The kids would be tied up and have their heads shaved. A youngster would be punished this way for infractions ranging from dozing off in church to talking to the girls after mass a bit too long. Anyone who didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the community was suspect and could be targeted for “partying.” 

When I was at the boarding school, from 1987 to 1992, I participated in this cruel ritual, sanctioned by Father Ramón Angles, who at the time led the SSPX in St. Mary’s, serving as the rector of its college and secondary academy. Throughout my sophomore, junior, and senior years, I was told not only that I had permission, but that we were encouraged to abuse students for misconduct that would have been viewed as negligible outside the SSPX bubble.

In recent days, the SSPX — my former institution, and that of my now-estranged father — has garnered fresh attention from the global media. Last month, the sect created four new bishops without papal authorization. The move prompted the Vatican to declare automatic excommunications against the newly consecrated SSPX bishops, as well as those who consecrated them. The Roman church also warned the group’s lay followers that those who continue to “formally adhere” to the society likewise risk excommunication. 

The SSPX launched in 1970 in opposition to the reforms of Vatican II. It is fundamentally schismatic, promising to uphold the “true” ways abandoned by the “liberal” and “evil” Catholic Church. Among SSPXers, it’s common to believe that the mainstream church has been infiltrated by “freemasons” and “communists.” Anti-Semitism is never far from the surface. They see themselves as the last remnant of faithful Catholics. And they act accordingly, with a heavy sense of who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group, and seldom any room for nuance. 

The abuse and cultish behavior generated by such self-righteousness thus long predate the sect’s latest appearance in the media. When I lived in St. Mary’s, in the 1980s and ’90s, first as a boarding-school student (1987 to 1992), then on my own accord (March to October 1993), I once rationalized our sectarian beliefs and bizarre rituals — like the blanket parties — and willingly participated in them. 

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Over time, I came to realize that the SSPX wasn’t faithful to the gospels of Jesus Christ, but at odds with the very spirit of Catholicism: assuming the worst of outsiders, extremist and insular, ultra-Right-wing and sectarian. In this sense, the SSPX magnifies the hyper-partisan nature of much of American life in the opening decades of the 21st century: thou shalt not go against the team, for the team is always right. 

At St. Mary’s, Fr. Angles ran the parish and schools like a dictator. He hailed from a well-to-do family in Barcelona, and his politics were essentially those of an early-20th-century Spanish reactionary. Fr. Angles told me on one occasion that Hitler was a “good Catholic” who just went “crazy” at the end; he also held a Nazi dagger in his office and bragged that when he was a boy, his family in Spain owned at least one bulletproof vehicle originally made for the SS. 

Still, I was eager to return to St. Mary’s for undergrad. But as it happened, Fr. Angles denounced my sister from the pulpit for attending an innocuous party where someone brought beer and played rock music on an acoustic guitar.

My parents took issue with this and began complaining to Fr. Angles’s superiors. That was not allowed in St. Mary’s. As retaliation, Fr. Angles reneged on his verbal commitment to provide me with a scholarship for my undergraduate studies; there was no prospect of me being able to pay for it, either. I left town for a while.

Despite all this, the town and the SSPX had become my entire world. Because I was a traditionalist. Because I believed we were the remnant. Because I wanted to save my soul. I wanted to return but was delayed until 1993, when I could save up enough money. It was during this period that I came to be acquainted with the Rev. John Rizzo, a kind SSPX priest who was willing to stand up to the society’s bullying ways and to Fr. Angles. 

Later that same year (1993), Fr. Rizzo published a letter to his former parishioners announcing his departure from the society. In it, Fr. Rizzo railed against the “overall ‘cultish’ behavior” he’d witnessed during his time in the SSPX, including “tactics of intimidation and fear [practiced] on the faithful” by society priests and “public denunciations from the pulpit mentioning names and offenses.” He also highlighted the society’s “unhealthy attitude toward women,” including the “insulting and degrading” methods used to uphold modesty norms.

After his exit from the society, Fr. Rizzo returned to St. Mary’s as a mainstream Catholic priest with a mission to minister to non-SSPX believers in the area. I remember hearing it said that it was a sin to attend Fr. Rizzo’s masses. 

At one point, SSPX men glued the door to the makeshift chapel where he celebrated his masses. And according to the Kansas City Star, the local sheriff warned him that his SSPX enemies have “stronger firepower” and that he’d best leave town — in a bulletproof vest. The house of Fr. Rizzo’s brother — where the priest was staying — was shot at in the middle of the night. Eventually, Fr. Rizzo left St. Mary’s for good.

By this point, the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I had begun to see, for the first time, the truth about Fr. Angles. A friend’s dad with similar misgivings told me that we had to stand up against Fr. Angles and proposed that I join him in telling our story to a Topeka news station, to warn the community of the danger. For that, I was kicked out of the parish, and my friends’ parents were ordered to shun me. The Waco, Texas, tragedy had also unfolded around this time, casting the extremism of the SSPX in a new light. 

The Rev. David Hewko, another priest in town, agreed with me about Fr. Angles’s vindictiveness and toxicity, especially in the aftermath of Fr. Rizzo being run out. He was one of the few people who wasn’t mindlessly on board with Fr. Angles’s agenda. When I spoke to local TV, Fr. Hewko met me in secret in the dark of the night and urged me to get out. I had spoken to outsiders, against the bottom line of the St. Mary’s SSPX leadership. I had to leave. And I did. In October 1993, I left, full of despair.

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Nearly three decades later, in 2019, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, or KBI, launched a probe into allegations of sexual abuse inside the SSPX at St. Mary’s. Once news of the investigation became public, numerous accusers approached the Kansas City Star newspaper with allegations of their own.

Jassy Jacas — who’d posted on Facebook about a priest’s inappropriate behavior toward her during counseling, and who’d reached out to the KBI — told the Star: “There’s no benefit of the doubt anymore. This is corruption.” The KBI, according to the paper, told Jacas that eight SSPX priests were under investigation at the time she approached the agency.

Speaking to the Star, my former teacher Kurt Chione, who taught at St. Mary’s Academy from 1988 to 1990, remembered one student, Michael Gonzalez, increasingly acting out and “crying after school and shivering outside.” Pressed by Chione, Gonzalez reported that “one of the priests ‘hurt me.’” Chione brought this to two SSPX priests, according to the Star, including Fr. Angles. The priests, however, dismissed the claim immediately and tore into Chione for “getting involved.” The academy soon terminated Chione’s teaching contract.

Eventually, Gonzalez dropped out of school in the ninth grade. His downward spiral accelerated. One of his sisters, according to the Star, pressed him to reveal the abuse he’d suffered. “This time,” according to the paper, “Michael named his alleged abuser. Father Angles.” In the year 2000, Gonzalez committed suicide, aged 25. 

Earlier this month, the KBI submitted the results of its yearslong probe into the SSPX in Kansas to the state’s attorney general.

Speaking to the Star, Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for Fr. Angles, forcefully and categorically denied the abuse and coverup allegations against his client, blaming Chione for failing to go to the police with Gonzalez’s allegations. (Chione insisted to the paper that he did approach law enforcers but was told they couldn’t do much because he wasn’t the victim.) 

It’s too easy to dismiss the likes of Fr. Angles and the SSPX as “evil.” They’re not acting out of a desire to do bad. They simply carry with them a monstrously oversized sense of justice that paradoxically licenses evil. 

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, spent time in St. Mary’s shortly before carrying out his terror attack, according to The New York Times and law enforcers at the time. He, too, had a disproportionate sense of justice. This was highlighted by a 2001 Vanity Fair essay by Gore Vidal, headlined “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh.” The essay was the culmination of Vidal’s yearslong correspondence with McVeigh after the latter was sentenced to death for carrying out the massacre.

Through those letters, and through conversations with McVeigh’s psychiatrist, Vidal came to a conclusion that has stayed with me, helping me understand my former confrères in the SSPX. McVeigh wasn’t a monster. Nor was he insane. He was, in Vidal’s term, overly serious. McVeigh had fought for his country in the Gulf War. When he came to believe that the same country was now waging war on its own citizens, shredding the Constitution, he decided it was his duty to fight back. The 168 lives lost in Oklahoma City were, in his mind, collateral damage. He didn’t deny his victims’ humanity. He simply believed the cause demanded the sacrifice. He believed the mission was too important. Too serious.

Vidal’s portrait landed like a fist when I first read it three decades after my time in St. Mary’s. The society’s zealots, too, were haunted by over-seriousness: an inability to see how their — our — actions, carried out in the name of God, tore apart the Church and even our own families.

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By Mary Harrington

Marcel Lefebvre, the French founder of the SSPX, had been an archbishop entrusted with a sacred duty to guard souls. When he saw the Church changing in ways he believed betrayed Christ, he took his vocation very seriously — permitting no doubt or skepticism, certainly not about himself or his own actions. 

Lefebvre’s absolutism had no room for the humility that a life of faith is supposed to nurture. Our version of the faith became so deadly serious, so unforgiving, that in too many cases we were willing to do harm to advance it. This seriousness — this inability to have mercy for human frailty, so fundamental to Christianity — gave some in the SSPX a permission structure to shoot at a priest’s house. To be sure, the SSPX community has many people who are simply seeking peace and meaning. There are plenty of people of goodwill. But there are also those who’ve been radicalized by the mission.

That same absolutism had characterized my life, even after I left the SSPX. I had been scandalized time and again by my father and others, but each time I had been profoundly wrong in how I responded. Instead of turning inward with patience and love — the true power of a Christian — I had charged outward like a crusader, seeking justice, keeping score, tit for tat, chasing ideological shadows while neglecting what mattered most. My righteous anger had become a wildfire that consumed my soul and threatened to consume my home. 

Every human carries this capacity. Unconstrained, you get St. Mary’s. You get punishment “parties.” You get Fr. Angles. You get McVeigh.

UnHerd reached out to St. Mary’s College and to the international media-relations department of the SSPX. Neither replied for comment. Pedro Irigonegaray, the Topeka, Kan., attorney who has represented the Rev. Ramón Angles, wrote in an email that the “outrageous allegations” in this essay “are entirely false.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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By Alexander Lucie-Smith

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

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

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

For decades the Roman Curia, the Church’s central organ of government, has been widely seen as unfit for purpose. One person who saw this clearly was the late Pope Francis who, in his exchange of Christmas greetings with the Curia in 2014, lambasted them for what he saw as multiple failings, including something called “spiritual Alzheimer’s”. He seemed serious about reform. Curial Christmas presents — a panettone and a bottle of prosecco each — were cancelled, and recruitment frozen. At the same time, Pope Francis instituted a dicastery for the economy, to bring all the financial departments under one roof, and put a tough Australian cardinal, George Pell, in charge of it. The soap opera seemed to be over, but in fact it was just beginning.

Pell soon found obfuscation and opposition at every turn. Monsignori lamented that they were being forced to account for every cappuccino, and stories were planted in the press about Pell’s own extravagance. The financial audit ordered by Pell was suspended by Cardinal Becciu, the sostituto, effectively the Vatican’s chief of staff. Progress stalled, and matters ended with three spectacular arrests. Pell went back to his native land to face charges of sex abuse, of which he was, after a long process, absolved. (It was believed by some Italians that the arrest and trial of Pell was orchestrated by Becciu, but this seems a stretch, even in a land addicted to conspiracy theories.) Libero Milone, the auditor, a clean pair of hands from Deloitte, was arrested by the Vatican, questioned for 12 hours and charged with espionage, or, as some might put it, merely doing his job. The charges were later dropped. But Cardinal Becciu’s triumph was short-lived. He too was arrested and, with several associates, put on trial in the Vatican for embezzlement, and found guilty. His trial was characterised by impenetrable details of a business deal concerning the ex-Harrods depository in London, and spiced up with stories about a woman, Cecilia Marogna, designated “la dama del Cardinale” (the Cardinal’s lady) who, supposedly on secret work for the Vatican, had splurged half-a-million euros of Vatican money on luxury handbags and high living.

