican. And so, in order to save the one true Church, the most pious of them have taken one for the team and proclaimed themselves popes. There was Pope Michael I, born David Bawden. A former SSPX member, Bawden proclaimed himself pope in the Nineties. He took over a dollar store in rural Kansas to hold a conclave. His College of Cardinals consisted of his parents, three friends, and himself. There was also Pope Pius XIII, born Lucian Pulvermacher. His conclave took place in 1998 in a log cabin in the mountains of Montana.

Suggested reading

Will Pope Francis kill the Latin Mass?

By Mattia Ferraresi

The most high-profile antipope yet is Peter III, born Markus Josef Odermatt, the leader of the Palmarian Catholic Church, which is based near Seville, Spain. The Church, though not technically sedevacantist, is essentially a cult: there are around 5,000 Palmarians, who are tightly controlled, encouraged to reproduce (some families have 15 kids), and taught that Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco are saints.

Peter III’s predecessor, Gregory XVIII, quit the organization in 2016 and exposed it as a massive scam. “It’s all a set-up, particularly a financial one,” he said. “They’re just using the miracle of the Virgin Mary as a front.” The whole thing is allegedly bankrolled by donations from wealthy businessmen and may be a front for money-laundering.

It’s tempting, perhaps, to dismiss the sedevacantists as a joke — a droll footnote in the long history of the Catholic Church. But to do so would be to underestimate their influence. While sedevacantism remains a fringe movement, its rhetoric has seeped into Catholic conservative circles in recent years. There is the same sense of paranoia and betrayal, and the same belief that the Church is under threat.

The trigger has been Pope Francis himself. Although he isn’t the firebrand progressive portrayed in the media, he is a liberal. The pontiff has reformed the Vatican and tried to make the Church less judgmental and more inclusive: in 2023, for example, he allowed priests to bless same-sex couples.

The backlash has been nasty. From the moment he became pope, Church conservatives have been out to get Francis. At times, they’ve sounded a lot like sedevacantists. Cardinal Robert Sarah is a prime example. To be clear, he has never openly questioned the validity of Francis’s election. That would be grounds for excommunication. But the Cardinal has not minced words. Francis’s decision to let same-sex couples receive blessings was, he said, “a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition”.

By Vatican standards, such a comment is outrageous. The Holy See, lest we forget, is an absolute monarchy. Francis is the supreme pontiff. While he’s not above criticism, insinuating that he’s betraying Catholicism crosses a red line.

But there is more. Just two months ago, Sarah said that any attempt to abolish the Latin Mass would be akin to “a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ”. This was surely a dig at Francis, who has severely restricted the use of the Latin Mass. Rumors abound that he wants to abolish it altogether. Sarah’s remark borrowed heavily from sedevacantist lore. The implications are clear: the Church might fall under the sway of the Devil. And none other than the Pope might be responsible.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has gone even further. He has not only rejected Francis’s teachings, but also cast aspersions on the Pope’s legitimacy. “Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there’s a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said in 2014. “They are feeling a bit seasick because they feel like the Church’s ship has lost its way.” A ship without a rudder. Burke was aping the core tenet of sedevacantism: the Church (the ship) was without a pope (the rudder). The Cardinal later put out a statement making a distinction between “the person of Pope Francis” and “the divine gift of the Petrine Office”.

Suggested reading

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

There were doubts over whether Burke still recognized Francis as Pope. A Catholic website published an article headlined “Does Cardinal Burke think Francis is an antipope?” In 2019, Ross Douthat of The New York Times even questioned Burke about it: “You believe Francis is a legitimate pope?” It beggars belief — here was a leading newspaper asking a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church if he was a sedevacantist. In the end, Burke clarified that, of course, he does believe Francis is the Pope. Nonetheless, he admitted that “people are getting more and more extreme in their response to what’s going on in the Church”.

On that point, Burke is right. The Francis papacy has broken traditionalists. Many are losing faith that they can ever change the Church from within. Angry and increasingly desperate, some openly flirt with sedevacantism. Even if most traditionalists don’t come out as sedevacantists, the damage to the Church is considerable.

The Church has struck back. In 2024 the Vatican excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop, for schism. He was found guilty of “refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff… and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council”.

Viganò sure sounds like a sedevacantist. “We have a deep church that has infiltrated and occupied the Catholic Church,” Viganò said last month. “The members of this counter-church have transformed the Catholic Church into an organization in support of the woke globalist Left.” Predictably, he has won plaudits from some lay conservative Catholics. Among them is Brian Burch, Trump’s Ambassador to the Holy See and a vocal critic of the Pope. “Viganò may not have everything right,” Burch said in 2020. “But there is one thing of which I am certain; Satan is real, and he is on the prowl.”

The story of the sedevacantists is a parable for our times: it shows how extremism goes mainstream. It starts when progress is achieved — a handful of zealots lose their minds and, at the start, everyone ignores them. But, over time, their conspiratorial paranoia takes root. Next thing you know, what sounded preposterous has become legitimate discourse.

But a final question remains: is their ultimate fantasy — to overturn Vatican II — possible? Could the traditionalists inside the Church regain control of the Holy See and coax them back into the fold? Could the next pope redeem them?

The polite answer is that it would take a miracle. Francis has appointed 80% of the cardinals who will elect the next pontiff. “I’m not saying he will be a progressive,” says Frédéric Martel, a sociologist and the author of In the Closet of the Vatican, “but he probably won’t be an ultra-conservative.”

It seems that sedevacantists have lost the holy war — but at least they can take comfort in the knowledge that their usurpers will roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell.

Given the politics and personalities involved, it’s tempting to accuse both men of being as deliberately offensive as possible — even to Roman Catholics, who won’t love the performative and irreligious tone of their materials. And as one straight man I know said, Yiannopoulos’s and Yardley’s new trad-bromance “looks pretty gay”. Yet Yardley seems to represent an incipient trend. He is one of a handful of detransitioners I personally know of who have turned toward Catholicism’s restrictive sexual dogmas (still no blowjobs, folks) and teachings on biological sex in order to change their lives.

While not all insights gained from the experience of being trans and back again are reliable — especially when staged for an online public — their voices are worth hearing for what they reveal about the so-called vibe shift, a younger generation’s turn away from sexual-liberationist paradigms, and the role of Christianity in it. This, even as the attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend just a few years ago — only now in the opposite direction.

More From This Author

How porn swallowed everything

By Valerie Stivers

Yardley is of the first generation of young people to launch their medical transition during puberty as part of the Tumblr-fueled gender revolution, and believes he will face permanent fertility consequences as a result. He says that he was a feminine-looking boy, who liked female things and had mostly female friends, and who was often misgendered. He didn’t know why he was different, but “other people informed me of it”. Around the time Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” came out, in 2011, he wondered if being transgender might be the answer. He went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and says he was goaded into transgender care. The therapist recommended by the clinic “immediately bought into it that I was really a girl”.

Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realization that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.

Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterization of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.

It’s fairly easy to diagnose a swing from one utopian extreme to another, which comments like that exemplify. But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalizing heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies. Today’s proliferation of increasingly niche identities and orientations, and the practice of changing them as a person evolves, supports the argument that these identities aren’t as hard-and-fast as they appear.

Some of the excesses of Yardley’s and Yiannopoulos’s publicly performed hard-Right Catholicism seem like they could be trolling. But Yardley’s explanation over the telephone sounds heartfelt. He was raised nominally Catholic, he says, and as early as 2020, when it became clear to him that being trans wasn’t making him happier or more socially comfortable, he began to research dissenting opinions. A Catholic priest was the first person ever, he says, to tell him something most human beings have believed throughout history — “No, you’re a man, and you can’t get out of it.”

Another outspoken detransitioner, Ray Alex Williams, has run a YouTube channel on the subject since 2023, and published an essay on Substack on 24 February headlined, “How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem.” Williams’s essay begins with the acknowledgement that people will think he has “gone off the deep end” and has gone “from one extreme cult to another”. During a follow-up phone conversation, he reveals that he isn’t officially Catholic yet; his religious-conversion experience is fewer than two weeks old; and his girlfriend broke up with him over it. The headline, in this case, seems like a deliberate distortion in a bid for clicks. However, as he tells it, his “desperate search for moral clarity” has been years in the making, and he believes he needs such clarity to help him combat the destructive role his sexual desires have played in his life.

Autogynephilia, or AGP, is contested cultural territory. Defined by the eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”, it generally involves not just the erotic desire to be a woman, but accompanying fantasies of being used and abused for being female, often these days following the tropes of the “sissy” subgenre of pornography.

When they don’t deny autogynephilia altogether, transgender activists object to the term because it pathologizes the set of sexual desires it describes, and opens the door to the claim that trans people with these desires are not women, but just men with an obsessive paraphilia. (Yardley explicitly disavows AGP as having had any role in his experience.) One thing is certain, though: the set of desires itself is fairly common.

New York magazine books critic Andrea Long Chu has been open that such impulses fueled her transition, and discussed how sissy porn shaped her identity in remarks at the New York Public Library in 2018. Chu said that she started watching “a lot” of pornography as a middle-school boy, and described a progression in her tastes from “run-of-the-mill, mainstream pornography” to “JOI” (jerk-off instruction) videos, in which a female performer demeans the male viewer. From there, Chu “went down a humiliation track … until I hit sissy porn…. My porn addiction had all along been waiting for something like sissy porn … because now if I’m reading in retrospect, the whole thing was about trying to access a kind of sexuality that wasn’t about being a man”. Trans actress and Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer wrote along similar lines in a now-deleted Instagram post the same year: “My sexual orientation was not gay. It was not straight. Nor pan. It was an attraction, is an attraction, always, to misogyny. My gender was SO influenced by a need to be used by men.”

Suggested Article

How we all became prisoners of gender

By Mary Harrington

Detransitioner Williams chronicles a lifelong struggle with a similar set of feelings and desires, which led him to transition to female in 2015, at the age of 28. He says he didn’t have “an underlying predisposition to hate my male body”, though that started after he became trans. Williams lived as a woman for eight years, which he says decreased the sexually fetishistic aspects of his behavior (and his libido), but had other negative consequences, such as extreme social anxiety. He also, in 2020, developed a pulmonary embolism and almost died, he says, which he attributes to taking cross-sex hormones. Attempts to detransition and manage his resurgent AGP in a healthy way, along lines suggested by Phil Illy’s book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, were a failure, despite finding a bisexual, kink-positive partner who accepted his sexuality.

The activist stance on these desires is that they are neutral in themselves and can be considered a sexual orientation, and that any negative consequences come from social stigmatization. Williams’s experience could bear that out. Despite finding willing partners and accepting circles, he continued to feel shame, confusion, and social discomfort from his gender urges and sexual practices. However, he also found that indulging his desires oriented him towards masturbation and away from his partner, and that his desires followed patterns of other addictions in his life, requiring ever-greater stimulus for diminishing rewards, and ultimately bringing unhappiness instead of pleasure.

One day, high on cannabis — another persistent addiction struggle, he writes — and ready to engage in his fetish, Williams had the revelation that both his marijuana smoking and his sexual behavior were self-destructive and pathological in the same way, and had to stop. “Immediately”, he writes, he had the desire to get back into religion, which he had experimented with before on his detransition journey, but this time, he was drawn to Catholicism, specifically for its intensity of pageantry and ritual and its strict sexual doctrine. He understands that his new convictions might seem suspect or “mentally unstable”, he says, but he now believes that the inner voice of shame and disgust that he hasn’t been able to silence has a transcendental cause, and is distinguishing a fundamental right from wrong.

Not all of the new detransitioners are drawn by Christianity’s oldest branch. Sierra Weir, 37, who goes by the name Exulansic on X and Substack, has since 2021 devoted herself since to exposing the ugly side of the gender trend, for simpler but similar reasons of mental and physical health. Weir did a double-major in gender studies and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and says she was once “really into” transgenderism. She transitioned medically to male when she was 23 but began to have ideological disagreements with the trans orthodoxies and experienced harmful and dangerous health outcomes from hormone therapy. She says she now has osteopenia (low bone density, a precursor to osteoporosis) which is a known risk factor with Depo Provera, which she took to suppress menstruation, and she has been recently diagnosed with lumbar degeneration, which she believes is related. She is vituperative against her former doctors, whom she believes misdiagnosed her and exacerbated her problems. “It just ruined my life”, she says.

Weir’s social media channels circulate lurid news items about crimes by transgender women, and frequently discuss suicides by distressed transgender people all genders and ages — material that can legitimately be read as stigmatizing for transgender people seeking public acceptance. She also writes and films disturbing stories on mostly biological female victims of terrible mental and physical health outcomes and botched surgeries. However, she says, “I’m not against individual people who are trans, and I have a great deal of compassion and empathy. I’m speaking out because I don’t want harm to come to them.” (She may or may not now be on the right side of history, but once again, it’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.)

