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.

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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.

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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.

What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practicing Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonization Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.

The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.

A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavors of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.

Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.

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Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay advisor to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.

The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonized Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.

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The battle for John Henry Newman

By Damian Thompson

In the act of canonizing Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.

Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realize that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.

That wasn’t because people didn’t think Newman deserved to become one of only 38 saints — out of more than 10,000 recognized by the Catholic Church — whose writings receive the ultimate papal imprimatur. Pope Leo’s announcement was almost universally welcomed. But what did it mean?

St John Henry (1805-90) will join the ranks of Saints Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. He will be the first native English Doctor of the Church since St Bede, born in Northumbria in 672 AD. And Newman — who was canonized in 2019 — will be the first former Protestant to be granted this exalted title.

Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, at the age of 21 in 1822. Three years later, he was ordained an Anglican priest. By 1828 he was Vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. Soon he developed a cult following among undergraduates, who would skip meals in order to hear him preach. His sermons — couched in exquisite prose laced with sarcasm — were the most glittering product of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce the Church of England to the pure apostolic faith of the early Fathers.

Then, in 1845, swayed by study, Newman sensationally went over to Rome, eventually becoming a cardinal. The decision cost him his teaching post at Oxford and many friends. The Victorian public was horrified. Even Newman’s enemies — of which he had many, since he was both outspoken and thin-skinned — realized that the dreaded Papists had poached the finest mind in Anglicanism.

But the point-scoring that followed Pope Leo’s announcement wasn’t inspired by Protestant sour grapes. Anglicans long ago came to terms with Newman’s defection. They argue that his most celebrated insights — above all, his notion that doctrine of the Church “develops” as successive generations uncover fresh truths — are derived from his Oxford sermons, whose brilliance was perhaps unsurpassed by anything he wrote as a Catholic. If Pope Leo wants to make him a Doctor of the Church, then they accept the implied compliment. It is rarely mentioned that Newman went to his grave believing that the Church of England was a heretical body that should submit to Rome.

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No: last week’s infighting was between Roman Catholics, who are mostly united in their devotion to St John Henry, but at loggerheads over his legacy. Both conservative and liberal Catholics want to “own” Newman, and in a Church scarred by the partisan liberal pontificate of Pope Francis they are ready to fight it out. To quote one prominent traditionalist, “Now that Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church, it’s important that those who have actually read his works take control of the narrative before the Woke brigade hijacks him.”

The problem for conservatives is that plenty of liberal Catholics have read Newman and believe that he foreshadowed the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, which for that reason has been called “Newman’s Council”. And it’s true that Newman believed that lay Catholics could play a role in safeguarding doctrine. He noted that, during the fourth-century Arian conflict, bishops disavowed the divinity of Christ but their faithful flocks held on to it. Also, while accepting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was dismayed by its triumphalist definition by the First Vatican Council in 1870.

Yet the constant invocation of Newman by modernizing Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era. As an Anglican, Newman lampooned Victorian progressives who believed that moral truths could be uncovered by science. He returned to the subject with renewed ferocity nearly half a century later, in an address when he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

Liberals were guilty of believing that “one creed is as good as another”, he said, and that “it is the right of each individual to make [revealed religion] say just what strikes his fancy”. This would lead to the ruin of souls. To quote Dr Samuel Gregg of the conservative Catholic Acton Institute, “Today, I suspect, the sheer force of Newman’s critique of what he called ‘liberalism in religion’ would make him persona non grata in most Northern European theology faculties.”

Of course, conservative and liberal Catholics are simply indulging in guesswork when they transport an eminent Victorian into the 20th or 21st centuries. What we do know, however, is that John Henry Newman was persona non grata in certain Anglican circles before he even considered converting, and also among powerful Catholics after he sacrificed everything to join their Church.

Partly this was his own fault. Professor Eamon Duffy, doyen of English Catholic historians and a huge Newman enthusiast, writes that as an Anglican the young theologian was “far from fastidious” in advancing his agenda, orchestrating “an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest” against a liberal churchman. (Perhaps he would have felt at home on X.) Decades later, as Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman ministered selflessly to the poor while nurturing ancient grudges and ghosting friends who had offended him. That isn’t saintly behavior — but, on the other hand, it isn’t uncharacteristic of many saints who have temporarily lost sight of human decency in their crusades against “error”.

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A more fundamental problem was that, in both his Churches, Newman was looking for a via media — a middle way. As an Anglican he tried to reconcile the apostolic teachings of Rome with the insights of the Protestant Reformers before deciding that he was wasting his time. As a Catholic he criticized liberals while trying to moderate the dogmatism of Pope Pius IX and his ally Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, a fellow ex-Anglican convert who wanted to impose papal authority on every aspect of English Catholic life.

Manning privately thought Newman was a heretic — an absurd notion. When the new Pope Leo XIII offered the old man a red hat, Manning played a really dirty trick, spreading anonymously authored false reports that Newman had declined the honor. Fortunately, a message from Birmingham reached Rome just in time.

Such are the perils of trying to find common ground in a fractured Church. This year the first American pope took the name Leo in order to honor the pope who, in making the great English theologian a cardinal, implicitly conceded that Pius IX had dragged the Church into unnecessary controversies. Newman was more explicit. Pius had suffered the fate of any pope who reigns for too long: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Does that ring a bell? Pope Francis reigned for only 12 years, but it seemed longer. He was a liberal, not an ultra-conservative in the mold of Pope Pius; indeed, he sometimes flirted with the notion, so scandalous to Newman, that “one creed is as good as another”. But, like Pius, Francis tolerated no contradiction, displayed little intellectual curiosity, and did cruel things to Catholics who attended the Latin Mass celebrated by St John Henry. He issued encyclicals that merited the latter’s verdict on Pius’s “Syllabus of Errors” – in Duffy’s paraphrase, “a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise.” Above all, despite the pantomime of “synodality”, he centralized the government of the Church in the despotic fashion that Newman deplored.

Leo XIV has, so far, given us few hints of specific policy initiatives. But most commentators agree that he is looking for a middle way between conservatives and liberals, and already we can see trouble ahead: both hardline liberals and paranoid conservatives are determined to cast him in the role of Pope Francis II. My guess is that there is a via media out there, but that Leo will find it only if he displays the sort of courage that enabled St John Henry to cross the Tiber, and walks away from the path to chaotic secularism mapped out by his predecessor.

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

They’ve been called “Roswell eyes” because they remind people of alien-abduction art. For decades, visitors to these holy places wondered why the artist — a vastly well-connected Slovenian Jesuit called Fr Marko Rupnik — was commissioned to push them into the faces of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Christ himself.

Now unease has turned to revulsion. Rupnik, 68, has been credibly accused of truly grotesque sex abuse. Religious sisters who belonged to a community he founded in the Eighties claim they endured assaults so disgusting that The Pillar, a major Catholic news outlet, printed the story under the heading: “WARNING. Graphic and disturbing content.”

In December 2022 it was revealed that Rupnik had been excommunicated for abusing the confessional to absolve a woman from the sin of having sex with him. The Jesuits, after investigating what it called “gruesome” allegations made by other sisters he recruited — nuns in all but name — expelled him from their order.

But that was just the beginning of the public scandal. Today it threatens to engulf the Pope himself. As he prepares to preside over a synod of bishops and lay activists that is pledged to raise the profile of women in the Church, Francis is being accused of extending his personal protection to a sadistic clerical abuser of women.

The timeline explains why this week the 86-year-old pontiff finds himself in such a desperate position.

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In October 2018, Rupnik was reported to Rome for absolving his sexual partner in confession. In May 2020, he was excommunicated. Incredibly, in the middle of the excommunication proceedings Rupnik preached a Lenten Retreat in the Pope’s Apostolic Palace. Then his excommunication was lifted within a month of being declared, because he had “repented”.

In early December 2022, Italian blogs revealed that, as long ago as the Nineties, sisters belonging to Rupnik’s Loyola Community in Slovenia accused him of abuse. The Jesuit order was forced to admit that in 2021 it passed these allegations to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Inquisition, which polices doctrine and sexual morality. The DDF refused to lift the statute of limitations that would allow it to prosecute Rupnik for the alleged abuse. Yet it could easily have done so, if Francis had agreed.

On 18 December 2022, one of Rupnik’s alleged victims, a 58-year-old former Loyola sister identified as “Anna”, went public with her “graphic and disturbing content”. She claimed her abuse began with the priest kissing her on the mouth, “telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist”.