Two things now seem clear. The Pope had appointed reformers, and then not backed them to the hilt. As such, the Vatican remains a patchwork of conflicting fiefdoms and franchises. There’s the Secretariat of State, where Becciu was sostituto, which refused to acknowledge Pell’s authority, claiming that it was “la suprema”, answerable to no one. Meanwhile, the property portfolio, which is very valuable, is controlled by APSA, the agency that oversees the patrimony of the Holy See; much of this property brings in very little money, and is rented out below market value to Vatican employees as compensation for their poor pay. The governorate of the Vatican City State is independent of this, as is the Institute for Religious Works, better known as the Vatican Bank. And while some Vatican enterprises are bringing in cash, notably the Post Office and the Museums, others are losing it hand over fist, such as Vatican Radio. The chief income stream, Peter’s Pence, the annual collection from all Catholic churches in the world, is dwindling dramatically. The crunch is coming. In fact, it may have already arrived.

Inefficiency and corruption damage the brand, and as donations tail off, squabbling over the scraps tends to increase. The Church has still not shaken off the specter of Roberto Calvi, “God’s Banker”, found dangling under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. And the whiff of money laundering stubbornly endures. But the finances are only part of the wider administrative problem. In the past 12 years, Pope Francis effectively bypassed the Curia and the usual machinery of government. He appointed bishops personally, rather than through the normal processes as laid down by the dicastery for bishops. This turn to personal rule had some catastrophic results. In Argentina, all the episcopal appointments have been made by the Pope himself. In Mar del Plata, a city close to Buenos Aires, Pope Francis appointed two bishops in a row, both of whom had to resign before taking up the appointment. An interim diocesan administrator had to resign as well, when he was charged with misconduct. As for a previous bishop of Mar del Plata, he only lasted a year in his new job in another diocese. All of the appointees were well known to Pope Francis, but the vetting and due diligence were clearly insufficient.

After a time, a pattern of administrative failure emerges. In England, not an important country for the Vatican nor one Pope Francis took a close interest in, two newly appointed bishops of Portsmouth in a row resigned before taking up their appointment; this was presumably the fault of the dicastery for bishops. In Chile, there was an unseemly fight (complete with fisticuffs in the cathedral) over Pope Francis’s appointment of Bishop Barros of Osorno, who was imposed but eventually withdrawn after a long squabble which ended with all the Chilean bishops offering their resignation en masse. But the worst cases concern a man called Gustavo Zanchetta and another called Marko Rupnik. Both are accused of sexual crimes; in both cases, due process has been ignored.

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Consider the Zanchetta case. In July 2013, Pope Francis appointed him bishop of Orán in Argentina, one of his earliest episcopal appointments. Zanchetta was well known to the pontiff, indeed a friend. Four years later, he resigned for health reasons. Zanchetta was later sent to Spain for psychological assessment and then employed in Rome working as an “assessore” in APSA, a job specially created for him. Only later did it emerge that in 2015 one of Zanchetta’s secretaries had found sexually explicit images on his cell phone, including naked selfies of Zanchetta. Evidence suggests the Pope knew about this at the time, as he had summoned Zanchetta to Rome in October 2015. However, Pope Francis believed Zanchetta’s claim that his cell phone had been hacked.

Only in January 2019 was Zanchetta suspended from his Curial position for unspecified accusations of abuse. A church investigation was ordered, and a report filed. A canonical trial of Zanchetta was announced as imminent. In June 2019, Argentine prosecutors charged Zanchetta with sexually abusing two seminarians. Later, a charge of embezzling state funds was added. The trial began in February 2022 and Zanchetta was convicted of sexual abuse and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. However, the Argentine Bishops’ Conference asked for clemency and Zanchetta was allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest in a residence for retired priests. As for the canonical trial, that has disappeared from the radar, which means that Zanchetta continues to be a Catholic bishop in good standing. Who is protecting him, and why?

The Rupnik case is somewhat different, but worse. Rupnik, a well-known Slovenian celebrity priest, Jesuit and mosaic artist, is accused of sexual abuse against adults, in this case nuns who were under his spiritual direction. Rupnik has not been found guilty in a court of law, and probably never will be. However, his canonical crimes are clear. He absolved the sins of his partner in sexual sin, for which he was automatically excommunicated in 2019; nevertheless, the excommunication was almost immediately lifted, because, we are told, Rupnik repented. Moreover, because various allegations against Rupnik, received in 2019, dated back to the Nineties, they could not be investigated as there was a statute of limitations, which the Pope declined to lift. In 2020, Father Rupnik preached at the Lenten retreat in the Vatican. However, the Rupnik scandal ground on; some of the nuns went public. The Jesuits expelled him from the order for disobedience, and finally the Pope lifted the statute of limitations, to enable a canonical trial. This has not to date started, the excuse being that the appointment of judges is proving too hard. The person in charge of bringing Rupnik to justice is Cardinal Fernández, an Argentine and close collaborator of the late Pope Francis.

It was not always this way. Benedict XVI, shortly before becoming pope, spoke of driving the filth out of the Church. When he was pope, he sentenced the sexual abuser Marcial Maciel to a life of reclusion, by decree, without trial, as the Pope, an absolute monarch, can. Maciel had been protected by many during the pontificate of John Paul II, but Benedict moved against him swiftly and firmly. It can be done. But Rupnik continues to be a priest in good standing: who is protecting him, and why?

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By Darran Anderson

Administration, administration, administration is not quite the alluring slogan one could hope for, but it is this — the restoration of due process, and the urgent need to get things done — which will be the main challenge for the next pope. And it is decades overdue. At the tail end of the pontificate of John Paul II, who died in 2005, there was a perception that the Pope had neglected the government of the Church, thanks to his foreign travels and his long absences from his desk in the Vatican. It was hoped Benedict XVI would reform the Roman Curia, but that challenge, along with the Vatileaks scandal, defeated him, despite the promising start with Maciel. Pope Francis, too, failed to make effective changes. It’s now up to the next man. In the meantime, the Vatican is beginning to look like the Ottoman Empire in its final years, haunted by bankruptcy and the failure to reform itself.

Is there anyone who can stop the Vatican going the way of the Ottomans? Any cardinal who has run a large diocese well or governed a dicastery in the Vatican efficiently is in with a shot at becoming pope, as long as he is not too old. The trouble is that few names suggest themselves. Some of the cardinals in the running have ruled tiny dioceses, which in population terms are the size of small parishes: think of Mario Grech (Gozo, the Republic of Malta), Pierbattista Pizzaballa (Jerusalem), or even Soane Patita Paini Mafi (Tonga) and Giorgio Marengo (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). And since the archbishops of large dioceses like Milan and Paris are not cardinals, they will not be in the Conclave, though they could conceivably be voted for. As for Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines, who has had charge of the huge dicastery of Propaganda Fide in Rome, his administration has been less than stellar. It is this lack of experience among his rivals that puts Pope Francis’s second in command, Cardinal Parolin, Secretary of State, in pole position. He has spent the last 12 years touring the globe, and is well known to other cardinals. But many a man goes into the Conclave as pope and comes out a cardinal, and such will be the fate of Parolin. He is too associated with the controversies of Pope Francis’s reign, at a time when the Church is hoping, perhaps, to leave the Francis era behind.

The next Pope? I wish I knew. Conclaves have a habit of surprising us with little known candidates who go on to make an enormous contribution: Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, being a prime example, and Angelo Roncalli, John XXIII, being another. All Catholics must be hoping and praying for another Wojtyla or Roncalli, someone who will change the Church, and for the better; it does not matter what sort of theologian he is; he just needs to provide a strong hand in guiding the Barque of Peter, and sail it through the stormy waters that doubtless lie ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the Catholic Church should give it a try. What better way for the Vatican to shake off its harsh and forbidding reputation among the faithless young than by designing a winsome kawaii mascot for the Church’s forthcoming Jubilee Year?

Such was the apparent thinking of the high-ups who this week unveiled Luce, a character designed to put the adorable into religious adoration. Along with a raft of identically proportioned sidekicks, Luce is an unfeasibly large-headed, big-eyed, short-limbed cartoon child whose proportions are dictated by the chibi tradition in Japanese anime — also known as the “super-deformed” style. Blue-haired and snub-nosed, her enormous eyes brim with saintly sweetness as she guides young pilgrims towards the faith.

The Vatican masterminds are surely right that kawaii culture is popular with youth across the globe. Starting in the Seventies, with the massive success of Hello Kitty, it has since been fuelled by international crazes for manga, Studio Ghibli films, and Pokémon characters. Vaguely sinister soft toys with neotenous features, pointless pastel-coloured plastic tat, and decorated notepaper too small to actually write anything on are like crack for pre-teen girls worldwide.

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According to one theory, Japan’s national obsession with cuteness has roots in Sixties Japan, as representations of the ageing Emperor Hirohito started to depict him as endearingly enfeebled. This was arguably a cultural coping mechanism, as the Japanese faced post-war realisations about the limits of their military and economic power. Other commentators have made connections with the classical tradition of Japanese aesthetics, according to which sadness is an appropriate response to beauty: cute things are often thought of as enjoyably “pitiable” in kawaii discourse. The Shinto religion is also thought by some to be a relevant background factor, with its emphasis on innocence and play. And feminists have pointed out that traditional models of Japanese femininity construe women as small, powerless, and vulnerable — all features heavily present in the kawaii tradition.

Somewhere in all that, perhaps, is Japan’s excuse for its obsession with anything endearingly small, innocent, and childishly appealing. But what’s ours? For cuteness is increasingly not just an obsession of Generations Z and Alpha. The same nauseatingly sugary aesthetic is creeping — or rather, perhaps, playfully skipping as fast as wobbly oversized heads will allow — into Anglophone adult worlds. In this, it is no doubt encouraged by local conditions, in which “adultescence” can yawn into one’s thirties and distinct cultural boundaries between generations barely exist.

Consider that we are now in the season of adult Halloween costumes — in itself, a giant exercise in tooth-aching whimsy — and whole articles are being written, apparently seriously, about how sinister clown costumes have gone cute this year. Middle-aged textspeak is scattered with cartoon emojis, and phone cameras have filters that make owners look like puppies or princesses. Grown humans watch Pixar films or go to Disney World without the excuse of accompanying offspring. And, believe it or not, there are even “maid cafes” selling “kawaii culture” in UK cities, where youthful-looking young women in maid outfits will draw smiley faces on your pancakes or play boardgames with you, allegedly with no sexual undertones whatsoever.

Noticing the trend, this year Somerset House put on an art exhibition exploring what its curators called the “irresistible rise of cuteness”. And then there’s the ubiquitous concept of the “meet-cute”, now part of the contemporary lexicon to describe a first date. In terms of relationship ideals, it’s no longer considered sufficient to encounter a prospective partner by means of a firm handshake at a rendezvous planned in advance. Instead you should do something that would elicit gooey-eyed “awws” from your friends in the retelling: accidentally chuck a cup of coffee over him, say, or find yourself in a furious bidding war over the same antique vase. And if the meeting goes wrong and no sexual attraction is thereby experienced, modern parlance now has it that you have “the ick”. At both ends of the spectrum then, adult agency and mature sexual attitudes are being smothered in cooing, babbling, and clucking noises.