More From This Author

How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Mary Harrington

In addition to believing that hormones and surgeries are physically risky and damaging in ways people aren’t told about, she believes that cross-sex hormones can cloud a person’s thinking — making them more likely to opt for risky procedures — and exacerbate previous mental health issues. “The hormones were affecting my ability to think and my ability to remember”, she says. Having detransitioned, she feels like “I don’t have brain fog anymore.” She believes that people suffering from gender dysphoria from any of these conditions “deserve to have optimal health and to understand their predicament”, and that medical providers are “abdicating that responsibility.”

Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, Weir was “being banned from all platforms of note”, she says. Now she’s free to critique the movement she was once a part of, and with the same zeal. Yardley, for his part, attributes the wave of detransitioners not to the vibe shift or a trend, but merely to the passage of time. It’s been several years since the transgender tipping point, he says, and people have “passed that first sense of euphoria that people get from accomplishing any goal” and begun to have doubts. “So many people are detransitioning because so many people transitioned”, he says. That conclusion, as least, sounds reasonable, and like something we should be open to learning from.

But let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t merely swing from one brand of too-certain conviction to another. The Roman church, in addition to its prohibition of most sexual acts, asks adherents to cultivate lives of silence, contemplation, and prayer. Those who have embraced the Church as a refuge from online ideologies might want to take up these practices — instead of plunging head-long into the next performative mania.

Perhaps you can see the flash of a bishop’s ring as he taps a piece of gossip into WhatsApp; the Holy See employs world-class electronic spies, so everyone uses a private phone rather than the Vatican-issued ones. Even the phone-tappers are busy exchanging information, because like everybody in Rome they suspect that the painfully fragile Francis — who is often too short of breath to read out his own sermons — hasn’t got long to go.

They are just guessing, of course. The Pope is secretive about his health, and two years ago he bounced back from major surgery on his colon that was assumed to be advanced cancer. Even so, he’s 87, the oldest pope for more than a century, and a conclave can’t be too far off.

Ludwig Ring-Eifel of the German news agency KNA said in January that seeing the Pope so short of breath at a press conference at which he was too ill to answer prepared questions was “a difficult moment for me … and you can tell that this situation has also affected many colleagues emotionally”. At the beginning of March, Andrew Napolitano, a retired Superior Court judge from New Jersey, was staying in the papal guest house behind St Peter’s. “The Pope is in poor health, can barely speak or walk; and he radiates sadness,” he reported. “I don’t think he’ll be there much longer.”

Vatican nerves are always on edge in the final years of a pontificate. In the case of the conservative Benedict XVI, they were overshadowed by leaks — gleefully reported by a hostile media — revealing flamboyant corruption at the top of the Roman Curia, the government of the Holy See. Benedict was too frightened to act and resigned in despair.

Now the Vatican is once again paralysed by scandals, but this time round, correspondents working for secular and Catholic outlets are trying to protect Francis, who faces more serious questions about his personal conduct than any pope in living memory.

For years, allegations that would torpedo the career of any secular Western leader have been concealed or played down by a Praetorian Guard of liberal journalists who, back in 2013, staked their reputations on “the Great Reformer”. As a result, even devout Catholics don’t know that the first Jesuit pope has tried to shield several repulsive sex abusers from justice, for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

Suggested reading

Inside the Catholic civil war

By Damian Thompson

Only now is the truth coming out, to the relief of Vatican staff who have to deal with a pope who bears little resemblance to the wisecracking, avuncular figure they see on television. They are — or were until recently — terrified of a boss whose autocratic rule is shaped more by his rages and simmering resentments than by any theological agenda. And they can’t conceal their satisfaction that one particularly gruesome scandal involving papal ally Fr Marko Rupnik is stripping away the facade of “the Squid Game pontificate”, as it’s nicknamed, after the South Korean Netflix series in which contestants have to win children’s games to save themselves from execution.

The Rupnik affair is the most sickening scandal I’ve encountered in more than 30 years of reporting on the Catholic Church. Rupnik, a supremely well-connected artist on whose tacky mosaics the Church has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, was expelled from the Jesuit order last year after he was credibly accused of raping religious sisters belonging to a community he founded in his native Slovenia. Women have come forward claiming that the community was a sex cult. They say he tried to force them to watch pornographic films, drink his semen out of a chalice, violently took the virginity of one sister in a car and encouraged young women to engage in sexual threesomes that, according to Rupnik, would illustrate the workings of the Holy Trinity.

Last year, facing an explosion of rage on Catholic social media — mainstream media were strangely silent — Pope Francis said he would act against his friend Rupnik. He hasn’t done so. Nor has he explained why, when Rupnik was facing excommunication for abusing the confessional to “absolve” one of his female sexual victims, he was invited to conduct a retreat at the Vatican, or why his subsequent excommunication was mysteriously lifted within weeks with the approval of the Pope.

This month Fr Rupnik was listed in the 2024 Vatican directory as a consultant on Divine Worship, of all things. Meanwhile Bishop Daniele Libanori, the Jesuit who investigated the women’s claims and found them credible, has been removed from his position as an auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Rome.

Another toxic scandal is still unfolding in Argentina. In 2016, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, the former Cardinal Bergoglio’s most pampered protégé, had to resign from the diocese of Orán after he was accused of financial corruption and aggressive attempts to seduce seminarians. The Pope’s response? He airlifted Zanchetta to Rome and invented a job for him:”‘assessor” of the funds managed by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the Vatican treasury. Zanchetta was later convicted of assaulting seminarians, even though Rome refused to supply documents requested by the Argentinian court. He’s serving his jail sentence in a retreat house amid reports that his accusers are being harassed.

The story is coming back to haunt Francis, whose enemies — emboldened by his loosening grip on the government of the Holy See — are circulating extremely damaging documents. These suggest that the Pope is even more tangled up in the scandal than previously suspected. And there are other cases: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis unsuccessfully attempted to keep the child molester Fr Julio Grassi out of jail, commissioning a report that branded his victims as liars.

The dark secrets of this pontificate will weigh heavily on cardinals’ minds in their pre-conclave discussions before they cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. They will be speaking in code: no one wants to take the risk of openly trashing the reputation of a recently deceased (or retired) Supreme Pontiff. But the cardinals will be forced to talk about the increasingly poisonous divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics, which date back to the Second Vatican Council but have been made far worse under this pontificate. And they will find it hard to draw a line between Francis’s policies and his personality, since he takes such visible delight in using his powers to spring surprises on the universal Church.

***

When Francis first took office, most cardinals shared the popular enthusiasm for his informal style: his preference to be known as plain “Bishop of Rome” and his abandonment of some of the more comical trappings of his office such as the red shoes. But they quickly discovered that this “informal” pope, in contrast to his predecessors, liked to rule through executive fiat.

Francis has issued a torrent of papal rulings known as motu proprios (literally, “of his own accord”) — more than 60 so far, six times more frequently than John Paul II. They have made massive changes to liturgy, finance, government and canon law. They often land without warning and can be brutal: the Pope has used this mechanism to seize control of the Order of Malta, for example, and to strip away the privileges of the secretive but ultra-loyal organisation Opus Dei.

Two rulings above all have traumatised the conservative Catholics for whom Francis nurtures a pathological dislike, rarely missing an opportunity to point out their “rigidity” or to mock their traditional vestments, decorated with what he calls “grandmother’s lace”.

The first is his decision, issued via motu proprio, to crush the celebration of the pre-1970 Latin Mass that Benedict had carefully reintegrated into the worship of the Church. In 2021, in a decision that he knew would cause his retired predecessor terrible pain, Francis effectively banned its celebration in ordinary parishes.

Only a tiny proportion of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics attend the Old Rite Masses, so why has the ban turned into such a big deal? Partly it’s a reflection of the Cromwellian thoroughness with which it has been enforced by Francis’s new liturgy chief, Cardinal Arthur Roche, the most powerful English cleric in Rome. A native of Batley with the manner of a self-important Yorkshire alderman, Roche has evolved into that familiar Roman beast: an authoritarian liberal with a nose for the juiciest Satimbocca alla Romana and the fluffiest tiramisu. This year he forced his old rival, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, to ban the Old Rite Holy Week ceremonies in his diocese.

Suggested reading

Ten terrible years of Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

The British Conservative peer Lord Moylan, a traditionalist Catholic, vented his fury in a post on X: “I heard a wonderful Tridentine Maundy Mass this evening. I shan’t tell you where it was in case Arthur sends his henchmen round. I’ll just say that English Catholicism has a centuries-old tradition of underground Masses. All that has changed is who’s persecuting us.”

Many bishops aren’t keen on the intricately choreographed Latin ceremonies, but what they dislike far more is having their arms twisted by a pope who, while telling the world that he’s empowering bishops by encouraging “synodality”, whatever that means, is undermining their pastoral authority over their parishes.

But even this controversy pales in comparison with the explosion of rage from half the world’s bishops when, just before Christmas, without warning or consultation, the Pope signed Fiducia Supplicans, a document allowing priests to bless gay couples. This time his chosen instrument was a declaration from the Church’s doctrine office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), that same-sex couples or people in other “irregular” situations could receive “non-liturgical” blessings from priests. This was amazing because, as recently as 2021, the same office had condemned the notion of same-sex couples. Also, no one had ever heard of a non-liturgical blessing. It didn’t exist in canon law. Who came up with that idea?

Step forward the new Prefect of the DDF, Cardinal Victor “Tucho” Fernandez, the most eccentric of the Pope’s Argentinian protégés. It’s hard to exaggerate the weirdness of appointing Fernandez to head the DDF. He was best known for writing a book on the theology of kissing — until it was discovered that he’d also written one about the theology of orgasms, containing passages so disturbing that Tucho himself had second thoughts and apparently tried to hide all the existing copies.

How could this embarrassing lightweight come to occupy an office previously held by Benedict XVI, who as Joseph Ratzinger was arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century? One theory is that Fernandez wasn’t Francis’s first choice, but the name of his preferred candidate, the German progressive Bishop Heiner Wilmer, was leaked and so he picked someone else. As soon as he was in office, Tucho wrote Fiducia Supplicans and slipped it onto Francis’s desk without showing it to other senior cardinals.

The fall-out was spectacular. There was already a growing rift between Catholic bishops, led by German and American progressives, who thought it was OK to bless gay couples and those who thought it made a mockery of the teachings of Christ. After Fiducia that rift seems irreparable.

On 11 January the bishops of West, East and Central Africa jointly announced that they “do not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples”. Francis, unpredictable as ever, then said that was fine because they were Africans, thus throwing Tucho under the bus, opening himself up to accusations of racism and offending the LGBT lobby. Gay rights activists were already mortified by panicky Vatican “clarification” of January 4 stating that the blessings of same-sex couples should last a maximum of 15 seconds and were “not an endorsement of the lives they lead”.

Suggested reading

Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy

By Tobias Jones

Meanwhile the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, wounded by papal overtures to Putin, said Fiducia didn’t apply to them either. Likewise the Polish Church. Most recently the Coptic Orthodox Church has taken the drastic step of suspending theological dialogue with Rome.

“Hagan lio!” — “make a mess! — was the new pope’s message to young Catholics in 2013. What did he mean? All his words are drenched in ambiguity; perhaps it’s explained by his statement that the Church “always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street”. But Fiducia Supplicans smells like an accidental mess, not a calculated risk. It’s something you scrape off your shoe because you weren’t looking where you were going. Had the Pope taken leave of his senses?

***

“He is one of the most complicated men I have ever met,” says a Vatican source who has been observing the Pope closely for a decade. “He can be terrific fun and also incredibly vengeful. If you cross him, he’ll kick you when you’re at your lowest ebb.”

“But don’t get the idea that he’s a master strategist. He’s a clumsy tactician who spends his time lighting and putting out fires. His number one priority, overriding everything else, is that he should be inscrutable. He doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s planning to do — and, if you find out, he’ll do the opposite, even if it disrupts his plans.”

My source does not belong to any clerical faction and his assessments of people tend to be conspicuously gentle. It’s been interesting to watch how, during our meetings in Rome over the past five years, his opinion of Francis has hardened to the point where he unhesitatingly describes him as a nasty man.

If Francis cancels any plan anticipated by the media, then that helps explain the disaster of Fiducia Supplicans: Bishop Wilmer is probably more heterodox than Cardinal Fernandez on the subject of homosexuality, but he would never have put his name to “Tucho’s amateur doodlings”, as one critic describes the document.