Later, she claimed, “he became more aggressive: I remember a very violent masturbation … during which I lost my virginity, an episode that initiated pressing requests for oral intercourse.” By the early Nineties, according to Anna, Fr Rupnik had abused 20 sisters.

Significantly, Anna claimed that the abuse continued at Rupnik’s new studio in Rome, the Aletti Centre, where his creepy mosaics are produced. She told the Italian newspaper Domani: “There Father Marko asked me to have threesomes with another sister of the community, because sexuality had to be, in his opinion, free from possession, in the image of the Trinity…” She also revealed that in December 2021 she and other alleged women victims submitted their testimony to the DDF. She heard nothing more from the Vatican.

The Jesuit order expelled Rupnik in June this year, having judged “the degree of credibility of what was reported or testified to be very high”. This was after decades of ignoring the scandal.

The Pope, meanwhile, gave an interview in January in which he simultaneously claimed that he made a procedural decision about the Rupnik allegations, but that “I had nothing to do with this” (ie, the Rupnik case). The respected Vatican correspondent Christopher Altieri pointed out in Catholic World Report that these statements couldn’t both be true. He said “senior churchmen close to Francis have strongly suggested that Francis had pretty much everything to do with the management of it”.

In the past few months, anxiety in Rome about what the Pope knew has been kept in check by liberal members of the Vatican press corps, who refuse to ask awkward questions lest the answers disrupt the synod. But last week their strategy fell apart when the Diocese of Rome issued a statement on its investigation into the Aletti Centre, the alleged scene of revolting abuse.

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To quote Ed Condon, Editor of The Pillar, the statement congratulated the centre on “maintaining a ‘healthy community life without any particular critical issues’ and praised its members for ‘maintaining silence’ about the scores of accusations that Rupnik spiritually and sexually abused women, including through overtly sacrilegious sexual acts”. Bizarrely, it also suggested (but without explaining why) that Rupnik shouldn’t have been excommunicated for the offence of which he was found guilty, a diabolical abuse of the confessional.

This defies belief, and Condon — always loyal to the Pope — for the first time confronted the possibility that Francis was subverting the Church’s investigations “on behalf of a man accused of arguably more appalling crimes, by far more people, than some of the most notorious names in the canon of disgraced churchmen”. Five alleged victims of Rupnik responded furiously to the Diocese of Rome’s statement, saying it “ridiculed” their pain.

In addition, the Left-wing editor of La Croix, Robert Mickens, upbraided liberal hacks on the papal plane back from Marseilles on Friday for failing to ask Francis “THE most important question of his pontificate”, Given Mickens’s enthusiasm for the Pope’s most provocative moves against conservatives, that’s an extraordinary turn of phrase.

Are we finally witnessing a long-delayed joining of the dots? On at least two occasions in the past, Francis has inexplicably (and unsuccessfully) tried to shield abuser allies from justice. Before becoming Pope he commissioned a report whose aim was to keep the Argentine child abuser Fr Julio Grassi out of jail; he also tried to protect the Argentine predator Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta by parachuting him into a senior job in Vatican finances, and refused to supply documents demanded by the Argentine court that eventually sentenced Zanchetta to jail. There have been other disturbing episodes.

Four years ago, a senior figure in Rome told me he couldn’t explain why the Pope should take such insane risks on behalf of criminals — unless not doing so, for some reason, was an even bigger risk. But he had no evidence, of course, and such is the power of the supreme pontiff that crucial information will be locked away while Francis is alive. There’s very little chance that he’ll resign, and one of the quirks of Catholic canon law is that, if a pontiff announces his resignation in response to any pressure, including a scandal, then his resignation is automatically invalid. But a word I keep hearing now is the Cold War term Kompromat. It’s beginning to look as if, despite Francis’s attempts to distract everyone with the synod, Rupnik and his bug-eyed mosaics have already killed off this pontificate.

It was the fifth ballot since Tuesday night, and they knew it would be the last. After that first vote, there was a ripple of surprise when the bookies’ favourite, the scholarly but energetic Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, received 30 votes instead of the anticipated 40. The runner-up, with 26 votes, was the cardinal who came second to Joseph Ratzinger in 2005, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

Most commentators had written off Bergoglio because he was 76. But, of all the candidates, he seemed the most determined to clear out the filth in the Vatican. The year before, Benedict XVI’s butler had leaked documents revealing the industrial-scale blackmailing of senior clerics with an appetite for gay sex parties and money-laundering. The old pope was not personally implicated, but he clearly didn’t have a clue what to do about it. When he announced that, at 85, he no longer had the strength to do the job, few cardinals doubted that the so-called “Vatileaks” were to blame. Likewise, no one doubted that Bergoglio — who had been a nightclub bouncer before becoming a Jesuit priest — was looking forward to knocking heads together.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the horse-trading began, carried out sotto voce during meal breaks and rest periods in the Domus Sancta Marthae, a cross between a five-star hotel and a prison where the cardinals are incarcerated between ballots. By the fourth ballot, the Argentinian Jesuit was unstoppable. The fifth ballot was merely an opportunity for as many cardinals as possible to vote for the winner.

When it was over, 90 out of 115 had backed Bergoglio. The white smoke billowed forth and the bells of St Peter’s rang out to confirm the election (a recent innovation, just in case the accident-prone Vatican sends out black smoke by mistake). The new pope, who had chosen the name Francis after the medieval saint who embraced extreme poverty, walked on to the balcony of St Peter’s minus the traditional gorgeously embroidered stole. His disarming manner sent the crowd into an ecstasy of cheering. The next morning, Francis turned up at the counter of the Domus to pay his bill in person. He rang his newsagent in Buenos Aires to tell him to stop delivering the papers. The media were charmed by these faux-humble stunts.

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And so began one of the darkest decades in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. The cardinals had been taken for a ride. They had elected a man about whom they knew little: a divisive and intellectually lazy clerical politician.

But that is not the worst of it. The truth — unforgivably obscured by a mainstream media that relies on papal allies for “commentary” on Vatican affairs — is that Francis himself, both before and after his election, has empowered and protected predatory clergy and their accomplices.

No one paid any attention at the time, but one of the cardinals who joined the “humble” new pope on the balcony 10 years ago was the late Godfried Danneels, former Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels. In 2010, shortly after the very liberal Danneels retired, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges admitted to his former boss that he had been sexually abusing his own nephew. Cardinal Danneels met the victim and, unaware that he was being recorded, told him to shut up about the abuse until the revelation would cause less embarrassment. Police questioned Daneels about the attempted cover-up and raided his offices. The recording was made public and Danneels — who once nurtured ambitions to become pope — was torn to pieces by a Belgian media that had once admired him.

So what was he doing on the balcony with Francis? And why, in 2015, did the Pope invite Danneels, guilty of trying to cover up incestuous abuse of a minor, to a Vatican Synod on the family, of all subjects? I asked the late Cardinal George Pell, who at the time was in charge of reforming Vatican finances. “To thank him for the votes,” replied Pell. Danneels was a member of the so-called St Gallen Mafia of elderly liberal cardinals who lobbied for Bergoglio in 2005 and 20213. In Pell’s mind, at least, rehabilitation was his reward.

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Consider, also, the case of Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, who twisted arms for Bergoglio. It was an open secret in Rome and the US Bishops’ Conference that “Uncle Ted” loved to seduce seminarians. When Benedict XVI discovered this, he banished him to a life of prayer and repentance. As soon as Francis was elected, McCarrick found himself back in favour, travelling around the world as the Pope’s unofficial emissary and fundraiser. Eventually the New York Times revealed that McCarrick was being accused of child abuse, at which point Francis had no choice but to strip him of his title of cardinal. But it should have happened years earlier given that, on becoming Pope, Francis was told that the Vatican had a thick file on McCarrick’s sexual activities.

One of Francis’s first acts as pope was to make his friend Fr Gustavo Zanchetta the Bishop of Orán in northern Argentina despite claims that he was corrupt. In 2017, aged only 53, Zanchetta resigned for “health reasons”. In fact, he had been reported by the Vatican nunciature in Buenos Aires for alleged abuse; in 2015, graphic gay sex images of himself and “young people” had been found on his phone and were reportedly shown to the Pope. (Zanchetta claimed they had been planted.) There were extensive allegations of misuse of funds that led to a raid on his former office by Orán police.