Indeed, the fact that cuteness has the capacity to reduce grown women and the occasional man to babytalk is a frequently observed feature of its strange power. In her great book on minor aesthetic properties of our time, cultural theorist Sianne Ngai quotes a 19th-century journalist attending the society wedding of Lavinia Warren and “General Tom Thumb” Stratton — two people of very short stature — who observed that the onlooking enraptured female crowd emitted “small-sized adjectives and diminutive ejaculations” as they gazed upon the adorable spectacle. In such a way, Ngai suggests, “cuteness generates ever more cuteness”. Or, to put it bluntly, cuteness kills vocabularies and, ultimately, brain cells. No surprise, then, that it should become totemic of this most stupid of eras.

There is another thing about cuteness that seems to make it irresistible. Namely, as noted, it implies vulnerability and powerlessness: aspects our culture is intoxicated by. Luce holds a pilgrim’s stick, but to eyes hungry for emblems of weakness it could just as easily be mistaken for a disability aid. Everything about her speaks to smallness and defencelessness. Some warped souls will find this an outright turn-on; more, though, will be non-erotically gratified by the projected image of the self.

For there is something obviously self-regarding in the pleasure to be had from exaggerated caricatures of human vulnerability. In a susceptible observer with enough mirror neurons firing, cute representations make her feel both maternal and meltingly childish, unsure if she is imaginatively positioned as watching subject or as adorably smol-bean-like object. For the same sorts of reason, cuteness can produce profound ambivalence in an onlooker. Do I want to hug this thing? Protect it? Buy it? Be it? Destroy it?

Pace the Vatican then, it seems to me that cuteness is a bad vehicle for the traditional elements of religious experience. Whatever else Luce achieves — increased brand awareness, perhaps, or even the physical presence of more young people in churches — she is unlikely to directly draw them closer to God. For, in comparison to the more traditional aesthetic categories of beauty and sublimity, cuteness seems essentially secular. Ngai agrees, writing that because cuteness “dramatises” its own “frivolity and ineffectiveness”,  it is “fundamentally non-theological, unable to foster religious awe and uncoupling the experience of art from the discourse of spiritual transcendence”.

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Even when affected by the sight of Luce as presumably intended, viewers will still only be in the realm of small bursts of manageable feeling, with no loss of self but rather an intensification of queasy self-awareness as just described. In some ways, this makes the mascot a weird strategy on the part of the Church. The one thing everybody knows about teenagers — and especially girls — is that they have an enormous capacity for engaging in ecstatic, swooning acts of self-abandon and absorption in the absolute. Just ask Saint Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc.

Yet unlike traditional religious paintings or pieces of music, full of awe-inspiring power, grand drama, or painful intensity, one cute representation is exactly as affecting as the next — which is to say not very much. Looking at Luce might make you feel pleasantly squishy in the solar plexus; but then again, so might looking at Bambi or Pikachu. It is for this reason that cuteness sells so well — it’s cheap and easy, in every sense. Even the tackiest of Catholic kitsch tries harder to whip up a sense of God’s immanence than this.

No doubt there will be those who say I’m overthinking. Can’t I just be happy that an out-of-touch institution is making relatable overtures to a new generation? I’m afraid I can’t. The modern cult of cuteness is too revolting. We get the aesthetic properties we deserve, perhaps; but surely the Church can do better than metaphorically placing potential converts in soft play. Many manifestations of religious experience are available, but I’m fairly sure saying “awwww” isn’t one of them.

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.

Piscitelli is now an advocate for other victims, having won $600,000 in compensation from a 2006 jury trial against the Diocese of Oakland — which last month declared bankruptcy, after receiving more than 330 legal claims of sexual abuse. It’s part of a growing trend in the Catholic Church of the United States, which Piscitelli and other campaigners believe is an attempt by the church to skirt its responsibilities — but the reality is not as clear-cut as it may seem.

Since ground-breaking reporting by The Boston Globe in 2002 exposed widespread sexual abuse in America’s Catholic Church — including the practice of moving known paedophile priests between parishes — countless victims have sought justice. Two years after the exposé was published, the United States Church commissioned a report, which found that, between 1950 and 2002, over 4,000 Catholic priests were the object of sexual abuse allegations. The cases involved some 11,000 children, the overwhelming majority of whom were young boys. The allegations go all the way to the top, with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked by the Pope in 2019, the subject of an ongoing criminal case. A seismic reckoning, but one that is still far from complete.

In California, a 2019 law opened a three-year window in which cases would be exempt from statutory limitation, resulting in more than 3,000 lawsuits. The influx of claims has seen at least four of the 12 Roman Catholic dioceses in California file for bankruptcy, or contemplate doing so, to deal with the crisis. In New York, five of the state’s eight dioceses have also recently sought bankruptcy protection.

In a letter to parishioners last month, Oakland Bishop Michael C. Barber said that the Diocese made the filing because it believed that the bankruptcy process is “the best way to support a compassionate and equitable outcome for survivors of abuse”, while ensuring that the church continues to support the community. He warned that the Diocese would be forced to close some of its worship sites, and “re-imagine” how to use others. This was part of the “dual challenge of declining engagement by Catholics”, he explained, citing a 25% decline in priests since 1985 and Mass attendance that has almost halved since 2010.

According to research firm Gallup, between 2000 and 2020 the percentage of self-described Catholics in the United States who were members of a church declined by 18 points (from 76% to 58%) — double the number of Protestants no longer going to church. While the decline in church attendance cannot be solely put down to child sexual abuse scandals — it is occurring to an extent across most Christian denominations, and has been accelerated by pandemic lockdowns — they may explain why it has been particularly precipitous for Catholics.

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For those seeking financial redress for these horrific crimes, understanding the true wealth of the Catholic Church is a frustrating pursuit. One estimate suggests its total United States assets are worth $65 billion, but there is no way to prove this figure. Only through individual bankruptcy cases can churches’ true wealth be known. The Oakland Dioceses’ recent petition says that its assets are valued between $100 million and $500 million — and that liabilities from the claims against it are estimated to be in a similar dollar range.

When an organisation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, it automatically halts any pending civil lawsuits, while allowing the organisation, in this case the churches, to continue operating. Marie Reilly, a law professor at Penn State Law and practising Catholic, has compiled Chapter 11 bankruptcy data for The Catholic Project, which aims to provide transparency regarding the process. She noticed that filing for bankruptcy was becoming commonplace after the Diocese of Portland first sought the legal protection in 2004: 32 of the country’s 195 dioceses have sought it since. But Reilly believes that media coverage of the practice is often misleading.

“Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who are great at what they do, manage the media extremely well,” she told me. The Church, Reilly added, tends to be unwilling to “publicly push back on some of some of the inflammatory and colourful statements that are made by advocates for survivors of sexual abuse”. She believes that bankruptcy “is a very powerfully charged word” and public perception of it, along with legal complexities, makes the bankruptcy process “seem sinister in a way that in fact, it is not”.

A number of bankruptcy scholars, and lawyers who have no affiliation to the Church, have also come out in support of the bankruptcy strategy as the best way to handle mass sexual abuse claims. (The Boy Scouts of America, facing a similar crisis, is using the same mechanism). The reasoning goes that United States tort law could permit the first few claimants to take the lion’s share of compensation, meaning that subsequent victims could be left fighting for scraps. Reilly says that “the untold story about bankruptcy” is that it provides “an alternative to the winner-take-all race approach to litigation”. If all the claims against the church are resolved “in a single forum”, she says, all the victims “will be treated similarly”.

Victims, however, say that filing for bankruptcy shields the Catholic Church from true justice. Mike McDonnell, a child sexual abuse victim of the Church in Philadelphia and spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), says that bankruptcy proceedings stop the operations of the Church hierarchy coming to light. Many victims, he explained, are seeking to “unveil how some of these well-known predators within the diocese were allowed to continue their career by being transferred to parish after parish”. He believes that it is not only financial claims that are halted when a bankruptcy petition is filed, but also any deeper inquiries into the systemic cover-up of abuse. “The victim is then prevented from seeing documents that we know the diocese is holding on to,” he says. “We know that the Catholic Church is extremely good at keeping records and taking notes.”

There is only so much the national, and international, Church is willing to do. The Vatican wrote to the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2020, reminding them that dioceses filing for bankruptcy may require consent from the Holy See — when the “alienation of temporal goods” exceeds $7.5 million for dioceses with more than 500,000 members, and $3.5 million for those with smaller numbers. The overarching US Church body, meanwhile, has established a protocol for managing cases — each diocese is supposed to have its own designated Victim Assistance Coordinator, for instance — but it has eschewed responsibility for the financial management of claims. Chieko Noguchi, executive director of public affairs for the US Bishops’ Conference, told UnHerd in a statement that the “financial, legal, structural, and operational matters” of each United States diocese operates separately under the governance of its respective bishop. (She also said that the Church has “made much progress, but we also know that the painful experience of survivors calls us to continual improvement”.)

Marie Reilly agrees that victims deserve restitution, but says that their cause has been hijacked by class action lawyers who advertise on television and “generate a large number of claims” though communicating an “anti-church sentiment”. She suspects that some victims’ groups are funded by “well-organised, extremely sophisticated” donors looking for profit rather than justice.

On that front, she has a case. In 2017, former SNAP fundraiser Gretchen Rachel Hammond filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Network, alleging that she was fired for confronting the organisation about “colluding with survivors’ attorneys”. Hammond accused SNAP of exploiting victims, stating in her lawsuit that the organisation “routinely accepts financial kickbacks from attorneys in the form of ‘donations’”, and it then “refers survivors as potential clients to attorneys, who then file lawsuits on behalf of the survivors against the Catholic Church.” Mike McDonnell told UnHerd that SNAP will not comment on “that resolved issue”.

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Church bankruptcy is the real issue, he says, that needs to be addressed. “It’s not fair, because it still allows the dioceses to steer the proceedings and have a better outcome,” he says. Victims need significant compensation. But the days of “large six figure settlements” for survivors are becoming increasingly rare. “If you really tally up the cost of trauma over the course of an individual’s lifetime, it’s a heck of a lot more than $175,000”, which he says is now roughly the average payout. McDonnell believes that, by refusing to take financial responsibility for that trauma, the Catholic Church is kicking the can down the road, and “revictimising those who have been terribly hard done by”.

Many have pointed to the vast property holdings of the Church as another sign that filing for bankruptcy is a shady tactic. But some dioceses have actually started selling property to contribute to settlements. In 2021, Long Island in New York sold its headquarters for $5.2 million. Last year, the Archdiocese of New Orleans sought court approval to sell off properties as part of its bankruptcy case. So far, it has only sold one former school for $1.9 million — a drop in the ocean of the $243 million in assets, and $139 million in liabilities, that it listed in its bankruptcy petition. (Marie Reilly notes that the Diocese has “layers of financial problems” beyond sexual abuse cases).

And while the Catholic institution’s unpopularity balloons, it appears that an equally despised, albeit secular villain is entering the arena. Reilly says that insurance companies have become increasingly involved in this scandal, on behalf of the Church, and that they are resisting victims’ claims in court. Historical lawsuits without witnesses are notoriously difficult to prosecute, and insurers are beginning to mount more robust legal defences. “Insurers are saying, ‘the dioceses won’t push back, so we’re going to push back — we’re not just going to write the checks anymore’”, she says. This is another way in which bankrupt churches might serve victims better: under bankruptcy law, claims are “batch processed”, with few going to jury trial — a process that is not only traumatic for victims, but also has a less predictable outcome.

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Pope Francis has asked victims of clerical sexual abuse for forgiveness, but SNAP says it is up to individuals, and not something that can be granted to the institution. These cases are about redressing failure, and everyone — even insurance companies — recognises that nothing in this world can ever truly compensate for the moral, psychological and spiritual injuries inflicted on untold numbers of young children by an institution that was supposed to love them.