But note how quickly the Pope switched into reverse gear. A book just published by the French conservative Catholic Jean-Pierre Moreau portrays Jorge Bergoglio as a liberal iconoclast inspired by quasi-Marxist liberation theology. I think that’s wrong, and he is what he’s always been: a Peronist. Like Juan Perón, the populist President of Argentina during his childhood, he is more interested in power than in ideas. My Vatican source talks of Francis’s “powerful charm, his way of making you think you’re the only person who matters”. They said the same thing about Perón, a consummate opportunist who, at the height of his powers, won simultaneous support from neo-Nazis and Marxists but who also took pleasure in lashing out unexpectedly at allies and opponents alike.

Ideologically, Peronism is all over the place, but it has always been committed to social welfare and also passionately anti-American — two enduring strands in Francis’s thinking. During John Paul II’s pontificate Bergoglio stressed his theological orthodoxy, earning the hatred of some of his fellow Jesuits. But he always disliked meticulous ceremonies — there’s footage of him virtually throwing the Blessed Sacrament into a crowd in Buenos Aires — and when you watch him yawning his way through ceremonies in St Peter’s you can’t help wondering if he finds Mass boring. He no longer celebrates it in public, and the excuse that he’s always too ill to do so doesn’t work: John Paul II said Mass even when crippled by Parkinson’s and barely able to speak.

On the evening Francis was elected, the traditionalist website Rorate Caeli published a cry of anguish from Marcelo Gonzalez, a journalist in Buenos Aires. It was headed: “The Horror!”’ and described the self-effacing figure who had just walked on to the balcony of St Peter’s as “the worst of all the unthinkable candidates”. Bergoglio was a “sworn enemy of the Traditional Mass”’ who had “persecuted every single priest who made an effort to wear a cassock”.

Like most observers, I thought the article was over the top, and like most observers I was wrong. Gonzalez was proved right about the Latin Mass — and also about cassocks. These days ambitious priests in Rome know that the swish of the soutane could land them in a miserable curacy, so now they scuttle across the piazzas in drab clerical suits.

But is Francis really a liberal? The fact that he loathes conservatives doesn’t mean that he supports women’s ordination — he doesn’t — and one shouldn’t read too much into the occasional photo-op with an LGBT Catholic: gossips in the Curia suggest that, when the Holy Father lets his guard down and slips into scatological Buenos Aires slang, he’s not especially complimentary about “the gays”. Or some other minorities.

It’s hard to explain the prominence of gay clergy in his entourage, both in Argentina and Rome, given that no one has ever suggested that Jorge Bergoglio, the former nightclub bouncer who had a girlfriend before he entered seminary, is homosexual. But he knows whose closets contain skeletons. One priest in Rome told me: “When Bergoglio visited Rome in the old days, he’d park himself among other visitors in the Casa del Clero, absorbing the gossip, much of which was about gay clergy. And he wouldn’t forget it.”(The Casa is where Francis went back to settle his bill after his election and made sure there were cameras set up to record his humility.)

Of course, the future pope wasn’t alone in gathering information in this way. Latin American politics, clerical as well as secular, has always been oiled by the exchange of secrets — and nowhere more so than in Argentina, where two thirds of citizens have some Italian ancestry and political horse-trading has a distinctly Italian flavour.

Perhaps it was naive of the cardinals in 2013 to expect the former Cardinal Bergoglio to clean up the corruption that had driven Benedict XVI to the state of helpless despair in which he resigned his office. But that was the main reason they elected him. He promised pest control, and it was a promise he didn’t keep.

Suggested reading

The fairy tale that freed Napoli

By Tobias Jones

Maybe the cardinal should have taken a closer look at two retired cardinals who were acting as his unofficial campaign managers. The American Theodore McCarrick and the Belgian Godfried Danneels were both in disgrace, having been caught trying to lie their way out of sex scandals. McCarrick’s assaults on seminarians had been an open secret in the American Church for decades, while Danneels had already been caught attempting to cover up incestuous child abuse by one of his bishops. Francis immediately rehabilitated both of them. McCarrick resumed his role as the Pope’s emissary and fundraiser (though Francis eventually had to defrock him when he was charged with child abuse). Danneels, incredibly, received a papal invitation to a synod on the family.

Meanwhile, Francis’s financial reforms began promisingly. He created the new job of Prefect for the Economy for the late Cardinal George Pell, a no-nonsense Australian conservative. Pell stumbled across gigantic money-laundering operations involving senior curial officials — whereupon he was conveniently forced to resign to face trumped-up charges of child abuse in Melbourne.

During Pell’s long, ultimately successful, battle to clear his name, Francis inexplicably gave free rein to Archbishop Angelo Becciu, who was already suspected of having his hand in numerous tills. Becciu took the opportunity to sack Libero Milone, the independent auditor appointed by Pell, threatening to throw him into a Vatican jail cell for the crime of ‘spying’ (i.e., doing his job).

Eventually Becciu himself was sacked after the discovery of billions of dollars poured into dodgy investments — at which point, very oddly, Francis made him a cardinal. And he remains one today, despite losing most of his cardinal’s privileges in 2020 after he was charged along with nine others with embezzlement. He was found guilty and now faces five and half years in jail — but no one thinks he’ll serve them: he knows too much.

Yet not everyone with access to damaging information has been promoted. Bishop Nunzio Galantino was president of APSA when Zanchetta was hiding there in the non-job of “assessor”. He expected to be made a cardinal when he retired. He wasn’t and is reportedly furious.

This month I was sent a 500-page dossier on Zanchetta. Many of the stomach-churning details of the allegations of the sexual exploitation of seminarians have never been reported. I was also sent a photocopy of a document purporting to show that diocesan officials from Orán accused Zanchetta of hiding the sale of properties that funded the building of his seminary. It displays the signatures and stamps of the officials. Allegedly, Zanchetta claimed that Pope Francis himself advised him to conceal the transactions. A leading Catholic blog reported this claim in 2022; the mainstream media did not. I showed the photocopy to a former very senior Vatican official, who replied via WhatsApp: “I had heard of this matter as a rumour but now I see it in black and white!”

***

However hideous the scandals associated with this pontificate, it’s unlikely that they will influence the next conclave as much as the document signed by Francis on 18 December last year. Fiducia Supplicans changed the dynamics of the electoral college — not just because it forced Catholic bishops to address the radioactive topic of homosexuality that has torn apart the Protestant Churches, but also because it summed up the catastrophic incompetence of this pontificate.

At least three quarters of the future cardinal-electors will have been appointed by Francis. So you might think that the conclave, while recognising Fiducia as a blunder, will be looking for a pope who supports Francis’s relatively undogmatic approach to issues of human sexuality. And so it might — if he’d created enough liberal cardinals. But he hasn’t.

In the early years of his reign, Francis adopted a tribal approach, especially in the United States. It was as if he was playing a Peronist board game, moving red hats to unlikely sees occupied by Bergoglian loyalists. Newark, New Jersey acquired its first cardinal: Joseph Tobin, who had been close to Ted McCarrick. Los Angeles was punished for having an orthodox archbishop, José Gomez, who really had his nose rubbed in it: instead of becoming the first Hispanic cardinal, he had to watch the honour go to his über-liberal suffragan Robert McElroy of San Diego, accused of ignoring warnings about Ted McCarrick’s predatory habits. Chicago got a red hat, as is customary, but it landed on the head of the aggressively Left-wing Blase Cupich, needless to say a Francis appointee.

Suggested reading

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

Elsewhere in the world, Francis adopted a policy of appointing cardinals from the “peripheries”: Mongolia’s 1,450 Catholics have one; Australia’s five million Catholics don’t. Tonga has one, Ireland doesn’t. But, by doing so, he had to abandon his game of boosting liberals and twisting the tail of his conservative critics. These factional labels don’t mean much in the developing world. In the last two consistories he has created 33 cardinals, only a handful of whom hold Western-style radical views on sexuality. To quote one Vatican analyst: “Francis has wasted his chance to firmly stack the deck for the next conclave.” And now the college is full; even if he lives to call another consistory, he won’t have many places to play with.

The new cardinals tick various Bergoglian boxes. They relish the Pope’s attacks on free-market capitalism and his melodramatic warnings about climate change. None of them is a Right-wing traditionalist and until recently no one paid much attention to their ferocious views on “sodomy”.

Now those views really matter. To quote the same analyst, “when Fiducia Supplicans was published, the African cardinals ditched their Francis-worship overnight. The vast majority won’t vote for anyone who has backed Fiducia”. There are currently 17 African cardinal-electors; nearly all of them are in the anti-gay bloc. To these we can add at least 10 cardinals from Asia, Latin America and the West who share their views, even if they use milder rhetoric. Under current rules, a pope must be elected by a two-thirds majority of the cardinal-electors. This means that social conservatives, if they join forces with the significant number of moderates alarmed by Fiducia, can block anyone seen as progressive on homosexuality.

That’s bad news for Cardinal Luis Tagle, the ambitious former Archbishop of Manila. He was once dubbed the “Asian Francis” on account of his showmanship and socially liberal views. In 2019 Francis put him in charge of worldwide evangelisation — a huge prize that was snatched away when the Pope restructured his department and sacked him as head of Caritas, the Catholic aid agency dogged by sex abuse scandals.

It’s also tricky for Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the affable bicycling beanpole who’s Archbishop of Bologna. His politics are socialist — no problem for developing-world bishops — and during Benedict XVI’s reign he developed an enthusiasm for the old liturgy, even learning how to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. His stance on homosexuality is cautious — but he allowed a gay couple to have a church blessing in his diocese and then, disastrously, had his spokesman basically lie about it, claiming it wasn’t a same-sex blessing when it obviously was. Zuppi isn’t a fan of Fiducia Supplicans, but at the moment he’d run up against the blocking third.

Hardline liberals stand even less of a chance. Blase Cupich of Chicago isn’t papabile; nor are the “McCarrick boys” Tobin, McElroy, Gregory and Farrell, or the veteran European Leftists Hollerich, Marx and Czerny. The name of the Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech has been mentioned because he’s secretary general of the “synod on synodality”, a consultative body of bishops and lay activists that the Pope notably didn’t bother to consult about the new gay blessings. Grech, unkindly nicknamed “the Bozo from Gozo”, has seen his reputation collapse along with that of the toothless synod. His enemies describe him as the biggest toady in the Curia (unfair to Arthur Roche, many would say).

As for hardline conservative papabili, there really aren’t any; Francis has at least made sure of that. But there is a moderate conservative possibility: Cardinal Péter Erdő, Primate of Hungary. Unlike the exuberant, tearful Tagle, he’s an emotionally reserved scholar. When I met him for coffee in London years ago, we were half an hour into the laborious business of using a translator when he suddenly switched into fluent English. He has the reputation of disliking the limelight and being a bit thin-skinned — but at a synod on the family in 2015, despite arm-twisting from papal apparatchiks, he used his position of relator-general to deliver a masterful defence of traditional teaching. One Vatican-watcher describes him as “boringly conservative, which may be exactly what we need right now“.

What about moderate cardinals who are difficult to pigeonhole? The newest papabile is Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Italian-born Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. In recent months the horrors on his doorstep have revealed a diplomat of rare skill. His condemnation of IDF attacks on civilians in Gaza earned him a rebuke from the Israeli foreign minister — but he had earlier condemned Hamas for its “barbarism” and offered himself as a hostage in place of Israeli children. And while it’s not hard to believe him when he says he has absolutely no wish to be pope, it’s possible he may be forced to think again.

But any Vatican-watcher will tell you that new papabili flash through the sky during the last days of a pontificate. This time around they are busy memorising the names of Asian electors. (It’s generally assumed that after Francis we can forget about another Latin American or Jesuit for a few centuries.) Three names keep cropping up: William Goh from Singapore, orthodox on sexuality, quietly critical of the surrender to Beijing; Charles Maung Bo from Myanmar, also a critic of the China deal; and You Heung-Sik, the new prefect for the dicastery for the clergy from South Korea. Cardinal You is a fascinating figure: a teenage convert to Catholicism whose father had either been killed or defected to the North — no one knows. He then converted the rest of his own family. His faith is joyful and his vision of priestly formation far more attractive than Francis’s bitter tirades against “clericalism”.

Finally, we have to consider the most senior of all the papabili — Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who as Secretary of State (a mixture of prime minister and foreign secretary) is technically number two in the Vatican. The 69-year-old Italian is visibly on manoeuvres and his candidacy is being taken seriously. And that in itself is odd, because Parolin was in office when his deputy Becciu and others were embezzling or gambling with billions of dollars from Church funds. Also, he was the architect of the Vatican’s 2018 deal with Beijing, which — as former Hong Kong bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen warned him — would turn the Chinese Catholic Church, including persecuted underground believers, into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Communist Party.