And what did Francis do after Zanchetta resigned? He created a special job for him in the Vatican “assessing” the assets of the Holy See. He would probably still have it if, in 2022, he hadn’t been sentenced to four and half years in jail in Argentina for the sexual assault of two seminarians while Bishop of Orán.

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A pattern emerges. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio commissioned a report attempting to exonerate Fr Julio Grassi, who was jailed for molesting residents of his Happy Children homes for street children. As Pope, Francis denied on camera that he sponsored the £1 million secret document. Unfortunately, it bears his name. Fortunately for him, no major English-language media outlet has devoted significant resources to investigating his record of protecting abusers. An ordinary bishop who did these things would almost certainly be made to resign. But no one can be forced to resign the Holy See; indeed, any forced resignation of a pope is automatically invalid.

A succession of disgraceful episodes raise the question of whether Bergoglio should have been allowed to become a small-town priest, let alone spiritual leader of more than a billion people.

In 2018, the Vatican signed a deal with Beijing that handed President Xi Jinping the power to appoint official Catholic bishops. As a result, faithful Catholics are being herded into so-called “Masses” in which the worship of the Chinese Communist Party takes precedence over the worship of God. Lord Alton of Liverpool, the Catholic human rights campaigner, has described the pact on Twitter as “at best naïve and at worst a gross betrayal”. Cardinal Joseph Zen, former Bishop of Hong Kong, was so appalled that, in 2020, he travelled to Rome to appeal to the Pope to appoint a bishop in Hong Kong who would resist China’s illegal attempts to force its fake Catholicism on the province. The 88-year-old Zen asked for just half an hour with the Pope. Francis refused to see him. Moreover, he has never condemned his Chinese allies’ genocidal campaign against the Muslim Uyghurs, which includes forcing their women to have abortions.

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McElroy’s elevation to the college of cardinals was especially provocative. In 2018, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington was forced to resign when his clergy refused to believe his claim that he knew nothing about the sexual activities of his predecessor, Theodore McCarrick. Francis planned to replace Wuerl with McElroy, who was also a McCarrick protege — but such a move would have provoked open revolt in Washington. Hence the huge and unprecedented consolation prize of a red hat for the Bishop of San Diego, which has enabled McElroy to join Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, and Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, in the club of Francis-appointed cardinals who were once close to McCarrick.

Curiously, although McCarrick had once been a notoriously predatory Archbishop of Newark, his successor Cardinal Tobin said he didn’t believe any of the stories about him — until the truth emerged. Cardinal Farrell was McCarrick’s auxiliary in Washington, shared an apartment with him, but never suspected a thing. The future Cardinal McElroy, meanwhile, was informed by the late clerical abuse expert Richard Sipe in 2016 that McCarrick was a serial abuser. He took no action. And, to spell it out, these three cardinals — Farrell, Tobin and McElroy — are crucial allies of Francis “the Reformer”.

There is a chance, however, that Francis will regret the elevation of Bob McElroy. The Pope’s biggest headache at the moment is his pet project, absurdly entitled the Synod on Synodality, that Francis intended to push the Church surreptitiously in a liberal direction. What has happened instead is that the ultra-liberal German Church has gone full Protestant on Francis, using what it calls the “Synodal Way” to turn itself into a version of the Church of England. Last week, it voted to allow gay blessings in church.

Meanwhile, McElroy has taken a huge risk, calling for a “radical inclusion” of LGBT couples that would enable them to receive Holy Communion, a move that Francis does not support. This provoked Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to accuse America’s most recent cardinal of heresy. Even the Pope’s most fervent supporters are worried. If the Catholic Church in the United States, Germany and other liberal European countries falls apart in the chaotic manner of the now-defunct Anglican Communion, then history will blame Pope Francis — not necessarily for sowing the seeds of secularisation, but for his theologically incoherent thrashing about in the throne of Peter.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Latin Mass. Francis’s suppression of this ancient liturgy is losing him friends even among liberal bishops, who now find themselves forced to themselves forced to carry out witch-hunts on behalf of the Pope’s thuggish liturgy chief, Arthur Roche, another wildly unsuitable recipient of a red hat.

Let me leave you with this disgusting paradox. Earlier this month, the Pope’s Jesuit friend Fr Mark Rupnik, a celebrity mosaic artist, was allowed to concelebrate Mass publicly. Meanwhile, claims that he grotesquely abused women have not been fully investigated because Francis refuses to lift the relevant statute of limitations.

At the same time, faithful priests have been expelled from churches where they offered the traditional Mass and now are forced to do so in church halls and basements. They represent the only community of Catholics that is growing in the 21st century, and the Pope is literally driving them underground.

No: the shocking thing about that photo is that Benedict XVI, the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century as well as a revered pontiff, is being loaded into a white van. OK, so it’s an undertaker’s vehicle, and everyone is behaving with due reverence, but what was the Vatican thinking? The optics are terrible: Benedict looks like a piece of furniture. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Pope Francis’s staff didn’t think Benedict merited a ceremonial hearse. At the Requiem Mass, Francis preached a homily in which he mentioned his predecessor’s name only once, and couldn’t be bothered to attend the interment in the crypt. Even the Vatican correspondent Robert Mickens, a veteran critic of Benedict’s, wrote that the Pope Emeritus “deserved better”. Cardinals from around the world were horrified.

Now Francis is paying the price. No sooner was Benedict in his grave than we felt the first tremors of an earthquake that threatens to bury his successor alive. The Catholic civil war has entered a new phase. The Pope has been accused by his enemies of favouring heretics, foul-mouthed outbursts of temper, sucking up to dictators, sadistic manoeuvres against traditionalists, perverting the course of justice, a feeble grasp of Catholic doctrine and — not for the first time — of protecting a sex abuser. Catholic conservatives had been worried for years that when the ancient ex-pope finally died, Francis would be free to pursue his own agenda. For nearly 10 years he stopped short of formally changing Catholic teaching on divorce and homosexuality, restricting himself to giving a nudge and a wink to hardline liberals while missing no opportunity to give traditionalists a kicking.

In a development that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, Latin Mass parishes and communities are attracting disproportionate numbers of young priests and worshippers. Some of them cultivate a fogyish, holier-than-thou manner that gets up the nose of ordinary Catholics — but most of them are breathing new life into a moribund Church. Pope Francis loathes them. In 2020, with no warning, he banned many of their Latin Masses, and according to multiple sources, at a meeting with seminarians in December he ranted against “fucking careerists who fuck up the lives of others”. In his defence, perhaps the words were less vulgar in Spanish. Then again, it’s no secret in the Curia that the air turns blue when the Vicar of Christ is displeased.

With his scholarly predecessor finally dead, the thinking went, the Argentinian Pope could really let rip. And so his conservative critics decided to get their revenge in first. Benedict’s private secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein landed a blow within hours of his boss’s death. The ex-pope, he said, was “heartbroken” by Francis’s Latin Mass ban, and no wonder: it was Benedict who reintroduced the old liturgies in his 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum. On January 12, Gänswein rushed out a book, Nothing But the Truth, which claimed that Benedict thought Francis had misrepresented his reasons for issuing the document. It also hinted that he felt his successor was adopting a dangerously careless approach to Catholic teaching on sexuality.

In the same week came more bombshells. To the anguish of the Church’s conservative wing, Cardinal George Pell, former head of Vatican finances, died suddenly after a routine operation on January 10. A few hours later, The Spectator published an article by Pell that tore mercilessly into Pope Francis’s pet project, a forthcoming “Synod on Synodality” whose agenda has been dictated by liberal Catholics who support women’s ordination and are obsessed with placating the LGBT+ lobby. Pell said the synod was shaping up to be a “toxic nightmare” and poured scorn on the working document’s “neo-Marxist jargon”.

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Never before had the Australian cardinal expressed himself so bluntly — or so it seemed, until the celebrated Vatican mischief-maker Sandro Magister revealed that Pell was the author of a memo, signed “Demos”, that circulated among cardinals last year. And “blunt” doesn’t begin to describe the language Pell used when writing under a pseudonym. The cardinal — once one of Francis’s closest advisers — described this pontificate as “a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe”. He accused the Pope of remaining silent in the face of “heretical” voices calling for the scrapping of the Church’s ban on women priests and gay sex, while encouraging “the active persecution of traditionalists” and writing papal documents that marked an intellectual “decline” from the standards of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Pell warned his fellow cardinals that the Church was heading towards bankruptcy. He accused the Pope of turning the Vatican’s trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and other defendants on massive corruption charges into “an international scandal” by shifting the legal goalposts. That was a typical Pell touch: although Becciu had been his arch-enemy in the Curia, he had himself been the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice when he was jailed in Australia on false charges of sex abuse, and he did not want to see a fellow cardinal denied “due process”. The memo mentioned the regular phone-tapping that frightens everyone in the Curia, Francis’s habit of ruling through decrees that allow no appeals, and the Vatican’s betrayal of Chinese and Ukrainian Catholics. “The Holy Father has little support among seminarians and young priests,” it added.