For survivors like Joey Piscitelli, the Church’s request for grace is a step too far. And nothing will persuade him that the legal manoeuvring is not a false pretence to keep perpetrators’ names, and details of their crimes, out of the media. “A bankruptcy court shouldn’t have jurisdiction over the information of what priests did to kids,” he says. “By filing for bankruptcy because they’re being pursued for tens of millions of dollars, Catholic Churches are claiming that they are the victims.”

The reason behind this surprising meeting: Elmaleh had just made a film about converting to Catholicism. Stay With Us, which came out in France last November, sees Elmaleh playing himself and preparing for baptism. But it’s a heavy cross to bear. Elmaleh’s parents, also playing themselves, feel betrayed when they learn their son is changing faiths. His mother tells him: “New God, new parents! Get yourself adopted.”

The movie is clearly autobiographical. Although Elmaleh won’t reveal whether he has converted in real life, he has described his relationship to Catholicism as one of “attraction, curiosity, love” and called the Virgin Mary “my most beautiful crush”. His meeting with the Pope left him profoundly moved. “He’s an extraordinary person,” he said afterwards, “charismatic, humble, inspiring, joyous.”

Yet Elmaleh isn’t the only famous Jew to hear the siren call of the Good News. Shia LaBeouf, the star of Transformers, converted after playing the 20th-century priest Padre Pio in a drama released last year. They join a vibrant community of Jewish converts to Catholicism known as Jewish Catholics, or Hebrew Catholics. It is unknown exactly how many there are around the world, but a rough estimate would put them in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. Among them are Fr. David Neuhaus, a Jesuit who served as the Patriarchal Vicar of the Hebrew Catholic Vicariate in Jerusalem, and Fr. Antoine Lévy, a Dominican currently conducting doctoral research at the University of Tel Aviv.

Both clerics converted in their twenties, and neither repudiate their Jewish identity. On the contrary, Neuhaus tells me he’s “conscious of the fact I’m not just a Catholic like all other Catholics, but I’m from a Jewish family and part of Jewish history”. That last point is crucial: Jewish identity is bigger than just practising Judaism. Many secular Jews know little about the Torah, but still feel a strong connection to Jewish peoplehood and traditions.

Lévy, who wrote a book entitled Jewish Church, says “nobody can define Jewish identity. It’s impossible.” He adds that being born Jewish is not something you can “get rid of” — likening it to the Christian concept of sacrament. “It’s in you for life,” he explains. “Whatever you do, whatever you become… a Christian Jew is still a Jew.”

Many rabbis would, of course, disagree with that statement. To convert to another religion is often perceived in the Jewish community as a betrayal — even a denial — of one’s heritage. And yet, precisely because Judaism is more than just a religion, it isn’t that simple. As Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur tells Elmaleh in Stay With Us: “You can look for a way out of the Jewish House, but nobody has ever found it.”

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But how does one put up a crucifix in the Jewish House? What does it entail to be a Jewish Catholic? Theologically, it is not such a huge switch. As Lévy says: “The leap is short and simple. You simply need to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah of Israel.” The New Testament, under this framework, is the fulfilment of a prophecy set up in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament as Christians call it: that a Jewish man, descended directly from King David, will reveal himself as the Messiah. Christians believe Jesus, who was Jewish, was the Messiah. (Christ means Messiah in Greek.) Jews normally don’t and are still awaiting him.

Yet it is important to remember that, as Neuhaus puts it, Jews and Christians “share a language” derived from the Hebrew Bible. “Because of that shared language and those shared scriptures,” explains Neuhaus, “we can agree on many, many things. Our ethical standards, our moral vocabulary are very, very, very much shared.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for Jews, even if they are non-religious like Neuhaus and Lévy were in their youths, to convert to Catholicism. “There’s still a huge existential and cultural barrier,” says Lévy. It results from what he calls the “historical memory of Christian antisemitism”. When I asked David Kertzer, a Pulitzer-winning anthropologist and the leading expert on the history of the Catholic Church’s relations with the Jews, to describe that history, he replied: “demonisation”. Jews “were regarded as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus and were seen as obstinate because they refused to recognise the veracity of the divinity of Jesus and of the Christian message”. This was the impetus for the Catholic persecution of Jews through millennia.

Catholics certainly weren’t the only Christians to persecute Jews, but their record stands out. It includes the forced conversions of Jews; the massacres of Jews by mobs; the mass expulsions of Jews from Catholic kingdoms and provinces during the Medieval Inquisition; the segregation of Jews in ghettos, outside of which they were forced to wear a pointy hat so as to be immediately recognisable; taking Jewish children, who had been secretly baptised by Catholics, away from their family and raising them in the Church.

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Neuhaus and Lévy both wrestled with this history when converting. Their conversions, it must be understood, were motivated by faith and their personal experience of God. As Neuhaus puts it: “I didn’t become a Christian or a Catholic because of Christianity or Catholicism. I became a Christian because of an encounter with Jesus.” That’s the case for most Jewish converts to Catholicism. The impetus is spiritual, the why ineffable by the cold standards of reason. In Stay With Us, Elmaleh recounts how he entered a cathedral as a kid and came face-to-face with a statue of the Virgin Mary. To his surprise, he felt a surge of emotion and began to cry. In that moment, he was seized by faith. Later, when trying to explain to his parents why he so badly wants to convert, Elmaleh says he didn’t look for Mary; she found him.

But the past weighed heavily on their shoulders. “When I told my mother and my wider family that I would join the Catholic Church,” remembers Lévy, “they immediately said: ‘Now you’re joining those people who have been persecuting us for 2,000 years. You’re joining the herd of wolves.’” Neuhaus’s mother asked her son: “How can you join them after what they did to us?”

So, how could they? The answer lies in the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. It was initiated by Pope John XXIII to respond to the extraordinary change of the 20th century. To thrive in the new century and beyond, the Church had to change too. It needed, the Pope felt, aggiornamento — or updating.

Among these updates, Neuhaus says, was “taking out the animosity towards the Jewish people”. John XXIII acted with determination to drive through this change. His successor, Paul VI, codified it in the 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration released shortly before the Council’s closure. It marked the moment when, Kertzer explains, the policy of “demonisation” of the Jews ended. No longer were they considered collectively guilty for Jesus’s death. In fact, as Nostra Aetate stated: “God holds the Jews most dear.”

This change was key in Neuhaus’ and Lévy’s decisions to convert to Catholicism. It meant they were able to enter the Church with a clear conscience. “I would have never joined the Church in a time of persecution,” Lévy says. Neuhaus agrees — he needed, and still needs, “to be part of a Church that’s trying to find a new way to live a relationship of respect with the Jewish people”.

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Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made more overtures towards the Jewish community. In 1986, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to set foot in a synagogue. In 1994, he established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel. And in 2000, he made an official visit to the country and prayed at the Western Wall. John Paul II’s successors, Benedict XVI and Francis, have continued to foster a spirit of reconciliation.

That’s not to say there aren’t antisemites left in the Church. “I’ve encountered them again and again,” says Neuhaus. “What I think I can say with some degree of certainty is that the Church hierarchy now is against them, trying to discipline them and bring them to affirm what was affirmed at the Second Vatican Council.”

Despite those advances, there remains a major unresolved issue between Jews and Catholics. It has to do with the Vatican’s reckoning over its policies in the lead up to the Holocaust as well as its silence during the Holocaust. Kertzer has researched the subject, including in Vatican archives, for the past 20 years. In The Popes Against the Jews, he writes: “The physical elimination of the Jews of Europe came at the end of a long road… a road that the Catholic Church did a great deal to help build.” As detailed in the book, Vatican-supervised publications such as Civiltà Cattolica were purveyors of antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, vilifying Jews as hellbent on world domination. This rhetoric influenced European public opinion and fuelled antisemitic politicians. “When eventually both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists are trying to justify the persecution of Jews,” says Kertzer, “they justify them in no small part by reference to Christian sources.”

The Vatican has sought to address this, releasing a report entitled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah in 1998. It asks whether the fact that “the Shoah took place in Europe… raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards Jews”. But the report goes on to assert that “the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity.” As an explanation, it draws a distinction between Nazi antisemitism and Christian “anti-Judaism”, which it defines as “long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility”. In its telling, the former was based on racial animus, but the latter was religious.

“We Remember is certainly not a frank document,” says Kertzer, for whom the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny. “It just doesn’t recognise the reality that the demonisation of the Jews by the Church didn’t just involve so-called ‘religious criticisms’. It accused the Jews of seeking world domination.”

However, Neuhaus, who lost family during the Holocaust, adheres to the distinction outlined in We Remember. But he says that, in the late 19th century, “there was an unconsciousness about how anti-Judaism became antisemitism”. He continues: “When you read articles published in Civiltà Cattolica in the 1890s, around the time of Dreyfus, you see there is this complete confusion between anti-Judaism and antisemitism moulding into one animosity against the Jewish people.”

As for Lévy, he too acknowledges that Nazi antisemitism was “indebted” to Christian antisemitism, but cautions against making sweeping statements. He also says it’s important to “remember the number of Jews who were saved by Catholics during the Second World War”. As it happened, one of them was a Jewish teenager named Aron Lustiger. The son of Polish immigrants to France, he found refuge in Catholic boarding schools during the Nazi occupation.

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At age 13, in 1940, Lustiger visited a church and felt a powerful desire to become Catholic. He converted and took as his baptismal name Jean-Marie. After the war, he joined the Church and climbed up the hierarchy, but he was outspoken about being Jewish his entire life. “To say that I am no longer a Jew,” he explained, “is like denying my father and mother… I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

For Lustiger, moreover, his Jewish identity and Catholic faith weren’t antithetical but complementary. He described himself as a “fulfilled Jew”, saying: “The vocation of Israel is to bring light to the goyim [gentiles]. That is my hope, and I believe Christianity is the means of achieving it.” Lustiger was the prototypical Jewish Catholic.

In 1981, John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Paris. And in 1983, he was made a cardinal. “The Jewish Cardinal”, as some called him. Lustiger died in 2007, but his legacy can still be felt. Bishop Robert Barron, one of the Church’s most popular clerics, said in 2021 that “the recovery of the Jewishness of Christianity will be what [Lustiger] is most remembered for”. Barron, who is set to become a leading figure in the Church in the coming decades, has himself spoken of the necessity to “re-Judaise Catholicism” — that is, “to read Christ, the Bible, and the Christian faith through the lens of Israel”. In fact, the “re-Judaisation” of Catholicism has been an ongoing process since the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps, by following in Lustiger’s footsteps, Jewish converts to Catholicism are not abandoning Judaism, but spreading its message elsewhere.

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.

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.

This question has animated much of my reading this year: from Clayborne Carson’s Martin Luther King Jr, to Roy Foster’s examination of Ireland’s revolutionary generation in Vivid Faces. But the book that today’s Twitter activists could perhaps learn the most from is John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s deeply researched and highly entertaining biography of Dorothy Day. This rambunctious American peace activist emerged in times that echo many of the crises we currently face, but her answer to them was, inspiringly, different.

Born to a relatively comfortable middle class family in 1897, Day enjoyed a misspent youth among the radicals of 1920s Greenwich village, falling in love with feckless journalists and drunk intellectuals, writing novels, experimenting with feminism and socialism, and trying to figure out how life should be lived. If a friend of Dorothy’s was going to be arrested — and they often were, for agitating for votes for women in the 1910s, or protesting against the arms race in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1960s — you could safely bet that she would be right there alongside them. The Groucho Marx saying about how a good friend will try to bail you out of jail, while a best friend will be in the cell next to you, could have been written about Dorothy.