Suggested reading

Claire Keegan's faithless Christmas Carol

By Boyd Tonkin

That is precisely what happened. Zen, now 92 and regarded by many orthodox Catholics as a living saint, has used extraordinary language about Parolin: “He is so optimistic. That’s dangerous. I told the Pope that he [Parolin] has a poisoned mind. He is very sweet, but I have no trust in this person. He believes in diplomacy, not in our faith.’”

This thought is echoed by a Vatican source who has worked with Parolin: “He’s nice to everyone but hollow in the middle. Also, his health is bad. [Everyone in Rome mentions rumours of cancer and Parolin hasn’t denied it.] Last time I saw him he was so frail I was afraid to shake his hand.” But another source says (and this gives you a real flavour of Vatican gossip): “I wouldn’t put it past Parolin’s people to exaggerate the cancer thing, because they think the cardinals want a short pontificate.”

No one disputes that Parolin is a smart operator who specialises in making sure his fingerprints are nowhere near the scenes of various crimes. He nuances his statements on Ukraine and Israel while the Pope puts his foot in it with his improvised comments. He love-bombs potential enemies. Sensing a backlash against Francis, he is tacking Right, admitting that Tucho’s gay blessings are a nonsense.

To his critics, Parolin is the Italian Francis: empty, devious and sneeringly dismissive of the Latin Mass, an idiotic stance when you consider the surprising fact that the old liturgy is fast acquiring cult status among young Catholics. But are they overlooking one big difference? From the moment he became a cardinal, Bergoglio had his eyes set on the papacy and his gaze never wavered. Parolin, on the other hand, may recognise that he is too compromised to survive successive ballots. Perhaps his real ambition is to become a truly powerful Secretary of State under the next man.

And we really don’t have a clue who that will be. So much depends on how moderate, non-aligned cardinals vote. They are revealing nothing, especially now that the Vatican and probably diocesan curia are stuffed with hidden microphones. We can only guess what a swing voter such as Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster is thinking. Until recently he invoked the name of Pope Francis with cringe-making frequency. Now, not so much. He must be sick of the meaningless rhetoric of synodality and being pushed around by Arthur Roche. He clearly wasn’t impressed by Fiducia.

One can easily imagine mildly liberal cardinals voting for a mildly conservative candidate who can tackle the structural damage of the past 11 years. “Francis has left canon law with so many holes in it that it’s like the surface of Mars,” says a priest who has worked in the Curia. That’s infuriating for cardinals who, like Nichols, are diocesan bishops. They have to decide whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics can receive Communion, a desperately sensitive subject on which the Pope is deliberately evasive. And how do they ensure that these Fiducia blessings are “spontaneous”and “non-liturgical”? What does that even mean?

It’s a fair bet that, in their pre-conclave conversations, most cardinals will agree that the next pope must be someone capable of supervising an emergency repair job that clarifies doctrine, the scope of ecclesiastical authority and puts an end to the jihad against traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are a generation or two younger than the jargon-spouting Boomers harassing them.

Also, the cardinals know they must delve deep into the past of the leading contenders. They have no choice. The next pope will face instant, merciless scrutiny from online investigators. A 2021 article in The Tablet by church historian Alberto Melloni described an all-too-credible catastrophe: “The newly elected pope steps out. And as he smiles and humbly introduces himself to the crowds in the square, a lone social media post makes a stunning allegation.” The new pope, when a bishop, had failed to act against a priest who went on to commit further crimes. “In the square and in the press boxes, eyes drop from the balcony to their smartphones … The pope steps back inside, and resigns. The see is vacant again.”

Suggested reading

Would Kant really support BLM?

By Kathleen Stock

The necessary scrutiny will be an awkward business, but at the very least the cardinals mustn’t repeat the mistake made by their predecessors in 2013 — that is, taking a candidate at his own estimation. The truth is that many Catholics in Argentina from across the ideological spectrum knew about Francis’s character flaws: his compulsive secrecy, score-settling, disturbing alliances and rule by fear. But no one asked them.

One might argue that none of the 120-plus eligible cardinals is quite so mean-spirited as the Holy Father. Fair enough; but there should be no question of electing anyone who imitates Francis’s modus operandi. No chameleons, in other words. No one who was orthodox under Benedict, liberal under Francis and is now slinking back to the centre.

The new pope must be a holy man who relies on lieutenants who have no dirt on him and on whom he has no dirt — and it’s a shocking fact that this would represent a departure from recent precedent. The pope must be above reproach. That is far more important than whether he’s “liberal” or “conservative”.

Traditionalists will disagree, but I don’t think it’s a bad college of cardinals. Cynics might say that’s because Francis, having made factional appointments early on, lost interest and appointed independent-minded men by accident. But let’s not neglect the role of social media: while the Praetorian Guard have been busy hiding things, countless websites have been making life difficult for the poisonous old toads who have been trying to fix conclaves for the best part of 2,000 years.

Melloni is probably right: as the new Supreme Pontiff shuffles on to the balcony there will be an unnerving moment while the faithful check their mobiles. But if the cardinals have done their job properly the applause will quickly resume. And if you listen carefully, you will hear another noise coming from every office in the Vatican: a sigh of relief that the Squid Game is finally over.

***

This article was first published on 27 April, 2024.

Vance’s faith is more conventional than his grouping with Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes would imply. He has explained that what drew him to Catholicism was not its miracles or traditional versions of its liturgy, but its social teaching: the pointed questioning of free market economics that has lured other post-liberal politicians and thinkers. Catholicism gave him a way of understanding human beings that was “simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral” — an ethical holism more satisfying than his childhood Protestantism or the frenetic pursuit of status by the professional classes. Ironically enough, the only “weird” thing to occur on his journey towards conversion was a tiny miracle in defence of the current Pope. Just before his conversion, Vance had been sitting at a hotel bar, defending Francis against the criticisms of a conservative friend, when a wine glass popped off the shelf and smashed on the floor, shocking both men into ending their discussion.

The effort to separate wild from mainstream strains of Catholicism may in any case be misguided. What if weirdness is not an aberration from, but the essence of any faith? The New York Times columnist — and Catholic convert — Ross Douthat has mused that explanations of religions that emphasise their social or psychological utility cannot account for “religious experience in the wild”, which is “much weirder…and more destabilizing” than we could have predicted. Everything from fairy stories to the close encounters of modern Americans with UFOs suggests to him that the core of any faith, “the real place where all the ladders start”, is “revelation crying out for interpretation”. A gospel miracle or a flying saucer are both clues that the world and the minds with which we interpret it are “much stranger than the secular imagination thinks”.

You do not have to share Douthat’s fervent Catholicism to consider that the call of the weird expresses deep-seated dissatisfactions with modern life. In a thoroughly disapproving essay on post-liberal thought, the centrist historian Mark Lilla reflected on why so many of the university students he meets are embracing pungently reactionary kinds of Catholicism. These converts have correctly sensed the “malaise — call it cultural, call it spiritual, call it psychological” — into which our rule-bound and incredibly online Western societies have fallen. Like the questers of the Sixties, they are rebelling against the “air-conditioned nightmare” of modern life, which tends to depression and suicide.

The appeal of rewilding religion is evident in two new books from writers of very different temperaments. The weaker of them is a lurid but strangely enjoyable manifesto by the journalist Rod Dreher, a professional controversialist whose flight from the secularised United States has taken him to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. Dreher, an old friend of Vance who witnessed his reception into the Church, has grumbled about the attempts of Democrats to label him as weird. Yet in Living by Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, he argues that religion can only save us from our modern ailments by unleashing its stranger side. The problem with modern societies is that they are not weird, but WEIRD societies, a social sciences acronym for “white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic”. The rise of print culture, the Reformation and market capitalism combined to turn their citizens into anxious strivers who value only money and refuse to accept realities that cannot be described in the language of scientific and instrumental rationality.

Technology has worsened our detachment from all that is tangible and corporeal. Dreher, an over-sharer who likes to present himself as the worst of sinners, checks his phone first and last thing at night. Growing up in steamy Louisiana, he admits that he’s never liked going out into nature much, preferring to live mentally online. He worries that internet addiction is turning us all into Gnostics, early Christian heretics who maintained it was possible to detach the soul from the body. Our selves crumble into competing distractions. By fostering a bodiless selfhood, the internet encourages “transgenderism”. He claims that Chat GPT girlfriends have persuaded people to break up with their wives or launch assassination attempts on the late Queen Elizabeth II. We are what we watch: when Lil Nas X films himself twerking with devils, he tempts us to go over to Satan.

Despite these silly claims, Dreher does evoke powerfully enough the spiritless detachment that has infected even convinced members of mainstream churches in the United States. In a previous book, Dreher called on Christians to embrace the “Benedict option” and withdraw from the godless society around them. But it seems as if the lure of technology has been too strong: even the devout feel locked out from spiritual realities, cut off from a “sustained felt connection to the living God”. Bathed in the light of their screens, they have lost what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa has called “resonance”, a connection with an unpredictable and so revivifying natural world.

How then can Westerners touch grass? Dreher’s answer is simple: surrender the critical faculties that bar our access to wonder and believe what people tell us about encounters with other worlds. These experiences are not always comforting. Many of Dreher’s stories concern demonic possession. Take Emma in Manhattan, whose marriage with Nathan is on the rocks because she has been possessed by an evil spirit. Dreher watches her snarl at a Catholic priest who drops by for a consultation with her, armed with a fragment of the True Cross. Dreher even has his own tangles with demons to report: when he is in Rome for the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, a chair he was sitting on mysteriously topples and breaks in half.

More from this author

Can Silicon Valley raise the dead?

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

In Dreher’s mind, the future lies with “strong religions” that enlist us in this constant battle between good and evil. One of the reasons why Dreher — who is that most American of figures, the serial converter — dropped Roman Catholicism for Eastern Orthodoxy was his conviction that its rites retain the mystical but also the very bodily link between the physical and supernatural realms. It is one he thinks that other churches abandoned in the rush to experiment with Zoom services during Covid lockdowns.

His case for strong churches rests on the fact that the rise and consolidation of Christianity often owed less to rational argument than to stunning displays of power by apostles and saints, which pay no heed to modern distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the probable and the impossible. Yet he builds his argument on the weird present as well as the Christian past, suggesting that faith can profit from counter knowledge and altered states. Encounters with UFOs stir him just as they do Ross Douthat. He respects thinkers who have fused Ufology with theology, by suggesting that the Church’s miracle stories obscurely record past visits from advanced intelligences. Though he scoffs at “hippies”, Dreher coyly lets on that taking LSD as a college student revived his sense of the world’s beauty and so revived his faith in God.

Perhaps Dreher’s craving for high-octane experience has more to do with the vapid yet remorseless quality of life in North America, rather than modernity itself. Every time he leaves America, cheerfulness breaks through. The visionaries he meets in Irish villages, Budapest bars or in ravishing Italian towns manage to log off and find wonder with much less drama than the tormented seekers of the United States. Dreher’s own epiphany comes on a holiday in Jerusalem, one of the “thin” places where wonder seems closer than in humid Louisiana. Reeling from a divorce, he takes part in the Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feeling an unbounded exhilaration as he moves his hand unhurt through the flames passed around by the Orthodox clergy. He keeps a photograph of his grinning face at that moment on his smartphone — it is tough to kick the habit.

While he may abhor capitalism, Dreher retains a thoroughly American trust in market forces. If the West’s spiritual consumers are not offered a religion of wonder, then they will load something even stronger and more occult into their carts. If not Christ, then Baphomet. It is curious to find that Pope Francis shares this zero-sum reading of the West’s exhausted secularism. At a recent general audience, he remarked — then being no less online than the rest of us, posted on X — “Our secularised world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritism, astrologers and satanic sects. If we kick the devil out the door, he tries to return through the window.”

Suggested reading

The genesis of the MAGA Bible

By Matt Rowland Hill

The English philosopher Simon Critchley, who works at the New School in New York City, is a very different person to Dreher: agnostic and fastidiously precise rather than folksy and antic. But he shares his sense that modern life is rubbish, especially after the Covid lockdowns, and that the “weirdest and most dubious” forms of religious life might allow us to escape from it. He begins his book On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy with dark ruminations on the state we are in. “Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force…The world deafens us with its noise…we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.” As a result, we crave “ecstasy”, which is “what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us”. This leads us to “mysticism”, which opens up “the possibility of ecstatic life”. To be a mystic is to decouple the conscious self to which you are “riveted” and re-enter the living flow of reality.

You do not need to be wildly religious to practice mysticism, but it helps. Although Critchley’s book is free from flying wine glasses, snapped chairs and demonic possession, he does spend a lot of time introducing us to the visions of the isolated, starved ascetics of the Middle Ages. In the late 14th century, Julian of Norwich, one of his heroines, hoped to die at the age of 30 and so emulate Christ’s agonies on the cross. However, she changed her mind at the sight of a bleeding crucifix, which provoked a 12-hour spell of further visions. She rose from her deathbed and spent the next decades writing in obsessive detail about this healing rapture.