Pell would have been amused to watch Francis’s dwindling band of admirers jump like scalded cats when the authorship of the Demos memo was revealed. Given that he had died the day before, they couldn’t savage his memory; nor could they challenge the damningly precise detail in the memo; and perhaps some of them realised that George Pell had never been a traditionalist and, when Francis was elected, had believed that he might be the right man for the job. His despair came from his personal dealings with the Pope, whom he came to regard as devious but dithering and, worse, not fully committed to the Catholic faith.

And then it looked as if another bombshell had landed. On January 20, Benedict XVI spoke from beyond the grave in his final book, What is Christianity?, which he hadn’t wanted published during his lifetime because anything he said provoked hysteria from German liberals. Would Joseph Ratzinger finally settle scores with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who genuinely had humiliated him by trashing his ruling on the Latin Mass? The answer was no, as anyone who knew Benedict should have guessed. His book is a collection of essays, infinitely better written and, yes, more conservative than Francis’s writings — but the late Pope Emeritus would have considered it just as wrong to break his promise to show loyalty to his successor after his death as before it. So, nothing to see here, then.

But try looking somewhere else, to a book by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Benedict and sacked without warning or explanation by Francis in 2017. Müller, a moderate conservative with liberal friends who seemed like a bridge between the two pontificates, was understandably furious. Recently he has criticised the theological incoherence of this pontificate. On January 27, a book-length interview with Müller entitled In Good Faith was published in Italy. In it, the 75-year-old German cardinal sailed closer to the wind than Pell ever did under his own name. Pope Francis, he said, surrounds himself with “a kind of magic circle… composed of people who, in my opinion, are not prepared theologically”. Papal reforms of the Curia were a disaster, reducing it to “a business that works to provide assistance to ‘clients’, the episcopal conferences, as if it were a multinational enterprise and no longer an ecclesial body”.

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What makes Müller’s interview so deadly for Francis, however, is that it is the first time that a cardinal has drawn attention to the Pope’s favouritism towards clergy who have been accused of sex abuse. Müller mentions the “special status” given to Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, an Argentinian protégé of Francis whom he made a bishop as soon he became pope. In 2017, Zanchetta had to resign from his diocese of Orán amid allegations of abusing seminarians and financial mismanagement. Francis promptly created a job for Zanchetta in the Vatican overseeing the Holy See’s property and financial assets. This jaw-dropping appointment came to an end, however, when Zanchetta was jailed in Argentina for abusing two seminarians — despite the Vatican’s mysterious refusal to supply the courts with its own investigations into the charges.

This was at least the third time Francis had stuck his neck out — and risked his reputation — to defend a Latin American ally either plausibly accused or convicted of sexual abuse. Now there are questions about what the Pope knew about another of his clergy friends — his fellow Jesuit Fr Marko Rupnik, a celebrity artist whose tacky mosaics adorn churches all over the world and in the Vatican. The Rupnik scandal beggars belief. In 2015 the Slovenian priest seduced a novice nun and then absolved her of the sin of sleeping with him in the confessional. He was convicted of this grave offence — which incurs automatic excommunication — by a church court in January 2020. But his official excommunication was not imposed until May 2020, and lifted that same month because he had repented.

In between the conviction and the official excommunication, however, Rupnik was asked to preach the Lenten homilies at the Vatican in March 2020 and Francis signed off on it. Did he really not know about Rupnik’s trial for the seduction and absolution of a novice, particularly as Rupnik had been ordered not to preach in public without permission or to hear women’s confessions as a “preliminary” measure as early as June 2019? But that’s not the worst of it. Last December, Italian websites began claiming that Rupnik was suspected of serially abusing women in the Nineties. After the reports appeared, a former religious sister gave an interview to an Italian newspaper alleging that during the Eighties and Nineties Rupnik abused half the members of a community of consecrated women he founded in Slovenia. She claimed that he demanded that she play “erotic games in his studio… while painting or after the celebration of the Eucharist or confession”. Those “games” became increasingly pornographic.

Then it emerged that in 2021 the Jesuit order had started investigating allegations by nine women, but that nothing was done because the Vatican refused to investigate them, citing its statute of limitations. In 2022, the Jesuits asked for this to be lifted because the alleged offences were so “gruesome”, but the Vatican again refused. In January 2022, Rupnik had a private meeting with Francis. We know nothing about it, but we do know that in February the Diocese of Rome posted a talk by Rupnik on Eucharistic Adoration on its YouTube channel. And for the rest of the year this celebrity priest swanned around Italy giving retreats.

Last December, the Cardinal Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, Angelo De Donatis, issued a statement claiming that Rome learned of the Rupnik allegations “only in very recent times”. It ended with the statement that his diocese was “comforted by the discernment of her Supreme Pastor”. This prompted a veteran Vatican correspondent, Christopher Altieri of Catholic World Report, to claim that De Donatis was speaking in code. “Basically, Cardinal De Donatis is telling everyone who reads and understands curialese that Pope Francis is calling the shots on this one, and that Pope Francis has Fr Rupnik’s back,” he wrote. This was just before the deaths of Benedict and Pell and the flurry of books criticising Pope Francis. Vatican-watchers forgot about the Rupnik scandal for a few days, then started asking with increasing alarm whether Francis was party to a cover-up.

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The Pope seems to have panicked. On January 24, he gave a long interview in Spanish to Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press — definitely one of the safer choices for a pontiff worried about being grilled. Francis called for homosexuality to be decriminalised everywhere, which AP justifiably ran as the headline. Winfield gushed about what a milestone this was for LGBT people, while admitting that the Pope “referred to the issue in terms of ‘sin’”. In fact, he had described homosexuality as a sin, which is not the teaching of the Catholic Church. As a result, he had to write a hasty letter to the Jesuit gay rights activist Fr James Martin explaining that he meant that all sexual acts outside marriage were sinful, though “circumstances may decrease or eliminate fault”. For his critics, it was an example of Francis at his worst: a mixture of confusion, evasion and sleight of hand.

Inevitably, both sides in the Catholic civil war slugged it out over the episode — which was embarrassing for the Pope but at least deflected attention from the very slippery answer he gave when he was asked about his friend Rupnik. To quote AP: “Francis denied he had any role in the handling of Rupnik’s case, other than to intervene procedurally to keep the second set of accusations from the nine women with the same tribunal that had heard the first.” His only decision was “let it continue with the normal court, because, if not, procedural paths are divided and everything gets muddled up”. And, he added: “So I had nothing to do with this.”

This makes no sense. As Altieri points out, you can’t simultaneously claim that you intervened in a procedural matter and had “nothing to do with this”. And then there’s the fundamental question of why the Vatican was so determined to scupper a Rupnik trial by invoking a statute of limitations that Francis could easily have waived. Someone in Rome needs to do some more pushing on Francis’s protection of Zanchetta and others. And here we encounter the infuriating reluctance of accredited Vatican correspondents to subject the ruler of Western Europe’s most corrupt independent state to the scrutiny that any president or prime minister would receive.

As a result, most Catholics, and even some of the cardinals who will be voting in the next conclave, don’t know the extent of the crisis. And that’s why Cardinal Pell, with a heavy heart, wrote the Demos memo. He was doing everything in his power to ensure that the next pope was an orthodox Catholic — not something previous conclaves have had to worry about, but some of the red hats Francis has doled out have landed on the heads of clerics whose views are more liberal Protestant than Catholic. Unfortunately Pell died first, reminding us that a man regarded by countless Catholics as the worst pope for centuries has one precious asset: he’s lucky.

It might seem perverse to describe the death of a painfully frail 95-year-old man as a uniquely sad event. But in the case of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI we have to consider the poignant and unsettling circumstances in which he died.