Dorothy did not have to agree with you to love you. Her worldview did not depend on ideological convergence between friends — unlike that of today’s activists, who often insist on absolute purity and cannot tolerate disagreement. While Day’s openness allowed for the hectic fun of her early life, it gathered depth and meaning when she converted to Catholicism in her early thirties and began the journey that would lead to the foundation of her influential movement and newspaper, the Catholic Worker.

Dorothy’s conversion was an enormous surprise to her friends — she ran with a bohemian set and had been inclined towards communism as a young person (who isn’t?). But she ultimately declined communism’s emphasis on material progress as the only thing mankind need bother itself over. She needed more, and she thought humanity in general did too. Dorothy saw each individual as a whole person — which helped her avoid the horrific dehumanisation of the great ideological catastrophes of the twentieth century: ones that many of today’s activists, in their determination to hate those who don’t agree with them, seem bent on replicating.

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Dorothy, on the other hand, practised the love she preached. In 1933, she and Peter Maurin — a penniless French intellectual drunk on the radical potential of the Gospel — founded a “House of Hospitality” in Dorothy’s stomping ground of lower Manhattan. The House was for anyone who needed shelter, food and care — no questions asked. Crucially, no standards of behaviour or personal hygiene had to be adhered to. Dorothy liked to tell newly arrived volunteers at the House: “there are three things you have to remember about very poor people who live on the street: they don’t smell good, they aren’t grateful and they are apt to steal”.  This is not the carefully sanitised language of the modern activist; it’s the no-bullshit lowdown from someone who lived her word. Dorothy was not interested in saving people: her religiosity was non-evangelical, her compassion was not charity. It was not about control.

The results of all this acceptance were predictably chaotic, and the Lower East Side House of Hospitality was always just about to fall apart: bedbugs, unsympathetic city officials, rats, fire. Dorothy was comfortable with chaos — former hedonists often are — and it was a principle of her new faith that it was no use to live in middle class comfort while helping the poor. You had to live among them.

Day’s commitment to writing about organised labour in the 1930s brought her all across the country and her concern for racism brought her to the south long before the typical white do-gooder from the north paid attention to conditions for black people there. She, like many anti-racist campaigners today, thought that America was rendered a hypocrite through its racist treatment of its own people — but she was prepared to write about it while it was still deeply unpopular and indeed dangerous to do so. It’s amusing to imagine what Day would think of today’s booming Diversity and Inclusion industry with its corporate activism; while an advocate of brotherly love, she also had a caustic wit and a deep, instinctive distrust for any kind of institutionally mandated morality. The Catholic Church of its day did not know what to make of her; at one point, she was asked to omit the word “Catholic” from her newspaper’s title. She declined.

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While Dorothy seems to have been on the “right side” of most of the big questions of the twentieth century — anti-Franco, anti-Jim Crow, anti-fascist, anti-war — she was no saint (even if the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the long process of beatifying her, it being much easier to celebrate her now that she’s dead and can no longer shame comfortable prelates with her radical poverty). She was a less than ideal mother to her daughter, but then people called to higher ideals so often fail their own families. Tamar Teresa was born when Dorothy was 29, the result of a doomed love affair (one of several). She was a wanted, cherished child, and her arrival seemed to propel Dorothy towards the spirituality that would shape the rest of her life. But Dorothy was influenced by Emmanuelle Mounier’s “personalist” Catholic philosophy, which was sceptical of the bourgeois family and its emphasis on security and comfort — and this made her an unreliable mother.

A life of voluntary poverty is all well and good when freely chosen; Tamar never had the luxury of that choice. Growing up in an eccentrically run housing shelter can’t have been easy, especially as Tamar got older, and her mother spent increasing amounts of time on the road. While Dorothy had an answer to most questions, her life doesn’t offer many solutions to women who have children and feel called to something more. To be fair to Dorothy though, that one’s a toughie.

Dorothy Day died in 1980. She lived a huge life in a humble way, dedicated to improving — however slightly — the lot of the very least of us. She was a true activist: “the original hippie,” as icon of the counter-culture Abbie Hoffman called her, disciplined in nothing apart from her love for her fellow man, no matter how drunk, disorderly or ideologically unsound those men (or women) were. She is pretty useless as an example, then, to activists whose work involves identifying and shaming those who have the incorrect opinions. And maybe she’s also not that useful to the rest of us either: who among us is going to embrace a life of voluntary poverty? In this era of relentless careerism, such a notion is laughably quaint.

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As a life-long anti-war activist, the last decade of Day’s life saw her engage with the enormous wave of opposition to the Vietnam War. While she was heartened by the size of the protests, she was dismayed by their tenor; she hated the “contempt and ridicule” of the counter-cultural approach to activism. What would she think of current activism, which often seems comprised of only that? For Dorothy, the project of creating a better life on this earth — the project, one might in good faith assume, of all activists — had to be centred in love. And while few of us can follow fully in her footsteps — self-abnegation is not for the faint-hearted — we can perhaps learn from this.

Perhaps her most important lesson, though, for these terrifying, paralysing times, is Day’s rejection of the notion that anything or anyone will ever be “fixed”. Maurin said of the movement he created with her: “we don’t measure our success, we don’t despair and we don’t judge.” Our shambolic life on this collapsing planet is forever in crisis; we are always, like Dorothy’s Manhattan House of Hospitality, about to fall apart. But still she pushes us to answer: how can we make it better for the very least of us in the meantime?

That lack of amusement has extended to the man’s many admirers over the past weeks, as the Roman Catholic Church rejected the author for the canonisation process partly due to his alleged anti-Semitism. Bishop Peter Doyle, of Northampton, added that there was a lack of a “local cult” and “pattern of personal spirituality”, around the man, but it’s certainly been his writings on the Jews that have caused the greatest resistance.

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Cult or otherwise, there are Chesterton societies and magazines all over the world, and since the 1970s in particular he has been regarded as one of the great Catholic apologists – a man who managed to communicate often tangled theological beliefs with clean and clear popular appeal. American conservative Catholic thinkers are especially dedicated to this English-language writer, seen as one of their own, and their influence in the Vatican under Pope John Paul II helped to further the cause.

It must all seem somewhat esoteric, even obscure, to most observers. Chesterton was who he was and will remain so, hagiographical acknowledgement or otherwise. Yet saint-making still matters, whatever the cynics may say, and to have accepted Chesterton as a saint would have been profoundly controversial. This would have been the Roman Catholic Church placing its highest seal of approval on a man who many believe disliked Jews, at a time when even the most optimistic commentator would agree that the ghoul of anti-Semitism has found new life.

Controversy wouldn’t be new, of course; the entire business of saint-making has always been touchy and messy. The process isn’t supposed to begin until a hiatus of five years after someone’s death and then there has to be evidence of “heroic virtues”, proven miracles, and so on.

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The Roman Catholic Church’s official teaching is that it doesn’t make saints, it merely recognises them, but that’s a little disingenuous. Holy lobbying has become a big business, and one drenched in church politics, which is why different groups back conservative and progressive figures for the process. Whatever the Church may claim, there is a pronounced political and ideological division both in clerical and lay circles.

For example, those who worked to promote the cause of Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the traditionalist Catholic group Opus Dei, came from the opposite side of church politics to those behind the campaign for Óscar Romero, the bishop in El Salvador murdered by a fascist gang for his support of the poor and opposition to the government. But both groups have to be accommodated in a game of ecclesiastical balance.

It’s also why Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II were rushed to the front of the queue – with insufficient consideration of the former’s links to repugnant despots, and the latter’s – whatever his undoubted strengths – alarmingly flaccid response to sexual abuse within the clergy.

Then there are the legions of saints with dubious records, such as local hero Thomas More. He was a martyr for the cause, he was brilliant, but he also personally ordered and supervised the gruesome torture of those who questioned Catholic beliefs. That somewhat inconsistent element to his moral character was conveniently ignored, partly because when he was canonized in 1935, the Papacy was eager to emphasize its status and honour those who agreed with it, and because England was in dire need of some new compatriots confirmed to be in heaven.

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Chesterton is equally problematic, if less tangibly so, and the reason why his treatment has upset many of his devotees is not, for the most part, because they defend anti-Semitism, but because they deny the author of the Father Brown stories, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and volumes of compelling journalism was an anti-Semite in the first place.

Indeed his popularity among Catholic thinkers, and secular conservatives, has grown rather than diminished since his death in 1936, due to his undoubted wit as a writer, and his genuine cleverness and ability to charge through clutter and hypocrisy, like some grand knight of paradox and traditional values. His observations still seem highly relevant: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried” he wrote in ‘The Unfinished Temple’,  in (What’s Wrong with the World, Collected Works, 1910) “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it” (The Everlasting Man, 1925) and “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” (New York Magazine, 1923)

Chesterton’s gift, his charisma if you like, was the ability to be a middleman of intellectual ideas and popular curiosity. He could explain philosophy to the masses, and mass to the educated atheist, could write weekly and sometimes daily newspaper columns that roared with cleverness, and then produce a biography of St. Francis or Charles Dickens that impressed life-long devotees. When he published his life of Thomas Aquinas, the world-renowned Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson was distraught. “For many years I have studied St. Thomas and written on him and now a journalist writes a better book about him than I have!”

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Yet within Chesterton, within the style and the brilliance and the originality, there was something darker. Richard Ingrams, an admirer, put it well when he wrote that he, “shut his eyes to a great deal of the unpleasantness and cruelty in the world, including his own circle.” He was likely referring to his brother Cecil, and to the author and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, who undoubtedly had a major influence on the much gentler and kinder Gilbert Keith.

Cecil Chesterton was a journalist and editor of limited talent, but was revered by his younger sibling. Cecil was obsessed with what he saw as the negative Jewish influence in media and finance; led a vitriolic campaign against the handful of Jewish figures who were involved in the 1912 Marconi Scandal – an early form of insider trading, mostly involving non-Jews – and, with the far more talented Belloc, developed a virtual ideology based on the belief that Jews were alien to British society and a direct threat to its future.

Cecil died at the end of the First World War, through illness rather than combat, and shortly afterwards Chesterton wrote an open letter to the Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs, the first Jewish Lord Chief Justice of England), as the politician was about to travel to Versailles as part of the British delegation to the peace conference. It’s drenched in anti-Semitism, with references to “the Jewish international”, “alien psychology”, and “Daniel, son of Isaac, Go in peace, but go.”

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But there is much more than letters written in grief, perhaps under the influence of friends. Chesterton may have been led further along a dark path by those around him, but his mingling of misplaced medievalism, English insularity, and instinctive distrust of what he always offensively assumed to be Jewish characteristics, led to his own brand of error and cruelty. Many, though far from all, of his contemporaries may have had prejudices about Jews, and sometimes expressed them, but it was Chesterton’s frequent comments, his attacks and then defence of his position or attempted justification, that singles him out.

In his book A Short History of England, for example, Chesterton praised the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I as the actions of a “tender father of his people”; in his journalism he condemned the British press for opposing the French military and establishment’s anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair; and even called for Jews to be forced to wear a form of public identification.

Then there were the clawing vulgarities. In On Lying in Bed and Other Essays: “I am fond of Jews/Jews are fond of money/Never mind of whose. I am fond of Jews/Oh, but when they lose/Damn in all, it’s funny.” And this from The Flying Inn: “Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck/And his nose it had a hook/And his attitudes were anything but Aryan/ So I gave him all the pork that I had, upon a fork/Because I am myself a Vegetarian.”