Why admire — or even seek to emulate — such clearly pathological behaviour? Critchley’s answer is similar to the one offered more than a century ago by the American philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience. James knew that we could always give psychological or physiological explanations for the weird things “sick souls” such as Julian claimed to have seen or heard. But to medicalise such experiences does not exhaust their value: they can still bring information about reality that might be denied to better adjusted but limited minds. Critchley, who respects mystics not just as visionaries but as excellent writers, argues that they can show us sad moderns how to pass out of yourself and into some wider unity. Christians might think of this as union with God, but not everyone must. James called it letting in the “tremendous muchness” of reality. Critchley’s mystics get to that place by practising the subtle arts of negation and paradox. In the chase to find God, they end up losing him but also themselves — and so feel free.

The dark spaces of Julian and her mystic peers sound rather like Douthat’s place where “all the ladders start”. But Critchley doesn’t want to collapse these wrenching possibilities into merely religious experience. While the joy and release that arise from mysticism can come to suffuse everyday existence, he isn’t interested in extrapolating an organised religion from them, which could guide our moral lives or order our society. As most of us are not and will never be religious theists, our moments of sweet release must have other sources. Poetry and still more music — he likes Kraut Rock — seem the most promising of these to Critchley. It is slightly disappointing to find that his promise of joy peters out into such tasteful and private glimpses of transcendence as streaming the new Nick Cave or rereading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Then again, mystical literature has always been better at framing problems than offering easy answers. We cannot hope to swiftly or permanently escape the state many of us are in. The best we can do perhaps, before rushing to write off other people’s beliefs or experiences as weird, is to reflect on the social and psychic pressures that have generated them and bear down on us all. Maybe it is time to enlarge, rather than to celebrate, what we consider to be normal.

Amid the indignation, however, few were willing to ask what — or who — compelled Pope Francis to weigh in on the matter. If they had, they would have stumbled across the work of an influential figure who, it’s no exaggeration to say, is at the heart of the Vatican’s foreign policy.

Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned economist at Columbia University, has been an informal advisor to the Vatican for about a decade. Best known as the author of several books on poverty and climate change, his anti-American views, which entail blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, have seen him largely ostracised in academic and policy circles. Today, you’re more likely to catch him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson than a prestigious journal.

“The Pope is correct that negotiations require moral courage,” Sachs wrote to me in an email last April. “Zelensky showed that in March 2022, but was dissuaded by the US,” he added, reiterating the disputed account that the US and the UK forced Ukraine to turn down an almost done deal with Russia that would have ended the war. “Now, in my personal view, the US should show moral courage in recognising its mistake of pushing Nato enlargement.”

Although Francis has balanced his pacifist statements by occasionally praising “brave” Ukrainians, and has tactically backtracked following waves of criticism, the parallels between the Pope and Sachs on foreign policy are striking. Since the 2022 invasion, the Pontiff has said that “Nato barking at Russia’s gate” ended up “facilitating” Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, has celebrated the legacy of the “great, enlightened Russian empire”, and has managed to alienate even Ukrainian Catholics. It is perhaps no surprise that, in Kyiv, the Vatican is largely considered pro-Russian.

On the war in the Middle East, meanwhile, Sachs has lamented that “the US is complicit in the genocide in Gaza”, while the Holy See described Israel’s response to October 7 as “inhuman” less than a week after Hamas carried out its attack. Sachs’s friendliness toward Xi Jinping’s China — he assured that, unlike in Gaza, no genocide is under way in Xinjiang — also dovetails with the current position of the Holy See, which signed (and then renewed) a much-discussed agreement with the regime.

And as Vatican officials and scholars advising the Holy See have told me, these converging views are no coincidence. They point out that Sachs was credited as one of the main authors of Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si on the environment, and advised the Holy See on topics such as sustainable development, the climate crisis and economic inequality — striving to provide a scientific framework to the Pope’s moral authority. For years, he has been lecturing and consulting with top Vatican officials, reportedly visiting Rome as often as twice a month. The 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti on fraternity and social friendship took up the themes of solidarity and the multipolar world that Sachs has devoted himself to in recent years. In 2021, he was named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a prestigious academic body assisting the Church in developing its social doctrine. Pretty impressive for a non-Catholic raised in a Jewish family.

“The Pope relies on many advisers on political and economic issues, but certainly Sachs’s influence on the Pope’s inner circle has grown significantly during the last two years,” one Vatican aide told me. According to another official, Sachs’s ability to affect the debate also depends on his formidable fundraising power. Every year, he organises and chairs three major seminars in Rome on topics that Francis holds dear, and he works with donors and partners in order to cover the costs. In March, for instance, he set up a workshop named the Summit of the Future, aiming to link “fraternal economy” and “sustainable development” in a crossover that resembles a mixture of a Gospel and a UN brochure. The event was co-chaired with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN nonprofit created and still run by Sachs.

One of his long-term collaborators is Andrea Illy, CEO of illycaffè, the Italian coffee company known for championing social responsibility. Together they chair the Regenerative Society Foundation, an organisation comprising NGOs, academics, the private sector and “spiritual leaders”, which promotes a whole revolutionary socio-economic model. Illy has assisted Sachs in bringing questions of sustainable development to the forefront of papal matters, having been a speaker at one of Sachs’s workshops in the Vatican.

Among the main promoters of Sachs’s involvement in the Vatican is Stefano Zamagni, a professor of economics at the University of Bologna who led the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences from 2019 to 2023. “Sachs has no special access to the Pope,” Zamagni told me, “but his immense knowledge and authority is recognised by everyone. Because of that, the documents he prepares carry a lot of weight, and the Pope, whose background is not very solid, certainly reads them carefully.”

Zamagni concedes that Sachs is sometimes too extreme, but that’s just a “matter of style, not substance”. Yet Sachs is sure to convey his anti-US views on every available platform, including the TV show of Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s chief propagandist. Elsewhere, the most aggressive tabloid of the Chinese Communist Party routinely interviews him on major geopolitical issues in order to “counter Western media’s malicious distortions”.

In his quest to become a Western spokesperson for the Global South, he blames the CIA for global turbulence and purports that Covid came out of a US lab. Sachs even floated the idea that the ISIS-K terrorists behind the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in March 2024 were acting on behalf of the US, as Washington routinely “engages in Jihadi-linked terror, and has done so for decades”.

Suggested reading

The scandals haunting Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

“He used to be a mainstream economist and made many mistakes,” Zamagni said, referring to the early Nineties, when Sachs and others administered in Poland so-called “shock therapy” — dramatic economic policies employed to suddenly unleash market forces in state-controlled economies — and advised Russia to follow suit. “People don’t say that, but in Russia one million people died as a result of taking away health care coverage granted under the Soviet Union,” Zamagni said. In the end, the lost sheep rejoined the flock.

Sachs was named a professor at Harvard at the age of 28, received 42 honorary doctorates, filmed a documentary with Angelina Jolie, advocated for massive foreign aid to developing countries, applied scientific development principles to rural villages in Africa, fought to end poverty, partnered with George Soros, and worked with Bono in Africa at the height of the musician’s humanitarian career. Like many others before him, Sachs wanted to save the world. He also thought he knew how to do it. Soros believed Sachs had “a certain messianic quality about him”. He would eventually find in Pope Francis a leader who was the epitome of the principles he pursued all his life.

“My sense is that there was a turning point in his life,” Zamagni said. “I believe he went through a crisis and came out enlightened,” he added, praising the conversion-like journey that turned Sachs from torchbearer of neoliberal orthodoxy to leading advocate of the Global South. Others, though, see his apparent shifts as coherent elements of a technocratic framework.

“Sachs’s support for an unregulated free market in the early Nineties may seem to run counter to his current admiration for Xi’s China and other illiberal regimes, but it’s actually consistent with a mindset that puts efficiency before political debate,” says Nadia Urbinati, a professor of political theory at Columbia and colleague of Sachs. “Sachs and others want to reform democracy in order to make it more efficient. The idea, which is increasingly popular, is that democracy’s decision-making process is slow, troublesome and irrational, and therefore needs to be corrected with tools taken from autocracies and hybrid regimes,” Urbinati explained.

These days, Sachs seems desperate to be credited as a prophet of the Global South’s rise against the corrupt — and rapidly collapsing — world order shaped by the West. The very order Sachs worked so hard to build, before realising it was the work of the devil. Perhaps he has found in the Pope the moral inspiration required to re-launch himself into a new endeavour to fix the world’s shortcomings. In the end, the shock therapist, the humanitarian idealist, the conspiracy theorist, the renowned scholar, the messianic thinker and the enabler of autocrats are all facets of the man who thought he knew how to save the world.

Inside the 800-year-old cathedral, the Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, once Pope Francis’s doctrinal chief and now one of his leading critics. His meticulous ritual actions were followed with rapt attention by the congregation.

Very few of them were born when this rite of Mass was mothballed after the Second Vatican Council in 1970. Even the 76-year-old Müller was ordained priest long after it had disappeared from parish life. He has only recently learned to say it, in response to an unprecedented demand created by Pope Benedict XVI’s bold decision in 2007 to make the Traditional Latin Mass or TLM available to Catholics everywhere.

But will the annual Chartres pilgrimage ever happen again? This week Rome is buzzing with rumours that Pope Francis — a veteran opponent of the old liturgy, which he regards as reactionary and effeminate — is planning to ban the Latin Mass from almost every Catholic church in the world.

Three years ago Francis instituted a partial ban that ejected TLM faithful from churches that, in some cases, they had paid to restore. The retired Benedict was grief-stricken by the decision but had taken a vow of silence. In the United States, the heartland of the Generation Z renaissance, many traditionalists can now hear the old Mass only in church halls, basements or school gyms.

The Vatican official responsible for enforcing Francis’s ruling, ironically entitled Traditonis Custodes (Guardians of Tradition), is his liturgy chief Cardinal Arthur Roche, a native of Batley, West Yorkshire, who has approached his task with Cromwellian zeal.

This year, the power-hungry Roche forced his old rival Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, to ban the celebration of traditional Holy Week services in his diocese. This piece of arm-twisting prompted the Conservative peer Lord Moylan, a traditionalist Catholic, to write furiously in a post on X: “I heard a wonderful Tridentine Maundy Mass this evening. I shan’t tell you where it was in case Arthur sends his henchmen round. I’ll just say that English Catholicism has a centuries-old tradition of underground Masses. All that has changed is who’s persecuting us.”

The perception that Francis is singling out traditionalist Catholics for punishment beatings is no longer limited to Latin Mass circles. Many mainstream Catholics who, like me, attend English-language Masses are outraged by the Vatican’s vendetta against faithful believers at a time when the Pope himself is mired in scandal.

Scrupulously devout Catholics are being humiliated by a pontiff who is implicated in the protection of a string of convicted or credibly accused sex abusers.

The most notorious case is that of the fashionable mosaic artist Fr Marko Rupnik, a close ally of Francis who was thrown out of the Jesuit order after former religious sisters accused him of stomach-turning acts of assault, including rape. Rupnik allegedly justified his disgusting acts by invoking a dark sexual theology represented in his mosaics. Incredibly, he is still a priest and the Vatican communications office continues to promote his artwork.

One possibility is that new liturgical restrictions will be published on July 16, the third anniversary of Traditonis Custodes. That document restricted celebrations of the TLM to churches with long-standing permissions to host it, and to traditionalist priestly fraternities founded as an alternative to the rebel Society of St Pius X (SSPX), which recognises Francis as pope but rejects the vernacular modern Mass as invalid.

More from this author

The scandals haunting Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

For popes John Paul II and Benedict, dealing with the disobedient SSPX, half in and half out of the Catholic Church, was a nightmare. But Benedict, in particular, shared the dissidents’ love of the Latin Mass while recognising that most Catholics prefer to worship in their own language. His historic 2007 ruling was intended to allow the old Mass to flourish alongside the new.

What he didn’t anticipate was that so many Catholics would embrace the TLM, whose words and choreography have not changed for centuries and is celebrated by a priest facing in the same direction as a silent congregation. They may be a small proportion of the world’s nominal Catholics, but their services are packed and their priests are on average at least 20 years younger than their non-traditionalist colleagues.

The Mass of the Ages, as devotees call it, offers a numinous and intimate experience to a generation who are repelled by services in which ageing “empowered laity” lead them in “contemporary worship” that, in the worst cases, resembles a cross between a 1970s game show and a campus protest. Now this spiritual resource is being taken away from them by the man they recognise as Vicar of Christ.