I was in St Peter’s Square on 10 April, 2005, when the words “Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger” boomed out from the loudspeakers. It was an electrifying surprise. Pope John Paul II’s Bavarian-born doctrinal chief was on everybody’s shortlist, but his reputation as the old pope’s “Rottweiler” marked him out as a partisan candidate. Not for one moment did I think the cardinals would choose him.

Well-informed Catholics knew that Ratzinger was, in fact, one of the most important theologians in the 2,000-year history of the Church. His argument that acts of sacramental worship transcended time and space emerged from an imagination endlessly refreshed by art and philosophy. But his mission to refresh the Church by recovering sacred traditions was not compatible with any change of teaching on women’s ministry or sexual minorities. Therefore many liberal Catholics — including those who were uncomfortably aware that the new Benedict XVI was the most intellectually gifted pope for centuries — made apocalyptic predictions about the coming Rottweiler papacy.

Benedict did not oblige them. Having been obliged to play the role of doctrinal enforcer by Pope John Paul, he decided to govern as a pastor and scholar. Indeed, there’s no doubt that his passion for writing interfered with his effectiveness as pope. He retreated into his study to write a biography of Jesus of Nazareth while senior curial officials swanned around the Vatican like elderly playboys in Dubai, using the contents of the world’s collection plates to buy sex and launder money. He did not attempt to conceal the activities of sex abusers in the Vatican, but his disciplinary actions were ineffective. When he discovered that the retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington was a serial abuser of seminarians, he told him to retreat to a life of prayer and then did nothing when “Uncle Ted” ignored him.

The lapidary beauty of Benedict’s encyclicals, in which he sought to capture the purifying essence of Christian love, was hard to reconcile with the debauchery of some of the world’s most influential cardinals, described in a torrent of leaks to the media.

At some point in 2012 Benedict decided that he did not have the physical strength to reform the Vatican. On 11 February 2013, he gathered together his cardinals and told them — characteristically in Latin — that he was resigning the See of Peter. He was the first pope to resign since Celestine XVI in 1294.

The shock was overwhelming, especially for traditionalist Catholics. They believed that, by removing restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Latin Mass in 2007, Benedict XVI had healed wounds created by the infantile worship forced on them since the Second Vatican Council. Ratzinger had been a theological adviser to the Council. He never repudiated its emphasis on a more accessible and open-minded evangelisation, but he came to loathe the ‘Year Zero’ philosophy of progressive Catholic who seemed to believe that Christianity itself had been reinvented at the Council.

Benedict must have been confident that his successor would develop what he called his “hermeneutic of continuity”, which reintegrated the Latin Mass and its music into the life of the Church. This rebalancing of Catholicism was essential, he believed, as a corrective to the political and cultural fashions that increasingly preoccupied liberal Catholics after the Council.

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But the pope-scholar miscalculated. He seems to have hoped that the See of Peter would be occupied by Cardinal Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan, a moderate conservative committed to dialogue with other faiths but firmly opposed to changes to Catholic teachings on sexual morality. Instead, the cardinals — sickened by revelations of cocaine-fuelled orgies and Mafioso bribery inside the Vatican — voted for the Jesuit Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who promised (but never delivered) fundamental changes to the Church’s government.

The new Pope Francis ostentatiously dispensed with some of the papal trimmings that Benedict loved; there would be no more red shoes, and he swiftly withdrew his hand from anyone who tried to kiss the ring on his finger. He cultivated Left-wing journalists who obligingly portrayed him as a humble yet charismatic reformer.

Meanwhile, Benedict shut himself away in a monastery in the grounds of the Vatican, no longer pope but still wearing a modified version of his white cassock and adopting the deeply confusing title of His Holiness Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus. On rare occasions he would write an essay or book introduction that appeared to criticise some innovation, such as the abolition of compulsory celibacy for Latin-rite priests, that Francis was encouraging the world’s bishops to debate.

But for the most part he kept his promise of silence, and there is not a single recorded instance of Benedict criticising Francis. Therefore we can only guess how the former pope reacted when his successor began to dismantle his legacy.

From the moment he became pope, Francis encouraged the Church to debate sensitive and divisive topics. As a result, the world’s cardinals were dragged into factional infighting over questions — such as women’s ordination and blessings for gay couples — that Popes John Paul and Benedict had assured them were settled for all time.

Curiously, Pope Francis always stepped back from the brink of changing the Church’s teachings, though he allowed Catholics to infer that the official line could be ignored in practice. But, eight years into his papacy, he did make one ruling that could have been designed to inflict acute humiliation on his frail predecessor. In 2021, without warning, Francis issued a partial but arbitrary and savage ban on many celebrations of the traditional Latin Mass.

Benedict said nothing, just as he remained silent while evidence accumulated that his “reforming” successor had a track record of protecting his personal allies from allegations of sexual abuse. He could not do so without breaking his vow of silence and thereby encouraging Catholic conspiracy theorists who believed that Benedict had never really resigned.

Of course, Benedict had only himself to blame for this rumour. Even among conservative cardinals there was a consensus that he should have reverted to his original name and dressed in black, not white. There was an even stronger consensus that Pope Benedict should not have resigned as early as he did. But that, of course, was informed by the wisdom of hindsight.

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Few people expected Bergoglio, a front-runner in 2005, to succeed in 2013, and even fewer expected Francis’s pontificate to re-open so many of the wounds that Benedict tried to heal in an unexpectedly gentle and tactful manner. (If Catholic journalists had done some detailed research into Bergoglio’s oddly tormented relationship with the Church in Argentina, they might have predicted some of the ensuing chaos, but they chose not to.)

The sorrow at Benedict XVI’s death and the celebration of his pontificate will therefore be muted; many conservative Catholics will be distracted by their efforts to suppress their anger at what they have come to think of as the self-pitying folly of his resignation.

In 2005, they witnessed an apparent miracle. The author of a series of intellectual masterpieces that offered Catholics a luminous glimpse of restored worship was elected Supreme Pontiff. Eight years later this same theological genius left the See of Peter in a helicopter, having allowed himself to be crushed by the responsibilities of his office. And then the Catholic Church fell apart. Whose fault was that?

We can be certain that Joseph Ratzinger asked himself that question many times; perhaps every day during a retirement that lasted almost a decade. What we will never know is how he answered it.

Under normal circumstances, it would be perfectly appropriate for the Supreme Pontiff to express shame for the persecution of pupils at the Residential Schools operated by the Church in Canada between the 1870s and 1990s. Last year, it was reported that the graves of 200 children had been found near one of these schools in British Columbia. That may be fake news. Some experts believe that the “graves” were soil disturbances and point out that they have not been excavated. No one disputes, however, that children suffered monstrously. Former pupils have talked of savage beatings and being forbidden to speak their native languages. Hundreds of sexual predators were protected.

But this pope has little moral authority to apologise for anyone else’s crimes. To understand why, we need to travel 6,500 miles from the scene of Francis’s meticulously staged expression of remorse in Edmonton to a dusty city in the subtropical north-west of Argentina. Although Orán has only 73,000 inhabitants, it does have a cathedral — a spiky concrete tent that embarrasses even the local tourist board.

Shortly after becoming pope, Francis made his friend Father Gustavo Zanchetta the Bishop of Orán. Zanchetta, then aged only 49, had been a protégé of Francis, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires. As an official of the Argentine bishops’ conference, Zanchetta knew that if you were an ally of Cardinal Bergoglio, he could turn a blind eye to just about anything. (For example, in 2009 Fr Julio Grassi, who ran homes for Argentinian street children, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for sexually assaulting minors. In what could be seen as an attempt to have the conviction crushed, Bergoglio authorised a report that trashed Grassi’s accusers.)

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The news that Francis was making Zanchetta a bishop horrified the priest’s critics in his home diocese of Quilmes. Two years earlier, Dr Santiago Spadafora, former adviser to the diocese, had complained to Cardinal Bergoglio about Zanchetta’s financial incompetence and “abuse of power” as the diocesan Vicar for Economic Affairs. Spadafora says Bergoglio rang him promising to examine “in detail” the supporting documents he had sent him. Nothing happened. When the new Pope announced that his protégé would be given a mitre, Spadafora started a change.org petition, signed by 100 lay employees from schools administered by Zanchetta, asking Francis to review the appointment. It was ignored.

Gustavo Zanchetta resigned as Bishop of Orán in 2017, less than four years after taking over — and a mere 22 years before he was due to retire — citing unspecified “health reasons”. According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, he then left the diocese in a “furtive, unexpected flight without even a minimal farewell”.