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His defenders argue that he was a Zionist, but that’s far too facile an analysis. While many at the time who supported the creation of a Jewish state did so because they thought it would lead to Jewish security and dignity, Chesterton was more concerned with what he was convinced was the foreign, un-English nature of the Jewish people. In other words: find them somewhere else to live. This was a natural – an inevitable – consequence of his obsession with what he referred to as “the Jewish question”, and incessant references to “plutocrats” and “financiers” – a vocabulary that would soon become part of the litany of genocide.

The other common defence is that he – and Hilaire Belloc for that matter – were vehemently anti-Nazi. That’s certainly true, though they also cheered for fascism elsewhere, especially when it was wrapped in Catholic nationalism. Chesterton wrote of thousands of Jews being “rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes” by the Nazis, who “beat and bully poor Jews in concentration camps”, and how, “I do indeed despise the Hitlerites.”

He died before the Holocaust was fully implemented, and with his authentic opposition to eugenics and his hatred of what he saw as “Prussian barbarity”, he would likely have been disgusted. But opposition to mass murder and ethnic cleansing doesn’t forgive someone of anti-Semitism, and those who help to create a climate where racist atrocity is permissible share a certain responsibility for its reality.

While the claim might groan in its banality, he certainly did have Jewish friends who he sincerely liked, he was appalled by the idea of Jews being harmed because of who they were, but he also played a game of grimy hide-and-seek around the issue, popping up to provoke and condemn, and then claiming innocence or, as his partisans would claim today, purity of intent. That just won’t do.

I once thought, perhaps with far more sanguinity than was deserved, that when weighed in the balance, GK Chesterton may not have been completely on the wrong side of history – that at least he wasn’t part of the problem, and that when the testing-time came he saw the threat before others were aware. No longer. He may not have been the worst, he may well have changed his mind if he had lived longer, but the damage was done.

As Jew-hatred gains a shockingly new prominence, its proponents look to anybody who offers an intellectual underpinning to their venom. Chesterton, tragically, is one of theirs. No saint he.

As far as political protests go, that’s not necessarily so unusual.

Christian organisations have often been at the centre of protests and demands for citizens’ rights. From the Black Church’s central role in the Civil Rights Movement to Catholic backing of Solidarity against Communist rule in Poland, as well as various Church-led pro-democracy campaigns throughout Latin America and Africa, hymns and prayers are often deployed in political confrontations.

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These examples are all taken from areas where the populations are predominantly Christian. Whereas, even though Christianity has been present there since the 1840s, few citizens in Hong Kong claim it as their religion – about 10-12%. And the make-up of the protesters is no different: most of them have likely never stepped foot in a church.

So why the hymns, then?

Some have suggested they are simply easy-to-sing-in-unison songs. Others argue that it is strategic, since the law police use to regulate or disperse public gatherings does not cover religious events.

But beyond these convenient reasons, the song is just one particularly noticeable sign of a much larger reality in the territory: the Church in Hong Kong wields power beyond its numbers, and its power has brought it into conflict with Beijing.

Even though most protesters have probably never gone to a church service, most of them have been pupils in church-founded schools. As was usually the case for many former British colonies, much of the education system in Hong Kong was established by churches during the UK’s long rule, such that today church-founded schools educate over half of all primary and secondary students in Hong Kong.

Many of these schools incorporate religion into their curriculum as a subject of study. With such dominance over education, and other social services as well, the Christian churches of Hong Kong have established their influence among the population, shaping the culture and people. Many Hong Kong residents are therefore familiar with church songs and with weightier aspects of Christianity as well, such as the churches’ outlook on social justice and rights.

And while the protesters, past and present, have not generally been Christians, their leaders have been. Two of the three founders of Occupy Central, one of the main groups leading the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, are Protestant Christians (one of them is a Reverend). Leading student activist Joshua Wong, who cofounded Scholarism – the predominant student group of the 2014 protests – is a fervent Evangelical whose father heads one of the leading Christian anti-LGBT groups in Hong Kong (the younger Wong has publicly split with his dad’s stance on gay rights but obviously inherited the knack for political activism).

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The Church’s influence extends to the government. Two of the four individuals to occupy the role of Chief Executive of Hong Kong, the highest political office in the territory since the handover to China, have been devout Catholics. This includes the current Executive, Carrie Lam – a Beijing approved politician who has become a target of the protests after she tried to push through the extradition law.

Despite generally being seen as carrying Beijing’s water, Lam has refused to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), essentially placing a ceiling on her own career within the Chinese government, because she would be required to renounce her faith in order to do so.

Lam’s story of competing loyalties embodies the conflict between the Church and the CCP that is being played out across China, and now in Hong Kong.

The CCP has the opportunity to extend its reach into Hong Kong through officials like Lam and policies like the extradition law. But the freedoms of speech, religion and travel afforded to the churches of Hong Kong during the time of British rule – and maintained under the current “one country, two systems” policy – have long allowed the Hong Kong churches to extend their influence into China by both criticising the CCP and supporting illegal underground churches in mainland China. Such actions represent a threat to the Chinese government.

Catholics in mainland China can legally practice their faith only through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a government body that regulates them into a tightly managed and Communist-friendly version of Catholicism. But in Hong Kong, the Catholics are free to practise as they wish – as well as having the freedom to freely criticise the Chinese government.

Much criticism has come from the outspoken Cardinal Joseph Zen (now retired). He rose up the ranks to eventually lead the Church in Hong Kong and spent decades as a human rights advocate, speaking out against the Chinese government’s repressions of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Falun Gong religious movement of the 1990s, and more.

For years, Cardinal Zen and the Hong Kong Catholic hierarchy, backed by the Vatican, also helped support the massive underground Catholic network in China.

Similarly, tens of millions of Chinese Protestants worship in illegal underground “house” churches. This is especially common in the southeast. The illegal congregations in these provinces have been supported by nearby Hong Kong, which supplied these illegal mainland churches with everything from moral and spiritual support to theological training and Bibles.

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These Christians are intentionally flouting China’s hardline regulations against religion and consciously challenging the Communist Party’s grip on power with their defiance. No wonder Beijing is irked.

As a result, under Xi, authorities have cracked down on these ‘foreign religions’: they’ve demolished unregistered houses of worship, jailed religious leaders, and even detained entire congregations and communities of religious believers who worship outside of officially-recognised religious organisations.

In a more disturbing move, last year, the Vatican and the CCP concluded years of negotiations with a deal to merge the government-controlled Catholic organization and the underground Catholic Church in China, while allowing Beijing to maintain a substantial role in approving the appointment of new bishops. Many have viewed this deal as a win for the Chinese government, extending its oversight over all Catholics in the country.

Lately, the CCP’s campaign against Christianity – a combination of repression and co-opting – has reached Hong Kong, coinciding with its more general attempts to chip away at democracy and freedom in the territory.

Beijing has tightened restrictions for mainland Christians travelling to Hong Kong, as many have done in the past years to attend Christian conferences and gatherings. And upon returning, those visitors have been subject to intimidation and detention.

More recently, Christian leaders in Hong Kong have become direct targets of Chinese bullying, with several pastors being questioned, and at least one prosecuted, for work done on the mainland. Several Protestant Christian leaders of the 2014 protests were also among those jailed in Hong Kong for their activism against Chinese repression.

While Catholic leaders in Hong Kong have not been harassed so directly, many worshippers there see the deal between the Vatican and Beijing as a disaster; Cardinal Zen personally confronted Pope Francis in an attempt to scuttle it before it was finalised.

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The Pope’s agreement with the CCP is seen a betrayal of their brothers and sisters in the mainland, an erosion of the leverage that the Holy See held against the Chinese state, and a signal that the Vatican is willing to sacrifice its loyal followers  (perhaps even those in Hong Kong) in order to establish better relations with the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, the CCP had also found support within the Hong Kong Christian elite from Paul Kwong, Archbishop of Hong Kong’s Anglican Church. He was appointed, in 2016, to an official advisory position within the Chinese government and subsequently became known for his CCP-friendly stances. He and the Anglican church approached the 2014 and 2019 protests with a combination of pro-Beijing statements and silence concerning police crackdowns on demonstrators.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Hong Kong’s Christian minority has been especially outspoken in its attempts to protect the territory’s democracy, and a major part of the resistance movement – the imposition of authoritarian rule in Hong Kong – is at least in part a measure by the CCP to target and control the Church.

Though eclipsed by the 2014 and 2019 protests, there have been two previous instances of significant protest in Hong Kong against Chinese heavy-handedness. The first major demonstration against Chinese rule came in 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets on July 1, the anniversary of the handover to China (the same date as this year’s storming of parliament). Their purpose was to reject a “National Security Bill” that would have given the government added powers to battle “sedition” and “subversion” including restricting links between Hong Kong citizens and “foreign political organisations.”

Hong Kong’s Christians were among the most vocal opponents of this bill; 90% of the territory’s Catholics saw it as designed to limit freedoms in Hong Kong (the Vatican could certainly be considered a “foreign political organisation”, no?) and both Catholic and Protestant congregations mobilised many of their members to march against the proposed law.

Similarly, when the government in 2012 tried to require schools to teach nationalism and pro-Chinese propaganda, churches rejected the proposed curriculum for their schools and helped organise tens of thousands of student protesters (including a young Joshua Wong) to march against the proposed regulation.

Many Christians now fear that this new extradition bill could be used as justification for arresting religious dissidents in Hong Kong and placing them in Chinese cells next to their mainland counterparts. But just as Christianity in mainland China has continued to grow in resistance to government efforts to suppress and control it (a common saying is that there may now be more Christians in China than Communists), the Hong Kong Church has remained defiant of Beijing in the face of new threats.

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Leaders such as Joshua Wong and Cardinal Zen are as vocal as ever. Wong was recently released from prison for his leadership in the 2014 protests and immediately took up a major role in the new demonstrations.  Meanwhile, the 87-year-old retired Cardinal Zen has taken to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to support the current protests.

Even Archbishop Kwong and the usually pro-Beijing Anglican hierarchy have acknowledged the necessity of the latest protests and urged the government to back down.

Even though Beijing has been careful to present its new policies, such as the extradition bill, as responses to secular concerns like maintaining law and order, there is a clear sense that the authorities are becoming more overtly anti-religious.  The first legal complaint over police handling of the protests to reach Hong Kong’s High Court concerned perceived anti-religious bias. During a particularly violent crackdown by police against protesters on June 12 – which saw many demonstrators taken in by local churches as they fled police batons and tear gas – one police officer allegedly demanded that a clergy member marching alongside the protestors “ask your Jesus to come down and see us”. The High Court dismissed the blasphemy complaint against the police as outside of the Court’s purview.

The churches are not in charge of the protests in Hong Kong, which have endured for weeks without central leadership. But the Church’s influence over the current protests goes far beyond a single Christian hymn. From criticising the Chinese Communist Party and supporting underground churches both before and after the handover, to calling upon the population to defy repressive Chinese-proposed laws in the early years of the “one country, two systems” era, the churches of Hong Kong have actively mobilized opposition to Beijing and created an atmosphere of defiance against the CCP.

And so the current round of protests in Hong Kong reflect the larger ongoing battle between the CCP and the Church.  So far, the protesters have stuck to singing the eponymous chorus of “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.” The full version of the song, however, goes on to make several declarations and a promise:

Jesus is risen from the dead
Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth
Jesus is living in His church
Jesus is coming for His own

Was the police officer who challenged protesters to call Jesus down familiar with this latter verse, I wonder?

Regardless, his comment reflects not just the derision that Beijing has towards Christianity and other religions, but also fear: not that Jesus himself is on his way, but that his followers are coming to challenge the Party, unless the Party comes for them first.

In the end, as Christians in both mainland China and Hong Kong have responded to repression with solidified resolve and greater levels of defiance, the Communist Party’s fears may become a self-fulfilling prophecy in Hong Kong and throughout the country.