How can Rome possibly justify such cruelty? One argument used by Francis and his anti-traditionalist circle is that TLM adherents, especially in America, behave like a spiritually superior elite. And there’s some truth in this. The more fervent “trads” have adopted a form of fancy dress: the men wear beards and smoke pipes; their wives dress in conspicuously modest long skirts. They sometimes slip into patronising language that has alienated Catholics who would otherwise be well disposed towards them.

But these haughty “rad trads” are not typical of Catholics who attend the TLM, often in tandem with the New Mass, regarding it as a spiritual resource that adds to the Church’s catholicity. After all, doesn’t the hierarchy love to advertise its “celebration of diversity”?

At a time when liberal bishops across the Western world are encouraging their flocks to genuflect before the Pride flag, why is Rome unable to tolerate Catholic communities who prefer to worship according to the ceremonies — and beliefs — of their forefathers? Why does it caricature and bully its own traditional believers in a fashion that the ancient non-catholic Eastern Churches find sinister, as do many Anglicans?

Suggested reading

Is the Catholic Church evading justice?

By Elle Hardy

There can be no definitive answer, because no one really understands the thought processes of Jorge Bergoglio. The 87-year-old Pope’s recent decisions have been quixotic, contradictory and divisive. No sooner had he given his permission for blessings of gay couples last December than he had to withdraw it. He was caught using anti-gay slang, roughly translated as “faggotry”, and despite the outcry immediately repeated it. He has now doubled down on his opposition to ordaining women as priests and deacons.

One theory is that, having let down members of his progressive fan club on so many key issues, the Pope is trying to placate them by kicking traditionalists. If so, he is pursuing a self-defeating strategy.

Put simply, Francis is losing the confidence of his bishops. It sticks in their throats that a pontificate that bombards them with jargon about “synodality” forced Traditionis Custodes on them without warning, undermining their authority in their own dioceses.

Many mainstream bishops who don’t particularly like the old form of worship nonetheless enjoy warm relations with local Latin Mass communities. They regard them as loyal Catholics. In England, especially, Traditionis Custodes has revived memories of the Tudor persecutions. What will happen to Old Rite Catholics if the Vatican turns the thumbscrews yet again? It’s worth noting that the heroic Elizabethan clergy who emerged from priest holes to say Mass for recusant Catholics were celebrating a liturgy very similar to the one Francis is trying to suppress.

The sense of a scandal-ridden pontificate losing its grip is now so strong that, to quote a Vatican source, countless bishops think it would be “both nasty and stupid” for the Pope to employ religious police to snuff out the Traditional Latin Mass.

Ordinary Catholics who have never attended one of these services are alarmed by the Vatican’s increasingly fanatical hostility to a beautiful expression of worship. Until now they have remained silent out of loyalty to the Holy Father. But their patience is likely to snap if their traditionalist brothers and sisters are subjected to yet another mauling by their shepherd.

Last month, unconsecrated nun Rosalind Moss, as the Vatican would have her, was praised by Texas Governor and practising Catholic Greg Abbott for supporting what has become the holiest of causes for Republicans: the re-election of Donald Trump. “Across the globe, men and women are waking up to the alarming truth that governments no longer serve God and the people,” Moss said in her weekly broadcast on the Catholic Media Network, simulcast on Facebook. “If President Trump gets in, it’s a complete act of God,” she continued. “We are up against not just an election, but an absolute war for good against evil.”

Mother Miriam, a Jewish-turned-evangelical-turned-Catholic convert who wears a full nun’s habit, claims to have been kicked out of two dioceses, and had her vows cancelled by one bishop and denied by three others. Yet this has only increased the size of her pulpit among a reactionary coalition of defrocked. Joining her in the “Nuns for Trump” crusade are The Dominican Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a disavowed Michigan “order” of anti-socialist activists, and Ohio-based Children of Mary, who have attended rallies wearing MAGA masks.

Not to be outdone, in 2020 Wisconsin priest Father James Altman went viral with a YouTube video stating that “you cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat”, warning that those who were would “face the fires of hell” with “60 million aborted babies standing at the gates of heaven barring your Democrat entrance”. Altman was subsequently stripped of his duties, but gained the support of prominent Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland, who was himself removed from his post late last year by Pope Francis, reportedly after calling him the “usurper of Peter’s chair”.

Traditionally, Catholic voters have been fairly evenly split between the two parties, only swaying to one side in notable landslide elections such as with George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008. Donald Trump is changing that, and it’s likely to have far-reaching consequences. Only four years ago, Catholics voted for Trump by just 1%. This year, the Republican candidate is currently up 12 points on Biden among Catholics. And this shift is most profound among Hispanics, who make up 40% of the country’s Catholics. In the past two national elections, Hispanic Catholics voted around 2-to-1 for Democratic candidates. In current polling, however, they have Biden only at two points ahead, at 49-47. To put that in context, a similar poll in 2020 found Hispanic Catholics preferred Biden to Trump by 67-26 — a staggering 20-point swing.

Dr Andrew Chesnut, a professor of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, says that American consecrated nuns — unlike Mother Miriam — have historically been known for progressive Catholicism, particularly social action work and charity. The rise to prominence of renegade clergy is “reflective of the political shift among white Catholics, and now increasingly Hispanic Catholics as well”, he says. While they can no longer partake in activities sanctioned by the Vatican, they are nevertheless representative of those who do. “Those who attend mass on a regular basis tend to be even more Republican and more pro-Trump,” Chesnut says.

This is largely why Trump’s lead among white Catholics is continuing to grow, an eight-point swing from 57-42 in 2020 to 61-38 today. Meanwhile, the number of Catholics who go to mass has halved since the Seventies, pointing to a population that is dwindling in numbers, but increasingly rusted on to conservative values. Indeed, no one is more representative of the changing mood of the Catholic laity than Bishop Strickland. According to the National Catholic Register, until 2016, he was “considered mild-mannered and middle-of-the-road”. But as that year’s election grew near, he ceased being a “management bishop” and adopted an aggressive and controversial approach. Recalling his words in prayer, he told the paper that he asked himself: “Are you going to just sort of follow this management model [or] are you going to teach the truth?”

More from this author

What do Christian Zionists think about Jews?

By Elle Hardy

These days, Strickland is a MAGA disciple, rejecting the established religious order to pursue the truths weighing on his soul, engaging in Covid-scepticism, stoking anti-LGBT sentiment, and attending rallies protesting the election “stolen” from Trump alongside other dismissed Catholic luminaries. “They form a traditionalist, pre-Vatican II wing who are not recognised by the Roman Catholic Church,” Chesnut says. In the Saint Dominic order, claimed by the Michigan Nuns for Trump, they have a figure known for combating heresy “which is what they see themselves doing in fighting against ‘godless socialism’ implemented by Biden”.

The Bible shows that one man’s heretic can be another’s hero, but equally, the gospels are nothing if not about the horrors of persecution and the importance of mercy. “American bishops have been at the forefront criticising, questioning and challenging Pope Francis’s papacy,” Chesnut says. “The bigger, more interesting picture here is that we’ve always seen Trump’s main constituency as white evangelicals. But we can now make the blanket statement that Trump is the candidate of white Christians.” Given the pace with which Hispanic Catholics are fast moving to the Right, it might not be long before we can say that Trump is the candidate of Hispanic Christians, too. And, even though black Protestants are firmly in the Democratic camp, some 18% are leaning towards voting for Trump this election, twice that of 2020, and six times the number who voted for him in 2016.

Suggested reading

Trump launches his New York heist

By James Billot

Yet while Trump’s spiritual coalition is taking shape, the question of why Catholics are now in the tent is a little thornier. “Catholics have moved to the Right for the same reason as Evangelicals are already there,” Andrew Chesnut believes, “and that is the perception of a declining standard of living due to immigration and a departure from traditional Christian values”. And the ramifications of this shift cannot be underestimated. Evangelicals have traditionally been seen as the Republicans’ most reliable constituency, accounting for about a quarter of the United States population. Yet Catholics represent around one in five Americans, meaning their change as a bloc from an essentially neutral political stance to reliable conservatives is likely to be electorally significant. In fact, it bears a resemblance to the shift in the Seventies, when evangelical voters swung behind Ronald Reagan.

In 1976, Reverend Jerry Falwell launched his “I Love America” tour, a nationwide campaign on socially conservative issues. In the same year, fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter had been sworn into office — but the cardigan-clad, micromanaging ditherer in the White House was in stark contrast to the charismatic, smooth-talking and morally unambiguous Baptist minister. Carter might have been the first born-again president, but the energy of the evangelical movement was firmly with Falwell, who turned his personal crusade into the national Moral Majority movement in 1979. In turn, evangelicals became a key pillar of support for the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, a divorced former actor and former Democrat whose spirituality appeared to bend more towards his astrology-worshipping wife than his God-fearing mother.

Similarly, the activism of out-and-proud Catholic heretics since 2016 has been, if not a result of the conservative political candidate of the day, then at least influenced by the same forces that swept the former reality television star to the highest office in the land. Today, Catholics are moving towards the flame of a twice-divorced reality television star making patently insincere Christian overtures while being found liable for sexually abusing one woman and facing allegations of trying to buy the silence of a porn star over their affair. Amid this paradox, should we be surprised that Mother Miriam and the renegade clergy are gaining influence on the Right by trading bells and smells for fire and brimstone? Today’s America isn’t anywhere near as Godly a place as it was in 1976, but the politics of faith are as potent as ever.

Perhaps you can see the flash of a bishop’s ring as he taps a piece of gossip into WhatsApp; the Holy See employs world-class electronic spies, so everyone uses a private phone rather than the Vatican-issued ones. Even the phone-tappers are busy exchanging information, because like everybody in Rome they suspect that the painfully fragile Francis — who is often too short of breath to read out his own sermons — hasn’t got long to go.

They are just guessing, of course. The Pope is secretive about his health, and two years ago he bounced back from major surgery on his colon that was assumed to be advanced cancer. Even so, he’s 87, the oldest pope for more than a century, and a conclave can’t be too far off.

Ludwig Ring-Eifel of the German news agency KNA said in January that seeing the Pope so short of breath at a press conference at which he was too ill to answer prepared questions was “a difficult moment for me … and you can tell that this situation has also affected many colleagues emotionally”. At the beginning of March, Andrew Napolitano, a retired Superior Court judge from New Jersey, was staying in the papal guest house behind St Peter’s. “The Pope is in poor health, can barely speak or walk; and he radiates sadness,” he reported. “I don’t think he’ll be there much longer.”

Vatican nerves are always on edge in the final years of a pontificate. In the case of the conservative Benedict XVI, they were overshadowed by leaks — gleefully reported by a hostile media — revealing flamboyant corruption at the top of the Roman Curia, the government of the Holy See. Benedict was too frightened to act and resigned in despair.

Now the Vatican is once again paralysed by scandals, but this time round, correspondents working for secular and Catholic outlets are trying to protect Francis, who faces more serious questions about his personal conduct than any pope in living memory.

For years, allegations that would torpedo the career of any secular Western leader have been concealed or played down by a Praetorian Guard of liberal journalists who, back in 2013, staked their reputations on “the Great Reformer”. As a result, even devout Catholics don’t know that the first Jesuit pope has tried to shield several repulsive sex abusers from justice, for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

Suggested reading

Inside the Catholic civil war

By Damian Thompson

Only now is the truth coming out, to the relief of Vatican staff who have to deal with a pope who bears little resemblance to the wisecracking, avuncular figure they see on television. They are — or were until recently — terrified of a boss whose autocratic rule is shaped more by his rages and simmering resentments than by any theological agenda. And they can’t conceal their satisfaction that one particularly gruesome scandal involving papal ally Fr Marko Rupnik is stripping away the facade of “the Squid Game pontificate”, as it’s nicknamed, after the South Korean Netflix series in which contestants have to win children’s games to save themselves from execution.

The Rupnik affair is the most sickening scandal I’ve encountered in more than 30 years of reporting on the Catholic Church. Rupnik, a supremely well-connected artist on whose tacky mosaics the Church has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, was expelled from the Jesuit order last year after he was credibly accused of raping religious sisters belonging to a community he founded in his native Slovenia. Women have come forward claiming that the community was a sex cult. They say he tried to force them to watch pornographic films, drink his semen out of a chalice, violently took the virginity of one sister in a car and encouraged young women to engage in sexual threesomes that, according to Rupnik, would illustrate the workings of the Holy Trinity.

Last year, facing an explosion of rage on Catholic social media — mainstream media were strangely silent — Pope Francis said he would act against his friend Rupnik. He hasn’t done so. Nor has he explained why, when Rupnik was facing excommunication for abusing the confessional to “absolve” one of his female sexual victims, he was invited to conduct a retreat at the Vatican, or why his subsequent excommunication was mysteriously lifted within weeks with the approval of the Pope.