It turned out that Zanchetta had every reason to act furtively. In 2015, he was reported to have saved pornographic photographs of himself and “young people” on his mobile phone. There were also complaints — fully justified, as it turned out — that he was sexually harassing seminarians. As The Pillar and numerous other Catholic news websites have reported, Pope Francis knew about the complaints and saw the photographs. But he claimed to believe Zanchetta’s explanation that his phone had been hacked.

The Pope met Bishop Zanchetta in Rome and then sent him back to his diocese. Senior priests of the diocese of Orán were so disgusted that they launched a complaint with the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires. Yet, when Zanchetta finally resigned in 2017, the Vatican insisted that it had never received “formal complaints” about the bishop. That was not true.

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In 2018, Francis sent his friend to Spain for “therapy”, presumably to address his alleged (and since proven) sexual predation. As for the many stories of financial wrongdoing, the Pope wasn’t worried. He promptly created a new job inside the Vatican for Zanchetta — as “assessor” at the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), which manages the Vatican’s property, financial and liquid assets. As they say in Rome, Vos non potestis facere eum. You couldn’t make it up.

In June 2019, Argentine prosecutors charged Bishop Zanchetta with sexually abusing two seminarians. In November that year, police raided his former headquarters in Orán, looking for evidence of fraud against the state. As Inés San Martin, a widely respected Argentinian Vatican correspondent, reported at the time: “Public records show that Zanchetta received over one million pesos, close to $250,000 at the time, from the provincial government for the restoration of a parish rectory and for a series of lectures in the local seminary that never took place.

“Zanchetta has also been accused of mismanaging church funds donated by the faithful and of keeping the sale of a Church-owned property off the books; the funds raised through the sale remain unaccounted for.”

For a time Zanchetta had to step down from his job “assessing” Vatican finances. Then Francis let him go back to work. But in March this year his career was finally brought to an end when he was sentenced to four and a half years in an Argentine prison — after he was found guilty of those charges of sexual abuse.

On the day of the sentencing, journalist Silvia Noviasky of El Tribuno said on Twitter that relatives and friends of seminarians were crying outside the court because the sentence against Zanchetta “was very little for the damage he did”. That’s putting it mildly. Zanchetta didn’t end up in jail. He is being allowed to serve his time in a monastery, because prison might exacerbate his high blood pressure. And now there has been yet another troubling twist to his story.

When it was clear that Zanchetta was heading for a prison sentence, the Vatican finally conducted a canonical investigation into his behaviour, to see what penalties he might have incurred under church law. The proceedings were kept secret. The Argentine court asked to see the findings and was ignored. Now, to quote the veteran Vatican correspondent Christopher Altieri:

“Pope Francis has sent the canon lawyer who represented his friend and former colleague Gustavo Zanchetta (a convicted sex offender serving time in prison), to investigate some of the very clerics who denounced their erstwhile bishop to the Vatican and testified against him”.

Dr Javier Belda Iniesta, who defended Zanchetta in a process whose outcome was never revealed, is now investigating the people who blew the whistle on this abuser.

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While the Vatican press corps drool over Francis’s Canadian adventure, many Catholics in Orán are ready to burn him in effigy. They know they’ll never get the chance to confront him in person: not once since becoming Pope has Francis set foot in his home country. But they can talk to the press.

One of Zanchetta’s victims gave an interview to Silvia Noviasky last week. Conveniently for the Vatican, it hasn’t appeared in English until now. M.C., a seminarian who was abused by Zanchetta, said he could hardly sleep because he was so distressed by the decision to put him under house arrest. “I think the judges didn’t take into account the psychological report on him as a manipulator, someone who doesn’t see reality as it is but the way he wants it,” he told Noviasky. “He’s been granted house arrest in a religious house which is frequented by those who are vulnerable.”

According to M.C., Zanchetta is able to call in favours in Orán, “a small town where we know each other or know each other’s secrets”. He’s furious that Zanchetta hasn’t been defrocked and retains the title of bishop. Noviasky asked him why that was. He replied: “Because there are a lot of favours doled out and cronyism and it all comes from Pope Francis, who currently says some things in his sermons and does different ones.”

Needless to say, none of the Vatican correspondents on the flight back from Canada seem to have asked Francis about the latest sinister developments in Orán. If they had, it may well have been their last trip on the papal plane. No more photos of themselves hobnobbing with the Holy Father that they can post on Twitter.

And so we’re no closer to answering the most baffling question of all. Why on Earth is Francis — not for the first time — taking risks to protect a convicted sex offender?

For well over a year, a nasty rumour has been floating through the Vatican that Pope Francis is terminally ill with cancer. I was told it was true by an Italian prelate in an apartment just a stone’s throw from the hostel where the 85-year-old pontiff is now pushed around in a wheelchair. A diplomatic source discussed it ruefully over an espresso in the Borgo Pio. A well-connected American traditionalist Catholic texted that it was “definitely true!” — the exclamation mark suggesting that he wasn’t too distressed.

However, in the same article Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, Philadelphia, said that: “What is clear is that his pontificate has entered his declining final stage… He is aware that he is approaching the end of his pontificate.”

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Team Francis aren’t popular in Rome these days. The best kept secret of this pontificate, at least so far as the general public in concerned, is that Jorge Bergoglio is not, and never has been, a nice man. He made so many enemies in Argentina that he hasn’t dared set foot in his native country since being elected pope. He was involved in some jaw-dropping scandals there, most shockingly his attempt to protect his child abuser ally Fr Julio Grassi from justice. He’s lucky that the Vatican press corps is too afraid of him to investigate them properly.

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It’s likely, however, that the most contentious topic will be homosexuality, and this is where the labels “liberal” and “conservative” are misleading. Left-wing cardinals from the developing world, of whom Francis has created plenty, may countenance a more relaxed attitude towards divorced-and-remarried Catholics, but the thought of homosexuality turns their stomachs.

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But this was a visit in which neither the White House nor the Vatican seem to be paying the slightest attention to the optics. That was a mistake, because although the Left-wing pope and the liberal president obviously like each other, there were just so many things that could go wrong. And by Saturday night, when bizarre rumours of the encounter started circulating on Twitter, it was pretty clear that most of them had.

The world’s media weren’t interested in what these two old men had to say about the environment. Their combined age is 163. Francis makes a point of reading as few newspapers as possible; Biden’s cognitive decline means he struggles to hold them the right way up. The only thing anyone wanted to know was what the Pope, who recently described abortion as “murder”, would say to a supposedly devout Catholic president whose militantly pro-choice stance extends to support for late-term abortions.

The first sign that the Vatican was nervous about the meeting came when it cancelled the planned live broadcast of Biden meeting Francis. The media had been told they could film the two men shaking hands in the Throne Room of the Apostolic Palace, followed by a few seconds of them sitting down to talk. On Thursday, the Holy See press office suddenly pulled the plug on this — the cameramen would be thrown out as soon as Biden emerged from his limo. The hacks scratched their heads for an explanation. The most likely one was that the Vatican was worried that the doddery president would forget the Pope’s name or walk into a broom cupboard. Or both.

A photograph released afterwards showed the two men chatting happily across the table, an impressive feat since they don’t share a language. But, with the aid of an interpreter, they did spend 75 minutes in each other’s company. That’s more than twice as long as Trump was granted in 2017 — no surprise, since Francis couldn’t stand him — and also more than 20 minutes longer than the Pope’s meeting with Obama in 2014.

Did they talk about abortion, and specifically Biden’s insistence on receiving communion every week — something conservative bishops say he’s not entitled to do, since his lobbying for abortion puts him in a state of grave mortal sin? The Vatican wouldn’t comment: it never discusses these private conversations. But Biden did, in response to a shouted question from a reporter. Asked if the subject of abortion came up, he said: “No, it didn’t. It came up, we just talked about the fact that he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion.”

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The exact words are important, because several US media outlets — unswervingly pro-Biden and keen to protect him from embarrassment — missed out the words “It came up”, thus concealing the fact that Biden had said abortion didn’t and did come up in space of a few seconds. Liberals generally, and especially liberal Catholics, would much rather go with the narrative that Francis diplomatically avoided the subject of abortion and simply reassured the president that he was a good Catholic who could receive communion.