Conservative denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention have unsurprisingly argued that transgender identity – or anything that does not conform to a binary, biologically based notion of sex and gender – should be considered incompatible with Christian theology.

Even those conservative churches, such as the Assemblies of God, that advocate for a holistic approach that does not reduce members to their gender identity, do so in the context of “help[ing transgender members] experience increasing integrity between their birth sex and their gender identity.”

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At the other end of the ideological spectrum, progressive denominations, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association, not only confirm various forms of gender identification, but go as far as opposing or advocating for particular pieces of legislation in the name of expanding transgender rights.

Meanwhile, major churches such as the Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) have yet to come up with an official stance on transgender members, for the time sidestepping the thorny issue. Their silence can only last for so long.

Now, the loudest voices within global Christianity have chimed in. Last month, the Vatican released its first major statement focused on the issue of gender identity. It’s quite, shall we say, conservative: it’s entitled, Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education. This title reaches all the way back to the Bible’s very first mention of sex differences – in the very first chapter of Genesis – to take a hardline approach to sex and gender.

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The new guidelines are meant to inform Catholic school teachers and professors, as well as “parents, students, school leaders and personnel” and so forth, on how to approach gender by elaborating upon the stance conveniently summarised in the title itself. Gender, in the Vatican’s eyes, is determined by biological sex, and sex is both binary – “male and female” – and immutable – “created.” Any alternative ideas work against God’s creation and help “to destabilise the family as an institution”.

The Catholic document goes further: it argues that ideas of gender as non-binary, fluid, distinct from biological birth sex, or influenced by personal choice or social construction are all part of a “gender theory” that emerged in the mid-20^thcentury. While Gender Theory may sound like a course one takes at university, the Vatican’s phrasing here is reminiscent of creationists’ labelling of evolution as “only a theory.” But whereas the creationists placed science in opposition to faith, the Vatican has flipped this argument on its head, claiming that the Church has science on its side – an assertion that might be contested by many scientists themselves – and that LGBT advocates are the ones being driven by ideology.

In other words, the Holy See is not merely telling transgender Catholics that their identities contribute to the breakdown of social norms; it’s telling them that their identities don’t actually exist.

Reactions to this statement are about what you’d expect. Representatives of the generally conservative Catholic hierarchy, including those in both the US and UK, have hailed the documents as providing necessary guidance. LGBT communities and supporters, meanwhile, have condemned the official Catholic stance. New Ways Ministries, an organisation of Catholic LGBT advocates, argues that the statement “perpetuates and encourages hatred, bigotry, and violence” against members of their community.

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Meanwhile, given all the chaos within the Anglican communion, which has nearly torn itself apart over issues of sexuality, you’d be forgiven for not having noticed that the Church of England released its own pastoral guidance concerning trans members late last year. Guidelines for Anglican clergy included avoiding stereotypes about gender nonconforming people and respecting parishioners’ preferred names and pronouns – seems reasonable so far – as part of an overall stance that seeks to establish the Anglican Church as one that “welcomes and encourages the unconditional affirmation of trans people”.

The Anglican document is in many ways the antithesis of the Catholic statement; it’s no accident that whereas the Catholic Church harkened back to the first mention of gender categories in the Bible, the Anglican bishops quote the last mention, from Saint Paul’s letter to the church of the Galatians. In case you do not remember it from Sunday School, this is the passage where Paul declares:

“As many of you as were baptised into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28).

The Anglican bishops not only home in on the dismissal of gender categories (among other social or identity distinctions) in this declaration, but also key in on the concept of baptism, the central ceremony of declaring membership in the Church.

This document has evoked a new controversy, because it proposes to establish an Anglican ceremony to celebrate gender transitions. The House of Bishops, having previously considered creating a new ritual to mark gender transitions, ultimately decides in this document that the Church could utilise its preexisting rituals such as Confirmation, Baptism, or Affirmation of Baptismal Faith (a sort of renewal ceremony for the already-baptised) to celebrate these transitions.

While these guidelines aren’t actually creating a “transgender baptism”, as has been reported in the press, the association between baptism and gender (re)identification has concerned some Anglican clergy.

A group within the Church known as the Church of England Evangelical Council  – one of the many to form in opposition to the Church of England’s liberalisation concerning LGBT clergy – issued a long response questioning the process, theological basis and practical wisdom of the bishops’ decision. The CEEC accuses the Anglican hierarchy of taking an issue upon which many within the church disagree and simply deciding on a position – a theologically dubious one – by fiat.

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Even though the critics of both sets of guidelines are coming from opposite sides of the theological and ideological spectrums, they are both right. The leaders of the two churches have gone too far to one extreme or the other, and their resulting guidelines are painfully naïve at best and disingenuous at worst.

The Catholic document claims to want to create a dialogue while offering a stance that leaves no room for discussion with those who disagree: ‘you’re wrong, delusional and dangerous, but if you’d like to talk, I’m listening’ is not an effective opening salvo for a productive conversation.

The Vatican’s statement ostensibly calls for identifying common ground between the Church and LGBT advocates, such as combating “bullying, violence, insults or unjust discrimination” (leaving the door open, not so subtly, for “just” discrimination). But such calls for unity are sandwiched between much more extensive rhetoric declaring that those who disagree with the Vatican are “confused” and “provocative” ideologues who seek to “annihilate the concept of ‘nature.’”

Sounds dangerous, no? New Ways Ministries, the Catholic LGBT group, warns that the document is a “harmful tool that will be used to oppress and harm not only transgender people, but lesbian, gay, [and] bisexual people, too.”

The Anglican bishops, meanwhile, attempt to pull off a theological sleight of hand that sidesteps the controversy that would come with the creation of a new sacred rite for transgender people by instead redefining an existing holy rite for a purpose it was never intended to serve. The bishops cite Paul’s words while missing their meaning. Paul was not intending to denigrate ethnic, social or gender identities – he was, you may recall, a very proud Jew who felt called to recruit Gentiles to this new religion.

But the purpose of this passage, and the letter from which it’s excerpted, is not to highlight these difference either, but to subsume them within the shared identity of ‘Christian’ that every member takes on upon baptism. The proposal to use baptism ‘creatively’, even if well-meaning, obscures the sacrament’s primary purpose.

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Maybe I should give the church leaders a break: even the LGBT community itself has often experienced difficulties and divisions in how to incorporate the ‘T’ – and both transphobia and trans-separatism have been issues within Queer circles. For organisations run mainly by straight, cis-gender men, there may simply be a steep learning curve as they figure out what to do in a newly-relevant set of social circumstances.

But beyond flaws in the specifics of each church’s proposal, both sets of bishops have made the more fundamental mistake of resorting to rules and regulations while at best only paying lip service to actual dialogue.

In this, the Holy See and the House of Bishops could both look to a smaller organisation, the Church of Scotland, which quietly issued its own document last year. Diverse Gender Identities and Pastoral Care is explicit in that it offers no theological interpretations or overarching regulations. Instead, the booklet simply allows transgender persons and their loved ones to tell stories of their individual experiences, inside and outside of the Church.

Rather than carving out rigid positions rooted in dogma or reshaping existing beliefs in ad hoc fashion, the Scottish Presbyterians have come upon a simpler but seemingly more effective way for Churches to work out what it means to be transgender and Christian: ask.

For Catholics who reject such ideas, Pope Francis was a breath of fresh air. Compared to his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he seemed modern, relatable and as close to progressive as a man emerging from the Catholic hierarchy could be. Francis’ compassionate attitude and “who am I to judge?” comments frightened conservative priests and lay members who saw their deeply-held beliefs being compromised.

On the other hand, they gave hope to progressive Catholics, who hoped the new pontiff would allow women to serve greater roles within the hierarchy; soften the Church’s hostile stance towards divorced parishioners; stop demonizing LGBT members; and take serious steps to end the horrific sexual abuse crises engulfing the Church.

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Francis’ first major meetings of Catholic bishops – the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family – seemed to be move the Church in that direction. It was suggested that divorced Catholics be allowed to engage in the Eucharist; that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community”; and that children within the Church must be protected from abuse.

Still, the last few years have been a disappointment for those hoping for a Francis-led Left-ward shift in the Church. Women are still barred from the priesthood, and the female editors of the Vatican’s women’s magazine recently resigned over complaints that they were being subordinated to men. Divorcees are regularly denied communion. Contraception remains banned by official Catholic doctrine.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has not endorsed blaming the gay clergy for the decades-long sexual abuse scandal that has left tens of thousands of victims across the world: at February’s much-heralded church conference on sexual abuse, the Pope kept discussions of homosexuality off the agenda. But he couldn’t prevent conversations from drifting in that direction, according to reports coming out of the summit. High-ranking Cardinals and bishops continue to declare that a vast “gay lobby” is corrupting the Church from within. Benedict’s latest letter is evidence that this thinking continues to endure in the highest of Church circles.

And this notion – that the larger problem within the Church is sexual liberation in general and homosexuality in particular – has been reinforced within the Church hierarchy for decades; it existed long before the current pontiff or his immediate predecessor had taken their first communion.

As Pope Francis tries to steer the Catholic Church in new directions regarding a host of issues, he is grappling with the legacies of the turbulent 1960s and the conservative 1980s, wrestling with the stances of the last two popes, and facing an accumulation of theology and tradition that spans millennia.

*

The modern Catholic Church cannot be understood without reflecting on the Second Vatican Council, commonly known as Vatican II. In the midst of the 1960s – a decade of social upheavals: decolonization, the Cold War, civil rights – hundreds of bishops met regularly with a view to radically reforming Catholicism for the modern world. Spanning four years and two popes, Vatican II arguably reshaped Catholicism more than any event in modern history.

The changes brought about included conducting mass in local languages instead of only Latin, recognizing religious freedom as a basic human right, encouraging dialogue with other faiths, condemning anti-Semitism, endorsing democracy, giving national Catholic hierarchies more autonomy, and creating the Synod of Bishops – a body of church leaders from around the world that would gather periodically to advise the Pope on important Church issues (as was the case for Francis’ 2014-2015 meetings).

For many leading Catholics, including the substantial bloc of progressive Latin American bishops who embraced liberation theology (a Marxist-inspired brand of Catholicism focused on justice for the poor and oppressed), Vatican II was a major step forward for the Church.

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Yet the council also set the stage for a conservative backlash, in two ways. Firstly, the radical transformations of the Church went too far in the eyes of many Catholics, who subsequently sought to reign in the progressive movement. Benedict’s new letter is representative of this viewpoint where it cites Vatican II as introducing a moral relativism that watered down Church doctrine and lowered standards for clergy.

Secondly, Vatican II mostly ignored what Loyola professor Stephen R. Schloesser calls “biopolitics” – issues of sex, reproduction and the regulation of the human body. In some ways, this oversight was understandable. Many of the defining moments of modern biopolitics – the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent gay rights movement; Roe v. Wade; legalization of no-fault divorces and the widespread use of “the pill” in western societies – did not occur until after Vatican II concluded. But by offering little guidance on these issues, Vatican II created an opening for more conservative bishops to reassert their influence and put the brakes on what they saw an immoral Leftward shift in the Church.

Their opportunity came in the 1980s – just as the eras of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (in many ways a political liberal by modern American standards) and Carter gave way to the Reagan Revolution, and dissatisfaction with Labour set the stage for Thatcherism.

In 1978, Pope Paul VI, who had taken office during Vatican II, died. The new Pope, John Paul II, was sympathetic to the conservative faction of the Church.  In 1980, John Paul convened his first major bishops’ meeting, the Synod of the Family. Unlike Pope Francis’ meetings of the same name, the 1980 Synod pushed a conservative agenda.