This month Fr Rupnik was listed in the 2024 Vatican directory as a consultant on Divine Worship, of all things. Meanwhile Bishop Daniele Libanori, the Jesuit who investigated the women’s claims and found them credible, has been removed from his position as an auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Rome.

Another toxic scandal is still unfolding in Argentina. In 2016, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, the former Cardinal Bergoglio’s most pampered protégé, had to resign from the diocese of Orán after he was accused of financial corruption and aggressive attempts to seduce seminarians. The Pope’s response? He airlifted Zanchetta to Rome and invented a job for him:”‘assessor” of the funds managed by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the Vatican treasury. Zanchetta was later convicted of assaulting seminarians, even though Rome refused to supply documents requested by the Argentinian court. He’s serving his jail sentence in a retreat house amid reports that his accusers are being harassed.

The story is coming back to haunt Francis, whose enemies — emboldened by his loosening grip on the government of the Holy See — are circulating extremely damaging documents. These suggest that the Pope is even more tangled up in the scandal than previously suspected. And there are other cases: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis unsuccessfully attempted to keep the child molester Fr Julio Grassi out of jail, commissioning a report that branded his victims as liars.

The dark secrets of this pontificate will weigh heavily on cardinals’ minds in their pre-conclave discussions before they cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. They will be speaking in code: no one wants to take the risk of openly trashing the reputation of a recently deceased (or retired) Supreme Pontiff. But the cardinals will be forced to talk about the increasingly poisonous divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics, which date back to the Second Vatican Council but have been made far worse under this pontificate. And they will find it hard to draw a line between Francis’s policies and his personality, since he takes such visible delight in using his powers to spring surprises on the universal Church.

***

When Francis first took office, most cardinals shared the popular enthusiasm for his informal style: his preference to be known as plain “Bishop of Rome” and his abandonment of some of the more comical trappings of his office such as the red shoes. But they quickly discovered that this “informal” pope, in contrast to his predecessors, liked to rule through executive fiat.

Francis has issued a torrent of papal rulings known as motu proprios (literally, “of his own accord”) — more than 60 so far, six times more frequently than John Paul II. They have made massive changes to liturgy, finance, government and canon law. They often land without warning and can be brutal: the Pope has used this mechanism to seize control of the Order of Malta, for example, and to strip away the privileges of the secretive but ultra-loyal organisation Opus Dei.

Two rulings above all have traumatised the conservative Catholics for whom Francis nurtures a pathological dislike, rarely missing an opportunity to point out their “rigidity” or to mock their traditional vestments, decorated with what he calls “grandmother’s lace”.

The first is his decision, issued via motu proprio, to crush the celebration of the pre-1970 Latin Mass that Benedict had carefully reintegrated into the worship of the Church. In 2021, in a decision that he knew would cause his retired predecessor terrible pain, Francis effectively banned its celebration in ordinary parishes.

Only a tiny proportion of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics attend the Old Rite Masses, so why has the ban turned into such a big deal? Partly it’s a reflection of the Cromwellian thoroughness with which it has been enforced by Francis’s new liturgy chief, Cardinal Arthur Roche, the most powerful English cleric in Rome. A native of Batley with the manner of a self-important Yorkshire alderman, Roche has evolved into that familiar Roman beast: an authoritarian liberal with a nose for the juiciest Satimbocca alla Romana and the fluffiest tiramisu. This year he forced his old rival, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, to ban the Old Rite Holy Week ceremonies in his diocese.

Suggested reading

Ten terrible years of Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

The British Conservative peer Lord Moylan, a traditionalist Catholic, vented his fury in a post on X: “I heard a wonderful Tridentine Maundy Mass this evening. I shan’t tell you where it was in case Arthur sends his henchmen round. I’ll just say that English Catholicism has a centuries-old tradition of underground Masses. All that has changed is who’s persecuting us.”

Many bishops aren’t keen on the intricately choreographed Latin ceremonies, but what they dislike far more is having their arms twisted by a pope who, while telling the world that he’s empowering bishops by encouraging “synodality”, whatever that means, is undermining their pastoral authority over their parishes.

But even this controversy pales in comparison with the explosion of rage from half the world’s bishops when, just before Christmas, without warning or consultation, the Pope signed Fiducia Supplicans, a document allowing priests to bless gay couples. This time his chosen instrument was a declaration from the Church’s doctrine office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), that same-sex couples or people in other “irregular” situations could receive “non-liturgical” blessings from priests. This was amazing because, as recently as 2021, the same office had condemned the notion of same-sex couples. Also, no one had ever heard of a non-liturgical blessing. It didn’t exist in canon law. Who came up with that idea?

Step forward the new Prefect of the DDF, Cardinal Victor “Tucho” Fernandez, the most eccentric of the Pope’s Argentinian protégés. It’s hard to exaggerate the weirdness of appointing Fernandez to head the DDF. He was best known for writing a book on the theology of kissing — until it was discovered that he’d also written one about the theology of orgasms, containing passages so disturbing that Tucho himself had second thoughts and apparently tried to hide all the existing copies.

How could this embarrassing lightweight come to occupy an office previously held by Benedict XVI, who as Joseph Ratzinger was arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century? One theory is that Fernandez wasn’t Francis’s first choice, but the name of his preferred candidate, the German progressive Bishop Heiner Wilmer, was leaked and so he picked someone else. As soon as he was in office, Tucho wrote Fiducia Supplicans and slipped it onto Francis’s desk without showing it to other senior cardinals.

The fall-out was spectacular. There was already a growing rift between Catholic bishops, led by German and American progressives, who thought it was OK to bless gay couples and those who thought it made a mockery of the teachings of Christ. After Fiducia that rift seems irreparable.

On 11 January the bishops of West, East and Central Africa jointly announced that they “do not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples”. Francis, unpredictable as ever, then said that was fine because they were Africans, thus throwing Tucho under the bus, opening himself up to accusations of racism and offending the LGBT lobby. Gay rights activists were already mortified by panicky Vatican “clarification” of January 4 stating that the blessings of same-sex couples should last a maximum of 15 seconds and were “not an endorsement of the lives they lead”.

Suggested reading

Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy

By Tobias Jones

Meanwhile the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, wounded by papal overtures to Putin, said Fiducia didn’t apply to them either. Likewise the Polish Church. Most recently the Coptic Orthodox Church has taken the drastic step of suspending theological dialogue with Rome.

“Hagan lio!” — “make a mess! — was the new pope’s message to young Catholics in 2013. What did he mean? All his words are drenched in ambiguity; perhaps it’s explained by his statement that the Church “always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street”. But Fiducia Supplicans smells like an accidental mess, not a calculated risk. It’s something you scrape off your shoe because you weren’t looking where you were going. Had the Pope taken leave of his senses?

***

“He is one of the most complicated men I have ever met,” says a Vatican source who has been observing the Pope closely for a decade. “He can be terrific fun and also incredibly vengeful. If you cross him, he’ll kick you when you’re at your lowest ebb.”

“But don’t get the idea that he’s a master strategist. He’s a clumsy tactician who spends his time lighting and putting out fires. His number one priority, overriding everything else, is that he should be inscrutable. He doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s planning to do — and, if you find out, he’ll do the opposite, even if it disrupts his plans.”

My source does not belong to any clerical faction and his assessments of people tend to be conspicuously gentle. It’s been interesting to watch how, during our meetings in Rome over the past five years, his opinion of Francis has hardened to the point where he unhesitatingly describes him as a nasty man.

If Francis cancels any plan anticipated by the media, then that helps explain the disaster of Fiducia Supplicans: Bishop Wilmer is probably more heterodox than Cardinal Fernandez on the subject of homosexuality, but he would never have put his name to “Tucho’s amateur doodlings”, as one critic describes the document.

But note how quickly the Pope switched into reverse gear. A book just published by the French conservative Catholic Jean-Pierre Moreau portrays Jorge Bergoglio as a liberal iconoclast inspired by quasi-Marxist liberation theology. I think that’s wrong, and he is what he’s always been: a Peronist. Like Juan Perón, the populist President of Argentina during his childhood, he is more interested in power than in ideas. My Vatican source talks of Francis’s “powerful charm, his way of making you think you’re the only person who matters”. They said the same thing about Perón, a consummate opportunist who, at the height of his powers, won simultaneous support from neo-Nazis and Marxists but who also took pleasure in lashing out unexpectedly at allies and opponents alike.

Ideologically, Peronism is all over the place, but it has always been committed to social welfare and also passionately anti-American — two enduring strands in Francis’s thinking. During John Paul II’s pontificate Bergoglio stressed his theological orthodoxy, earning the hatred of some of his fellow Jesuits. But he always disliked meticulous ceremonies — there’s footage of him virtually throwing the Blessed Sacrament into a crowd in Buenos Aires — and when you watch him yawning his way through ceremonies in St Peter’s you can’t help wondering if he finds Mass boring. He no longer celebrates it in public, and the excuse that he’s always too ill to do so doesn’t work: John Paul II said Mass even when crippled by Parkinson’s and barely able to speak.

On the evening Francis was elected, the traditionalist website Rorate Caeli published a cry of anguish from Marcelo Gonzalez, a journalist in Buenos Aires. It was headed: “The Horror!”’ and described the self-effacing figure who had just walked on to the balcony of St Peter’s as “the worst of all the unthinkable candidates”. Bergoglio was a “sworn enemy of the Traditional Mass”’ who had “persecuted every single priest who made an effort to wear a cassock”.

Like most observers, I thought the article was over the top, and like most observers I was wrong. Gonzalez was proved right about the Latin Mass — and also about cassocks. These days ambitious priests in Rome know that the swish of the soutane could land them in a miserable curacy, so now they scuttle across the piazzas in drab clerical suits.

But is Francis really a liberal? The fact that he loathes conservatives doesn’t mean that he supports women’s ordination — he doesn’t — and one shouldn’t read too much into the occasional photo-op with an LGBT Catholic: gossips in the Curia suggest that, when the Holy Father lets his guard down and slips into scatological Buenos Aires slang, he’s not especially complimentary about “the gays”. Or some other minorities.

It’s hard to explain the prominence of gay clergy in his entourage, both in Argentina and Rome, given that no one has ever suggested that Jorge Bergoglio, the former nightclub bouncer who had a girlfriend before he entered seminary, is homosexual. But he knows whose closets contain skeletons. One priest in Rome told me: “When Bergoglio visited Rome in the old days, he’d park himself among other visitors in the Casa del Clero, absorbing the gossip, much of which was about gay clergy. And he wouldn’t forget it.”(The Casa is where Francis went back to settle his bill after his election and made sure there were cameras set up to record his humility.)

Of course, the future pope wasn’t alone in gathering information in this way. Latin American politics, clerical as well as secular, has always been oiled by the exchange of secrets — and nowhere more so than in Argentina, where two thirds of citizens have some Italian ancestry and political horse-trading has a distinctly Italian flavour.

Perhaps it was naive of the cardinals in 2013 to expect the former Cardinal Bergoglio to clean up the corruption that had driven Benedict XVI to the state of helpless despair in which he resigned his office. But that was the main reason they elected him. He promised pest control, and it was a promise he didn’t keep.

Suggested reading

The fairy tale that freed Napoli

By Tobias Jones

Maybe the cardinal should have taken a closer look at two retired cardinals who were acting as his unofficial campaign managers. The American Theodore McCarrick and the Belgian Godfried Danneels were both in disgrace, having been caught trying to lie their way out of sex scandals. McCarrick’s assaults on seminarians had been an open secret in the American Church for decades, while Danneels had already been caught attempting to cover up incestuous child abuse by one of his bishops. Francis immediately rehabilitated both of them. McCarrick resumed his role as the Pope’s emissary and fundraiser (though Francis eventually had to defrock him when he was charged with child abuse). Danneels, incredibly, received a papal invitation to a synod on the family.

Meanwhile, Francis’s financial reforms began promisingly. He created the new job of Prefect for the Economy for the late Cardinal George Pell, a no-nonsense Australian conservative. Pell stumbled across gigantic money-laundering operations involving senior curial officials — whereupon he was conveniently forced to resign to face trumped-up charges of child abuse in Melbourne.

During Pell’s long, ultimately successful, battle to clear his name, Francis inexplicably gave free rein to Archbishop Angelo Becciu, who was already suspected of having his hand in numerous tills. Becciu took the opportunity to sack Libero Milone, the independent auditor appointed by Pell, threatening to throw him into a Vatican jail cell for the crime of ‘spying’ (i.e., doing his job).

Eventually Becciu himself was sacked after the discovery of billions of dollars poured into dodgy investments — at which point, very oddly, Francis made him a cardinal. And he remains one today, despite losing most of his cardinal’s privileges in 2020 after he was charged along with nine others with embezzlement. He was found guilty and now faces five and half years in jail — but no one thinks he’ll serve them: he knows too much.