Conservative US Catholics, meanwhile, reacted with a mixture of anger and confusion to Biden’s comments. They were outraged at the thought that a pope could spend over an hour with a pro-abortion Catholic and not remind him of the Church’s teaching — spelled out very clearly in the past — that his activism bars him from the Eucharist. Indeed, if Biden were to be believed, Francis had just demolished that teaching by beckoning the President towards the altar rail, thus making a nonsense of his earlier denunciation of abortion as murder.

But can Biden’s account be trusted? Strict truthfulness was never his long suit, even when he had his full complement of grey cells. Presumably he was advised that, given the Vatican’s policy of not commenting on private discussions, short of a furious papal denunciation he could get away with saying anything.

Also — and this is a difficult point for loyal Catholics to grasp — Pope Francis’s own judgement, even on questions of faith and discipline, is far from infallible. Like his one-time hero, the Argentine populist dictator Juan Perón, he is happy to bend or blur principles in order to wrong-foot his opponents. And there is no one he dislikes more than American Catholic conservatives. When they begged him to reprove Biden for his extreme pro-abortion stance, they were guaranteeing that he would do nothing of the sort. Francis knew that, by allowing Biden to escape censure — and to receive communion in Rome on Friday night — he would pull the rug out from under orthodox US bishops who want their conference to tighten the rules on reception of the Eucharist. Rug-pulling is one of this pope’s hobbies.

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So it might seem that Biden’s visit to the Vatican worked out well for him, despite the lack of official confirmation that he can receive communion. But on Saturday the poor man found himself confronted by an avalanche of tweets and retweets gloating about reports from well-connected sources that he’d had a bit of a “bathroom accident” while visiting the Pope. Hence, allegedly, the meeting over-running so much. And even if we discount this as puerile black propaganda, the edited video of Biden presenting gifts to Francis shows the most painfully frail American president in living memory. At 79 he is the oldest man ever to hold the office, but he could easily be a decade older. His visit to the Vatican will raise questions about how many more foreign trips he’s capable of making. It’s hard to believe he will still be in office for the midterms, let alone the 2024 elections.

There’s no doubt, however, that Biden derived an almost childlike pleasure from meeting the successor of Peter. But it’s less likely that Francis was personally moved by the encounter. You can imagine him rolling his eyes at the White House’s hilariously inappropriate decision to give him an antique vestment made for the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass he’s busy trying to suppress.

What we see on the video is the switched-on charm Francis provides for any foreign leader who passes his ideological smell test. The unofficial motto of this pontificate is “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, and it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to imagine the satisfaction the Peronist pope is feeling at the sight of his conservative critics roused to a new pitch of indignation.

But what the video also shows is a man who, still recovering from major colon surgery at the age of 84, is finally showing his age. He is tired – he had to cancel his plans to attend the Glasgow climate summit – and, significantly, many members of the college of cardinals, including his own appointees, are tired of him. We can’t predict whether the next pope will be a conservative or a liberal. What we do know is the conclave will be anxious to put an end to the Machiavellian antics on display last weekend.

That’s because, around the world, roughly a billion people traditionally regard the state’s geriatric absolute monarch as God’s representative on earth. They may have been aware that, for centuries, a few bad apples in the administration have betrayed the monarch’s trust by embezzling money. But the notion that the whole state was slowly turning into a criminal enterprise would have struck them as ridiculous, even sacrilegious.

Until now.

We’re talking about Vatican City, of course. Visitors to Rome are often sceptical of the notion that this walled enclave behind St Peter’s, less than half the size of Hyde Park, is really an independent country.

They shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever stayed there, as I have done, you’re left in no doubt that when the Swiss Guards wave you through, you’re stepping beyond the reach of the Italian republic. It’s especially true at night, when your footsteps echo in the desolate courtyards.

The Vatican has its own legal system, criminal investigators, gendarmerie and jail cells. And it doesn’t hesitate to use them. When Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was sentenced to jail for aggravated theft in 2012, he served his time in a cell in the Vatican police barracks.

That was a significant conviction. Gabriele had leaked documents alleging bribery and blackmail affecting the Pope’s closest advisors. The resulting “Vatileaks” scandal is suspected to have inspired Benedict’s decision to resign the papal office in despair in 2013.

The cells were occupied again in 2016, when Monsignor Lucio Balda, a high-ranking financial official, served several months there after being convicted of leaking confidential documents to journalists who claimed that the Vatican was engaged in massive property fraud.

At the time of Balda’s arrest, the international press settled on a clear narrative: the Vatileaks scandals showed the scale of the challenge facing Pope Francis as he set about cleaning up the finances of the Holy See. Benedict was weak and craven; his successor fearlessly committed to reform.

That narrative, or at least the part relating to Francis, was soon torn to shreds by events, though the Left-leaning Vatican press corps — utterly smitten by the Argentinian pontiff — was reluctant to draw the appropriate conclusions.

On 18 June 2017, Vatican gendarmes raided the offices of Libero Milone, former CEO of Deloitte in Italy, who had been appointed the Vatican’s first auditor-general at the instigation of Cardinal George Pell, an Australian prelate whom Francis put in charge of reforming finances. The Oxford-educated Pell had the reputation of a bruiser who specialised in detecting bullshit; his appointment was greeted with queasy alarm by the Vatican’s old guard.

At the time of the raid, however, Pell was preparing to return to Australia to face what turned out to be completely false charges of molesting two boys in his Melbourne cathedral in the Nineties. He was convicted of the offence at a retrial and was imprisoned until April 2020, when Australia’s High Court threw out the charges and acquitted him.

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But he was obviously no use to Milone as an ally when, to general astonishment, the highly respected auditor-general was threatened with detention in a Vatican jail cell by Archbishop Giovanni Becciu, 73. As day-to-day administrator of the Secretariat of State, Becciu was effectively Pope Francis’s chief of staff.

Becciu accused Milone of carrying out unauthorised investigations into the affairs of top Vatican officials. But that was precisely why Pell had brought him in: he wanted to know about secret bank accounts controlled by Becciu, one of which was linked to a disastrous £300 million property investment in Chelsea. Pell was Becciu’s arch-enemy.

So the Australian may well have felt grim satisfaction last week, as Becciu — incredibly, and disgracefully, made a cardinal by Francis in 2018 — was charged in a Vatican courtroom with embezzlement and abusing his office. He’s also specifically charged with trying to force a monsignor to withdraw evidence he gave about the London property deals.

The case was adjourned until October 5, and that’s fair enough: defence lawyers need time to go through 28,000 pages of documents relating to 10 defendants. According to the Daily Mail, the 487-page indictment against them “sheds light on hefty bank transfers, text messages between collaborators from seized cellphones – even bags of money changing hands and secret meetings in luxury hotels”.

Note that it’s the Vatican itself that has gathered evidence against Becciu and his alleged co-conspirators. And it’s true that from 2018 onwards the Secretariat of State, the Pope’s civil service and foreign office, went after Becciu relentlessly on the orders of his former boss, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

But Parolin had little choice. The rumours surrounding Becciu were becoming more extravagant by the day, which made Francis’s decision to give him a cardinal’s hat even more mysterious.

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Many of those rumours are now firm allegations. Ed Condon, editor of The Pillar, a new US-based Catholic news service, has been gathering evidence against Becciu for years — but even he is taken aback by “the sometimes surreal details alleged by prosecutors about some of the supposed ‘investments’ that have been made, including, in one case, a seven million euro investment in the construction of a U.S. motorway that simply didn’t exist”.

Most people first learned of the scandals when they read about the ruinous London property development. “But now the dam has properly broken,” says Condon. “We are seeing the various people charged turn on each other — in the run up to the trial, we’ve had allegations of blackmail, threats of violence and extortion.”

The nightmare for the Vatican is that the defendants aren’t just turning on each other: they’re turning on Cardinal Parolin, who is disliked by many of the faithful for negotiating a deal with China that forced loyal underground Catholics to join Beijing’s puppet “Catholic” Church.

All the signs are that the defence plans to own up to squandering Church money on lunatic speculation — but to claim that Parolin, Becciu’s boss, signed off on the deals. And perhaps they will go further. Becciu’s lawyers have already suggested that Francis himself knew about the London investment.

Is the Pope nervous? Consider one strange detail. When Vatican prosecutors confronted Francis with the evidence against Becciu in 2020, he sacked him from his new job running the Church’s saint-making department, and also stripped him of many of the privileges that go with the rank of cardinal. It was a brutal defenestration, suggesting that Francis had flown into one of his rages, never reported by a compliant press but all too familiar to Vatican staff.

