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”.

More from this author

The torment of Pope Benedict

By Damian Thompson

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”.

Suggested reading

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

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.

More from this author

The hypocrisy of Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

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.

While reading Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread, I kept thinking of the quotation — which I only know from Postgate’s novel; I confess to not being familiar with Marx’s doubtless very exciting A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Ahmari’s book is a collection of 12 chapter-length essays, each focused on a different aspect of traditional wisdom. Like me, he is an older millennial and an adult convert to Catholicism, although our journeys to the banks of the Tiber could hardly be more different. Mine was a comparatively gentle and unspectacular movement between Christian denominations, after an Anglican upbringing in quiet rural Kent. By contrast, Ahmari, now a New Yorker and a US citizen, grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, in a secular Muslim family, and became a Catholic in 2016 after moving to the US in the Nineties.

One thing we do have in common is that we are fathers to young sons, and worried about the kind of world in which our boys will grow up. Ahmari’s son Maximilian is named after the Polish priest-martyr Maximilian Kolbe, murdered in Auschwitz, and concern for his future animates the introduction to the book. Here Ahmari reveals his fear that Max will drift into the kind of disorderly, anodyne, atomised life in which so many modern Westerners find themselves, and goes on to frame The Unbroken Thread as a sort of guidebook. The great examples of the past can light our way through the gloomy swamp of liberal modernity.

Ahmari has made rather a name for himself in the USA as a determined critic of liberalism, by which he means a constellation of overlapping ideological commitments, united by the belief that whether in economic or social policy, the most important subject of political concern is the sovereign choice-making individual, determining what is best for himself by his own lights. As the American Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy phrased it, earning the ire of conservatives: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The Unbroken Thread is a critique of that idea.

Ahmari seeks to show that there are alternatives to the Kennedy view, and that these alternatives have enduring power and weight. The challenge for those who write about such matters is to find fresh ways to defend and illustrate the Great Tradition; he achieves this by blending references to conventional conservative heroes such as CS Lewis, Pope Benedict XVI and John Henry Newman with discussions of lesser-known or unexpected figures. I was fascinated to read about the husband-and-wife anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who spent many years studying the religious rituals of African tribespeople and later joined the Catholic Church, having left behind their youthful Communism.

More from this author

In defence of moral panics

By Niall Gooch

In the chapter dealing with the virtue of filial piety, i.e. respect for parents and family and established communal customs, Ahmari turns not to the Romans, but to ancient China and Confucianism. He even has praise, albeit qualified, for the second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin, who shared with social conservatives a hostility to pornography and prostitution, and a clear-eyed understanding of the need to control and regulate the male sex drive.

Ahmari wisely does not focus on specific hot-button issues, which can raise the argumentative temperature. He does not hide his views, but The Unbroken Thread is really about the high-level questions that are conceptually upstream of individual culture war battlefields. The existence and significance of God, the importance of keeping the Sabbath, duties to parents, the meaning of freedom and sex; Ahmari invites his readers to good-faith consideration of these questions that are too often crowded out in modern discourse.

Which brings me back to that quotation from Marx. Like many books of conservative cultural criticism, The Unbroken Thread is implicitly premised on the idea that if we can persuade people to adopt better ideas, we can improve things for the better. In the terms used by Marx, a change in consciousness can re-engineer social conditions and social relations. Ahmari is essentially appealing to individuals to rethink and re-imagine their lives. What conservatives also need, however — to put it as Marx did — is a change in social relations to change men’s consciousness.

It is undoubtedly true that, as the title of one famous conservative polemic noted, ideas have consequences. Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the technological and economic structures of a society can strongly determine the ways in which people understand the meaning and purposes of their lives. For instance, the aims, rhetoric and substance of modern British progressive activism are heavily influenced by events in the USA; this would not be the case to anything like the same degree without the internet, social media, smartphones and so on.

More from this author

How to resist the new totalitarianism

By Niall Gooch

Similarly, the explosion in gender fluidity over the last decade or so is indisputably the consequence of how the internet works. Not only does the web enable people who are physically remote from one another to form communities of interest or identity, thereby binding them more closely to those interests and identities, but social media gives us all of us a heightened sense of our lives as curated performance and presentation. WiFi and mobile internet, and the associated hardware, have compelled people to inhabit the world in a particular way, and there is unlikely to be a mass return to the old modes of analogue existence, even if we have excellent rational arguments against the new.

Or to take an example from The Unbroken Thread: it is easy to lament the decline in people caring for their infirm or aged parents, and ascribe this to the loss of Christian faith or heightened selfishness. Yet we must realise, too, that it is the material conditions of the modern world, its hypermobility and the nature of the economy, that make it possible and indeed necessary for people to live far away from their parents. Medical and scientific advances that have extended lifespans, and new geriatric treatments, mean that looking after frail elders at home is in many cases a much more demanding and longer-lasting task than it once was. The plausibility structures around the old-fashioned understanding of filial piety have been badly weakened, just as the Pill’s promise of “safe sex” helped to destroy the plausibility structures around the prohibition of pre-marital sex.

This is not meant as criticism of Ahmari. I am quite sure he would agree with me about the need to overhaul social relations alongside persuading individuals of the merits of traditionalism. Having spent his early life in Islamic Iran, he understands that civilizational questions matter, that the underlying material incentives and scaffolding of a society make a difference. He is closely associated with integralism, a political ideology in which the Catholic religion is privileged and protected by the powers of the government and in which Catholic teaching forms the basis for law-making. The recognition that political power can be used to reshape and adjust social norms and the basis of social relations is central to this worldview. And perhaps he would say that he is hoping that his book will persuade people with their hands on powerful political levers.

Suggested reading

Why utopias always fail

By Mary Harrington

Conservatives have done sterling work in tracing the roots of bad ideas, and have often presented compelling and powerful arguments for good ones. Yet people’s identity in any given society at any given time is not simply a matter of individual rational thought and the effective use of the “marketplace of ideas”. Rather it is shaped by all sorts of technological and material factors. Consider how the televising of British parliamentary proceedings has changed the way MPs behave, in the same way as the very existence of TV has changed politics. “The medium is the message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s words — new ways of communicating change human society, regardless of the content.

We cannot undo technological or material changes; the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, as the Persian poet Omar Khayyam said. What we can do is match well-written, thoughtful and true arguments like Ahmari’s with serious thinking about how to make the material incentives match them. Many on the contemporary Right, for example, are coming round to the idea that if we reduce house prices by relaxing supply constraints, we will incentivise earlier and larger family formation. This may not work, but in the current climate it is more likely to be effective than moral exhortation. After all, Marx was not too far wrong when he said that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.