Yet not everyone with access to damaging information has been promoted. Bishop Nunzio Galantino was president of APSA when Zanchetta was hiding there in the non-job of “assessor”. He expected to be made a cardinal when he retired. He wasn’t and is reportedly furious.

This month I was sent a 500-page dossier on Zanchetta. Many of the stomach-churning details of the allegations of the sexual exploitation of seminarians have never been reported. I was also sent a photocopy of a document purporting to show that diocesan officials from Orán accused Zanchetta of hiding the sale of properties that funded the building of his seminary. It displays the signatures and stamps of the officials. Allegedly, Zanchetta claimed that Pope Francis himself advised him to conceal the transactions. A leading Catholic blog reported this claim in 2022; the mainstream media did not. I showed the photocopy to a former very senior Vatican official, who replied via WhatsApp: “I had heard of this matter as a rumour but now I see it in black and white!”

***

However hideous the scandals associated with this pontificate, it’s unlikely that they will influence the next conclave as much as the document signed by Francis on 18 December last year. Fiducia Supplicans changed the dynamics of the electoral college — not just because it forced Catholic bishops to address the radioactive topic of homosexuality that has torn apart the Protestant Churches, but also because it summed up the catastrophic incompetence of this pontificate.

At least three quarters of the future cardinal-electors will have been appointed by Francis. So you might think that the conclave, while recognising Fiducia as a blunder, will be looking for a pope who supports Francis’s relatively undogmatic approach to issues of human sexuality. And so it might — if he’d created enough liberal cardinals. But he hasn’t.

In the early years of his reign, Francis adopted a tribal approach, especially in the United States. It was as if he was playing a Peronist board game, moving red hats to unlikely sees occupied by Bergoglian loyalists. Newark, New Jersey acquired its first cardinal: Joseph Tobin, who had been close to Ted McCarrick. Los Angeles was punished for having an orthodox archbishop, José Gomez, who really had his nose rubbed in it: instead of becoming the first Hispanic cardinal, he had to watch the honour go to his über-liberal suffragan Robert McElroy of San Diego, accused of ignoring warnings about Ted McCarrick’s predatory habits. Chicago got a red hat, as is customary, but it landed on the head of the aggressively Left-wing Blase Cupich, needless to say a Francis appointee.

Suggested reading

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

Elsewhere in the world, Francis adopted a policy of appointing cardinals from the “peripheries”: Mongolia’s 1,450 Catholics have one; Australia’s five million Catholics don’t. Tonga has one, Ireland doesn’t. But, by doing so, he had to abandon his game of boosting liberals and twisting the tail of his conservative critics. These factional labels don’t mean much in the developing world. In the last two consistories he has created 33 cardinals, only a handful of whom hold Western-style radical views on sexuality. To quote one Vatican analyst: “Francis has wasted his chance to firmly stack the deck for the next conclave.” And now the college is full; even if he lives to call another consistory, he won’t have many places to play with.

The new cardinals tick various Bergoglian boxes. They relish the Pope’s attacks on free-market capitalism and his melodramatic warnings about climate change. None of them is a Right-wing traditionalist and until recently no one paid much attention to their ferocious views on “sodomy”.

Now those views really matter. To quote the same analyst, “when Fiducia Supplicans was published, the African cardinals ditched their Francis-worship overnight. The vast majority won’t vote for anyone who has backed Fiducia”. There are currently 17 African cardinal-electors; nearly all of them are in the anti-gay bloc. To these we can add at least 10 cardinals from Asia, Latin America and the West who share their views, even if they use milder rhetoric. Under current rules, a pope must be elected by a two-thirds majority of the cardinal-electors. This means that social conservatives, if they join forces with the significant number of moderates alarmed by Fiducia, can block anyone seen as progressive on homosexuality.

That’s bad news for Cardinal Luis Tagle, the ambitious former Archbishop of Manila. He was once dubbed the “Asian Francis” on account of his showmanship and socially liberal views. In 2019 Francis put him in charge of worldwide evangelisation — a huge prize that was snatched away when the Pope restructured his department and sacked him as head of Caritas, the Catholic aid agency dogged by sex abuse scandals.

It’s also tricky for Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the affable bicycling beanpole who’s Archbishop of Bologna. His politics are socialist — no problem for developing-world bishops — and during Benedict XVI’s reign he developed an enthusiasm for the old liturgy, even learning how to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. His stance on homosexuality is cautious — but he allowed a gay couple to have a church blessing in his diocese and then, disastrously, had his spokesman basically lie about it, claiming it wasn’t a same-sex blessing when it obviously was. Zuppi isn’t a fan of Fiducia Supplicans, but at the moment he’d run up against the blocking third.

Hardline liberals stand even less of a chance. Blase Cupich of Chicago isn’t papabile; nor are the “McCarrick boys” Tobin, McElroy, Gregory and Farrell, or the veteran European Leftists Hollerich, Marx and Czerny. The name of the Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech has been mentioned because he’s secretary general of the “synod on synodality”, a consultative body of bishops and lay activists that the Pope notably didn’t bother to consult about the new gay blessings. Grech, unkindly nicknamed “the Bozo from Gozo”, has seen his reputation collapse along with that of the toothless synod. His enemies describe him as the biggest toady in the Curia (unfair to Arthur Roche, many would say).

As for hardline conservative papabili, there really aren’t any; Francis has at least made sure of that. But there is a moderate conservative possibility: Cardinal Péter Erdő, Primate of Hungary. Unlike the exuberant, tearful Tagle, he’s an emotionally reserved scholar. When I met him for coffee in London years ago, we were half an hour into the laborious business of using a translator when he suddenly switched into fluent English. He has the reputation of disliking the limelight and being a bit thin-skinned — but at a synod on the family in 2015, despite arm-twisting from papal apparatchiks, he used his position of relator-general to deliver a masterful defence of traditional teaching. One Vatican-watcher describes him as “boringly conservative, which may be exactly what we need right now“.

What about moderate cardinals who are difficult to pigeonhole? The newest papabile is Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Italian-born Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. In recent months the horrors on his doorstep have revealed a diplomat of rare skill. His condemnation of IDF attacks on civilians in Gaza earned him a rebuke from the Israeli foreign minister — but he had earlier condemned Hamas for its “barbarism” and offered himself as a hostage in place of Israeli children. And while it’s not hard to believe him when he says he has absolutely no wish to be pope, it’s possible he may be forced to think again.

But any Vatican-watcher will tell you that new papabili flash through the sky during the last days of a pontificate. This time around they are busy memorising the names of Asian electors. (It’s generally assumed that after Francis we can forget about another Latin American or Jesuit for a few centuries.) Three names keep cropping up: William Goh from Singapore, orthodox on sexuality, quietly critical of the surrender to Beijing; Charles Maung Bo from Myanmar, also a critic of the China deal; and You Heung-Sik, the new prefect for the dicastery for the clergy from South Korea. Cardinal You is a fascinating figure: a teenage convert to Catholicism whose father had either been killed or defected to the North — no one knows. He then converted the rest of his own family. His faith is joyful and his vision of priestly formation far more attractive than Francis’s bitter tirades against “clericalism”.

Finally, we have to consider the most senior of all the papabili — Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who as Secretary of State (a mixture of prime minister and foreign secretary) is technically number two in the Vatican. The 69-year-old Italian is visibly on manoeuvres and his candidacy is being taken seriously. And that in itself is odd, because Parolin was in office when his deputy Becciu and others were embezzling or gambling with billions of dollars from Church funds. Also, he was the architect of the Vatican’s 2018 deal with Beijing, which — as former Hong Kong bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen warned him — would turn the Chinese Catholic Church, including persecuted underground believers, into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Communist Party.

Suggested reading

Claire Keegan's faithless Christmas Carol

By Boyd Tonkin

That is precisely what happened. Zen, now 92 and regarded by many orthodox Catholics as a living saint, has used extraordinary language about Parolin: “He is so optimistic. That’s dangerous. I told the Pope that he [Parolin] has a poisoned mind. He is very sweet, but I have no trust in this person. He believes in diplomacy, not in our faith.’”

This thought is echoed by a Vatican source who has worked with Parolin: “He’s nice to everyone but hollow in the middle. Also, his health is bad. [Everyone in Rome mentions rumours of cancer and Parolin hasn’t denied it.] Last time I saw him he was so frail I was afraid to shake his hand.” But another source says (and this gives you a real flavour of Vatican gossip): “I wouldn’t put it past Parolin’s people to exaggerate the cancer thing, because they think the cardinals want a short pontificate.”

No one disputes that Parolin is a smart operator who specialises in making sure his fingerprints are nowhere near the scenes of various crimes. He nuances his statements on Ukraine and Israel while the Pope puts his foot in it with his improvised comments. He love-bombs potential enemies. Sensing a backlash against Francis, he is tacking Right, admitting that Tucho’s gay blessings are a nonsense.

To his critics, Parolin is the Italian Francis: empty, devious and sneeringly dismissive of the Latin Mass, an idiotic stance when you consider the surprising fact that the old liturgy is fast acquiring cult status among young Catholics. But are they overlooking one big difference? From the moment he became a cardinal, Bergoglio had his eyes set on the papacy and his gaze never wavered. Parolin, on the other hand, may recognise that he is too compromised to survive successive ballots. Perhaps his real ambition is to become a truly powerful Secretary of State under the next man.

And we really don’t have a clue who that will be. So much depends on how moderate, non-aligned cardinals vote. They are revealing nothing, especially now that the Vatican and probably diocesan curia are stuffed with hidden microphones. We can only guess what a swing voter such as Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster is thinking. Until recently he invoked the name of Pope Francis with cringe-making frequency. Now, not so much. He must be sick of the meaningless rhetoric of synodality and being pushed around by Arthur Roche. He clearly wasn’t impressed by Fiducia.

One can easily imagine mildly liberal cardinals voting for a mildly conservative candidate who can tackle the structural damage of the past 11 years. “Francis has left canon law with so many holes in it that it’s like the surface of Mars,” says a priest who has worked in the Curia. That’s infuriating for cardinals who, like Nichols, are diocesan bishops. They have to decide whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics can receive Communion, a desperately sensitive subject on which the Pope is deliberately evasive. And how do they ensure that these Fiducia blessings are “spontaneous”and “non-liturgical”? What does that even mean?

It’s a fair bet that, in their pre-conclave conversations, most cardinals will agree that the next pope must be someone capable of supervising an emergency repair job that clarifies doctrine, the scope of ecclesiastical authority and puts an end to the jihad against traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are a generation or two younger than the jargon-spouting Boomers harassing them.

Also, the cardinals know they must delve deep into the past of the leading contenders. They have no choice. The next pope will face instant, merciless scrutiny from online investigators. A 2021 article in The Tablet by church historian Alberto Melloni described an all-too-credible catastrophe: “The newly elected pope steps out. And as he smiles and humbly introduces himself to the crowds in the square, a lone social media post makes a stunning allegation.” The new pope, when a bishop, had failed to act against a priest who went on to commit further crimes. “In the square and in the press boxes, eyes drop from the balcony to their smartphones … The pope steps back inside, and resigns. The see is vacant again.”

Suggested reading

Would Kant really support BLM?

By Kathleen Stock

The necessary scrutiny will be an awkward business, but at the very least the cardinals mustn’t repeat the mistake made by their predecessors in 2013 — that is, taking a candidate at his own estimation. The truth is that many Catholics in Argentina from across the ideological spectrum knew about Francis’s character flaws: his compulsive secrecy, score-settling, disturbing alliances and rule by fear. But no one asked them.

One might argue that none of the 120-plus eligible cardinals is quite so mean-spirited as the Holy Father. Fair enough; but there should be no question of electing anyone who imitates Francis’s modus operandi. No chameleons, in other words. No one who was orthodox under Benedict, liberal under Francis and is now slinking back to the centre.

The new pope must be a holy man who relies on lieutenants who have no dirt on him and on whom he has no dirt — and it’s a shocking fact that this would represent a departure from recent precedent. The pope must be above reproach. That is far more important than whether he’s “liberal” or “conservative”.

Traditionalists will disagree, but I don’t think it’s a bad college of cardinals. Cynics might say that’s because Francis, having made factional appointments early on, lost interest and appointed independent-minded men by accident. But let’s not neglect the role of social media: while the Praetorian Guard have been busy hiding things, countless websites have been making life difficult for the poisonous old toads who have been trying to fix conclaves for the best part of 2,000 years.

Melloni is probably right: as the new Supreme Pontiff shuffles on to the balcony there will be an unnerving moment while the faithful check their mobiles. But if the cardinals have done their job properly the applause will quickly resume. And if you listen carefully, you will hear another noise coming from every office in the Vatican: a sigh of relief that the Squid Game is finally over.