Then, in the week before Easter this year, the Pope chose to celebrate the Holy Thursday liturgy not in St Peter’s but with Cardinal Becciu, in the latter’s private chapel. Was this a radical demonstration of Francis’s much-advertised “mercy”, as official sources claimed, or an ingenious act of damage limitation before the trial started? Perhaps a bit of both?

One thing we know about this Pope’s mercy is that it’s very selective. For a man never suspected of personal corruption or sexual misdemeanour, he’s oddly indulgent of deeply compromised figures. There is a long list of prelates accused of embezzlement, sex abuse or cover-ups who have been protected or rehabilitated by Francis.

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The most notorious example is ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a suspected serial sex abuser who was brought out of retirement by Francis to act as his international emissary. McCarrick was a fundraiser of genius, and was allowed to carry on until the media got wind of claims that he’d abused a minor. As for the $600,000 that “Uncle Ted” handed over as gifts to favoured clerics, who knows where it ended up? In the Vatican no one asks.

This grotesque culture of corruption wasn’t instigated by Francis: things were as bad under Benedict XVI and John Paul II. But neither of those popes were as hot-tempered as Francis, who has just savagely clamped down on the Latin Mass because he considers it too right-wing, and neither of them faced the prospect of a trial in which an unscrupulous cardinal and his former associates will sing like canaries.

Will we learn that Becciu conspired with Australian prosecutors to get Pell jailed on trumped-up charges? Will it shed light on the shameful China deal? The latest theory is that Beijing got hold of the details of the use of the gay hook-up Grindr by Vatican dignitaries and blackmailed the Secretariat of State.

What we can say is that we are well into the second half of Francis’s pontificate — he’s 84 and in fragile health. From October, the trial will overshadow everything, and even if there’s no evidence of the Pope’s complicity in the scandals it’s clear that the proposed reforms that got him elected eight years ago have come to nothing.

The next Pope will inherit a Church whose reputation, finances and internal unity have been destroyed. For the first time in living memory, most of the cardinals processing into the Sistine Chapel to elect Francis’s successor will be praying that the Holy Spirit doesn’t give them the job.

The organisation could fall apart. This crisis will disturb the lives of the hundreds of millions of people who take their party membership seriously. Yet the international media are in no hurry to cover the story. And, when they do report it, they try to discredit the party members pointing their fingers at the leader.

I’m sure you’ve guessed the identity of this ‘political party’: the Catholic Church. The mainstream media, especially in the English-speaking world, have stifled and twisted the allegation that Pope Francis rehabilitated Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington DC, knowing that he was a serial sex predator. Worse still, Francis brought this dirty old man into his inner circle and appointed his protégés to top jobs in America and the Vatican.

The allegations come from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who served as Francis’s own nuncio (that is, ambassador) to the United States from 2011 to 2016. They’re incredibly detailed. The most startling revelation is that Francis lifted sanctions placed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI, who – knowing that the American prelate was suspected of seducing young seminarians – tried to force him into silent retirement. Viganò thinks Francis’s actions are so disgraceful that he wants him to resign as Pope, and all McCarrick’s friends in the US hierarchy to follow suit.

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The media immediately set about trying to find holes in Viganò’s 11-page testimony. Fair enough. If Viganò – a conservative who couldn’t stand Francis – was telling lies, then they should be exposed.

The biggest hole they could find involved Benedict’s sanctions against McCarrick. They barely existed. The Pope Emeritus can’t remember exactly what they were, and there’s lots of evidence that McCarrick ignored them, swanning around and basking in liberal flattery as if nothing had happened. On the other hand, it was confirmed that Benedict did remove him from the seminary where he was living in retirement. Also, Benedict had earlier ended McCarrick’s official career by retiring him as Archbishop of Washington at the first opportunity.

In short, Viganò’s testimony remains as credible as it was when he dropped his bombshell on August 25. More credible, in fact. Last weekend, his claim that Rome knew of McCarrick’s abuses as early as 2000 was backed up by the release of a 2006 letter from a top Vatican official confirming as much.

Fore more than two weeks, therefore, evidence that Pope Francis welcomed a privately disgraced predator into his inner circle has sat on the desks of every news editor in the free world. And what have they done with it?

The answer is almost nothing – or worse than nothing. Judging by most of their coverage, the real story is that Viganò is a “conservative” who conspired with “right-wing” opponents of Francis’s “reforms” to bring him down.

A headline in the New York Times captures the tone of these stories: “Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce”. The report, by Jason Horowitz, says:

“Since the start of his papacy, Francis has infuriated Catholic traditionalists as he tries to nurture a more welcoming church and shift it away from culture war issues, whether abortion or homosexuality. ‘Who am I to judge?’ the pope famously said, when asked about gay priests.

Just how angry [Francis’s] political and doctrinal enemies are became clear this weekend, when a caustic letter published by the Vatican’s former top diplomat in the United States blamed a ‘homosexual current’ in the Vatican hierarchy for sexual abuse. It called for Francis’s resignation, accusing him of covering up for a disgraced cardinal, Theodore McCarrick.

With the letter – released in the middle of the Pope’s visit to Ireland — an ideologically motivated opposition has weaponised the church’s sex abuse crisis to threaten not only Francis’ agenda but his entire papacy.”

Look at the way the paragraphs are organised. First, the ludicrous claim that Francis is trying to move the Church away from the culture wars. In fact, he’s plunged it further into those wars – but he’s on the same side as the New York Times on these issues, so that’s OK.

Then, we’re told about the “caustic” tone of Viganò’s testimony, and its undoubted preoccupation with homosexuality, before a glancing reference to the most serious allegation made against a pope for decades, if not centuries. It’s true that this piece isn’t breaking the news of Viganò’s accusations – but at no point does Horowitz remind readers precisely what Francis is supposed to have done.

A contact of mine, a specialist commentator who writes for a Catholic news outlet, was rung by a reporter from the Washington Post. “There were a couple of questions about the scandal [of which he’d revealed important details],” he told me, “but then it became clear that the reporter was only interested in the supposedly ‘conservative’ allegiance of my employers.”

Conservative, conservative, conservative. The adjective crops up in references to Viganò as a sort of health warning, just as the BBC attaches the label ‘eurosceptic’ or ‘conservative’ to interviewees whose views it dislikes. Liberals escape such health warnings, because the Beeb thinks they’re the good guys.

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Anyone who doubts that the BBC still buys into the cult of Francis should read a report by Jason Reynolds in Rome, dated August 30. It’s headed “Pope Francis faces twin battle in Church split over sexual abuse”. This “twin battle” is first with sex abuser survivors who accuse him of not doing enough to protect him, and secondly with conservatives – hiss! – out to get him.

Under the sub-heading,“A trap to catch the Pope”, we hear from “Vatican-watcher” Robert Mickens, whose ferociously partisan attacks on conservative Catholics naturally go unmentioned. Says Mickens: “Viganò is kind of a strange character in this case because it’s really a whole group of people. What is the motive behind this? To bring down Pope Francis in any way possible. They’re trying to catch him in a trap. And Francis is not falling for it.”

This is preposterous. Viganò is not a “strange character”. Yes, he associates with fellow conservatives, some of whom (by no means all) would like Francis to resign. But they won’t employ “any means possible” to force a resignation. They don’t need to. Pope set the trap himself and then walked into it. If he had been told about McCarrick’s crimes, it was madness to brush them aside and turn this monster into one of his consiglieri.

Why did he rehabilitate McCarrick? We can’t answer that question without examining Francis’s long record of moral indifference to allies accused of criminal wrongdoing. The Belgian Cardinal Danneels, who was caught pressuring an abuse victim into shutting up about being abused by his uncle, a bishop, was later invited to a synod on the family by Francis.

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Test article

By Giles Fraser

There are plenty of other examples, but you won’t read much about them in the British press. All I’ve seen are short news stories from Rome that could have been dictated by the Vatican press office.

Fleet Street long ago dispensed with specialist religion correspondents. In their absence, editors turn to ‘progressive’ Catholics who babble like Hillary Clinton about a vast right-wing conspiracy against cuddly Francis.

It remains to be seen how journalists will deal with further revelations about Francis that we can expect over the next few weeks. These may finally compel them to address the actual story rather than trying to shoot the messenger.

But by then it will be too late: the media will have become part of the cover-up.