Those clergy and faithful hoping that the Church would reaffirm its moral principles even in the face of changing societal norms were delighted with John Paul II and the archbishop he placed in charge of the Synod, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). Together, they reaffirmed conservative positions on issues of divorce and remarriage, abortion, artificial contraception and celibacy. Catholics hoping the Church would adjust to changing times were disappointed.

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Ratzinger’s handling of the Synod led John Paul to appoint the Cardinal as the primary official in charge of enforcing Catholic doctrine. In this capacity, Ratzinger issued a hugely influential 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” – a document intended to address the “problem” of homosexuality within the Church, the one major sexual issue left unaddressed by the 1980 Synod. The official Catholic stance toward gay Catholics is often described as “love the sinner, hate the sin”, but Ratzinger’s letter barely paid lip service to the first half of that formula. In his view:

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

The document went on to identify homosexuality as “a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent”.

While Ratzinger’s words and tone may sound harsh and even offensive, the substance of his remarks largely built upon and reasserted millennia of Judeo-Christian doctrines. He quotes both the Old Testament prohibition of same sex sexual relations and Paul’s New Testament Letter to the Romans, in which the Apostle labelled such activities “unnatural.”

And although Ratzinger doesn’t mention him by name, the future pope’s 1986 stance owes much to the works of Thomas Aquinas, the famed 13^th Century theologian whose Summa Theologica systematised Catholic doctrine in ways that continue to shape the Church’s theology today. It was Aquinas who used St. Paul’s “unnatural” label to categorize all forms of sexuality outside the bounds of both marriage or procreative purposes: Summa placed same sex sexual activity alongside incest and even bestiality – all “unnatural” acts; fornication, adultery, and even rape were meanwhile classified as mortal sins that were still “natural” and thus less grave.

Condemning homosexuality as immoral for existing outside of the “sacrament of marriage” and the “transmission of life”, Ratzinger was following a line of argument directly from Aquinas.

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These documents by John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger intentionally torpedoed any ideas that the Church would moderate its social positions to match the changing realities of the larger world. These conservative pontiffs and their supporters believed the Church was under attack by the forces of liberalism and moral relativism; they saw a need to strongly state that some doctrines were immutable.

For many women, remarried parishioners, proponents of contraception and particularly LGBTQ believers, the message was that they did not fully belong in the Church.

The future Pope Benedict’s 1986 letter also popularised a new idea that was not found in previous Church doctrines. Where it condemned the “pro-homosexual movement and…its deceitful propaganda”, both outside and inside the Church, it sowed the seeds of the idea that a gay conspiracy had materialized as a corrupting force within the Catholic hierarchy.

This conspiracy theory has only grown since the sexual abuse scandal broke. Conservative Catholic leaders and groups like the American-based Catholic League use the fact that the victims of abuse have been mostly boys as “proof” that the abuse is homosexual rather than paedophilic in nature. The abuse is, supposedly, just another form of the “self-indulgence” towards which gay priests are inclined. Pope Francis’ opponents – such as Carlo Maria Viganò, a disgruntled former Vatican ambassador to the United States – explicitly make this argument and accuse Francis of ignoring or even placating the “gay mafia” to the detriment of the Church.

Pope Francis has continued to fight for reform, removing high-ranking officials implicated with violating minors or covering up abuse; pushing the church into the #MeToo era by recognizing widespread sexual exploitation of nuns by priests; and dismissing the significance of a “gay lobby” pulling the strings within the Vatican. But he is facing an uphill battle, and the hill is a steep one.

His immediate predecessors had well over 30 years to enforce their socially conservative vision of Catholicism, and they were able to draw upon hundreds of years of Church doctrine to do so.

*

Even if Francis achieves his agenda, many progressive Catholics may still find themselves disappointed. Despite the various criticisms he has received from the Catholic Right, Pope Francis has demonstrated little interest in actually changing fundamental Church stances toward issues such as homosexuality, celibacy or women in the priesthood. His mission, which may still succeed, is more about changing the tone and focus of the church than altering its theology.

Instead of changing doctrines about sin, Pope Francis has attempted to emphasise those concerning humility and Amoris laetiti, “the joy of love” – as the address he gave after the Synods on the Family was called. Instead of discussing sex in terms of restrictions and prohibitions, Francis has attempted to emphasise the role of sex as “a gift from God”. And rather than searching for a “homosexual clique” at the centre of the Church’s problems, the Pope is seeking to directly hold abusive priests and their enablers to account and to change the culture that encouraged the Church to avoid scandal at the cost of not protecting its most vulnerable members.

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In order to succeed, Pope Francis must keep walking this tightrope. He must convince conservative opponents that he is holding fast to scripture above the theology of his “liberation” mentors in Argentina; that he is committed to the traditions established by Church founders like Aquinas (an argument that the Pope has made, only to be greeted with skepticism); and that his papacy has more substantive continuity with his predecessors than widely believed.

While doing this, Francis will also have to change the tone of the Church’s message – and the attitude of its clergy – enough to make it inclusive to members who wish to remain part of the Catholic community without conforming to all the Church’s teachings on issues of sex and the body.

Francis’ Church would be one in which LGBTQ Catholics, divorcees, the remarried and those using birth control could participate in the public life of the Church, while they (and their priests) perhaps squint at the particulars of certain doctrines on which they disagree. It would be a Church where women feel respected and valued, even if their roles do not match their male counterparts. And it would be a Church where bishops and priests feel a solemn duty to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of their flock from abuse – and take swift action against colleagues who violate their trust, without searching for ways to deflect blame.

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Despite its setbacks, Pope Francis’ approach so far – overwhelmingly emphasising the love and service components of the Catholic message, which conservatives and progressives should be able to agree upon – is perhaps the only feasible option for bridging the gaps between the factions that have developed within the Church since the 1960s. Though these gaps seem larger than ever today.

Jesus himself, to read Gospel accounts, held his followers to high standards (he equated lustfully looking at a woman with adultery, for example), while also conducting a ministry that sought out the marginalised and showed love and kindness toward those who failed to live up to the moral standards he espoused.

Within a Church still wrestling with the radicalism of the 1960s, Pope Francis’ attempt to enact a love-based “back to basics” approach to Christianity is perhaps the most radical strategy of all.

But that visit took place before the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church were uncovered and before many thousands of survivors came forward to speak out. Irish friends have told me that some parishes are struggling to fill a bus to go to the papal Masses in Knock and Dublin. That would have been unheard of in 1979.

On Monday Francis issued a letter addressed to “to the People of God” around the globe. In it he called abuse a “culture of death”. He is right on that one: for many victims, the abuse they suffered indeed leads to death – physical (many survivors take their own lives through self-harming with drugs or alcohol) or spiritual, or both.

And this entire scandal – the Pope refers to cases as “atrocities” – is of the Catholic Church’s own making. The Church has protected perpetrators, moved them from place to place and sustained them even when they have fled their countries. It is hard to understate the complicity of the Church in these vile crimes.

We now see some of the most powerful men in the Church being exposed for what they are. And these exposures will continue. It isn’t just Pennsylvania, where a grand jury report released last week concluded that more than 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children. Probably many more than 1,000.

When, as an abuse survivor, I met Pope Francis in July 2014 I thought he was going to tackle the crisis. He seemed genuinely concerned. He listened to me intently and I thought he was sincere. When he appointed me to his Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors a few months later, I was sure things were going to change.

I was wrong on both counts.

I quickly realised that the commission was little more than a talking shop controlled by the Vatican. It met no more than twice a year and was effectively starved of any real funding. (I expect the many cardinals flying to Ireland for the papal visit this weekend won’t be travelling Economy.)

The day before I was given what the commission called a “leave of absence” in February 2016 for being, as one of two commission members said, “too outspoken”. I asked Cardinal Sean O’Malley, its president and the Archbishop of Boston, what the Commission had achieved.

He shrugged his shoulders and pointed out that a couple of bishops had been fired. I responded by saying that my understanding of the situation was that a couple of bishops had been ‘moved’. Not quite the same thing.

The commission, an advisory board, is bound to fail because it doesn’t have the backing of the Vatican bureaucracy – the powerful ‘curia’. Too many of their brother priests would be in trouble if it were to do a proper job – rooting out abusers and seeing they are brought to justice. The pressure on the Pope to stand back must be strong – we know he is not popular with many conservative Catholics and many of his own cardinals – and it was worrying that he did not visit the Commission until after the other abuse survivor on it and I had left.

From the day of my departure from the Commission until now, more survivors of clergy sexual abuse have come forward. The scandal of the systematic abuse perpetrated by church officials, and the ensuing cover-ups, has been forced out into the open. Some of the highest-ranking officials of the church have been accused – this is not a few rotten apples: this is a barrelful.

We have seen Chile’s Bishop Juan Barros step down after accusations of covering up abuse. Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington, has resigned from the College of Cardinals amid allegations of decades of abuse. Cardinal Donald Wuerl has been accused by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General of lying regarding his vigilance on abuse while he was Bishop of Pittsburgh. Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s treasurer, awaits trial in Australia for historic sexual offences – which he denies. Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and other senior clerics await trial in France for failing to report abuse. And as the 2015 film Spotlight showed, Cardinal Bernard Law, who died late last year, fled the US for the Vatican when his extensive cover up of abuse in the archdiocese of Boston became apparent.

When I was setting up the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) more than 20 years ago, I went to meet the then-Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume. He gave me a hearing. I am Catholic and was abused by two priests at my school. Like Pope Francis years later, he seemed genuinely concerned about the abuse I had suffered and my desire to bring change. And then he did nothing. And the recent findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), for which I sit on the Victims and Survivors’ Consultative Panel, exposed Basil Hume as one of those monks at Ampleforth School who turned a blind eye to the abuse that was rife in that institution. From this I conclude that we cannot trust church officials.

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And can we trust the institutional Church, the clerics, to change? I don’t think so. Yes, we can demand that the Church hand all its files and everything it knows about abusive clergy over to the authorities, but I doubt it will. Files will disappear, or, as the IICSA discovered, many will end up on bonfires or in the nearest shredder.

A morally corrupt institution cannot be left to cleanse itself, but my hope is that the real Catholic Church, the Catholic community worldwide, will rise up against the institution – the Vatican and the bishops. The people are the overwhelming majority, not the clerics. According to the investigative journalist Jason Berry, [1. See Berry’s book Render Unto Rome, Broadway Books, 2012] a certain amount of funds raised in local churches end up with the bishops and ultimately, the Vatican. One way for our community to protest this corruption would be to hold back these funds, demanding church collections only contribute towards sustaining the good priests, not the global institution.

I remain a man of faith, but I don’t think Christ came to build a structure such as we see today. All over the world I have met wonderful and decent priests and monks and nuns who are just as disgusted as I am by all these revelations. But they have been led by wolves in sheep’s clothing, and it’s time the wolves were driven out.

There is lot that Pope Francis could do. He could open the Vatican Secret Archives to an independent body, not a tightly controlled pontifical commission. The Church has always been very good at keeping records. Let it now be truly open and transparent so that any evidence or paper trails linked to abuse and abusers can be brought out into the open. Francis could and should order all bishops to do the same with their diocesan archives. This would lead to a purge of the many priests around the globe who are still in ministry and still abusing youngsters.

Francis refers to the cases in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report as mostly “historic” – but it’s not historic to the many survivors who continue to suffer. And there are still abusive clergy in the Church, particularly in the southern hemisphere, whom we tend to hear little about.

Recent scandals, as we’ve seen in Ireland, Australia, Chile and Pennsylvania, are set to keep emerging. The Pope, already 81, still has the opportunity to do something to address the issue. I hope and pray he does. But time is running out for him to do so.