A pundit who's lost his way and an Archbishop who never found his

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Once upon a time there was a Daily Telegraph commentator called Damian Thompson, who, in spite of frequent political disagreements and the odd freak of judgment, was a welcome meeting point for devout Catholic readers (and, of course, correspondingly haunted by Dawkinsite trolls). He was particularly good on the deficiencies of the Catholic apparatus in this country, a common and bitter speaking point of English Catholics (there is hardly one Bishop who can be said to defend the faith, and as for the bureaucracies that shelter under their croziers, the less said, the better). He could even be effective. When he publicized the plight of Cardinal Vaughan School, a really good Catholic school in West London under scandalous assault by diocesan apparatchiks, the story was noticed by a Telegraph reader, one Michael Gove, by profession Secretary of State for Education. Mr.Gove phoned Archbishop Nichols to let him know that he was thinking of having the school inspected, and the diocesan pressure on the school suddenly and miraculously vanished.

I think someone should set up an alarm for Mr.Thompson. I think he must be dead and replaced by his evil twin.

He hasn't posted on Church affairs in months. The tone of his writing has taken a sharp downward direction, and he seems unable to post on anything but splenetic and unfortunately unfunny assaults on political targets. And now has come a really defining moment, which the real Damian Thompson would have seized on.

Yesterday the Vatican communicated a list of 22 new Cardinals, to be created in the coming Concistory. Archbishop Nichols has been at the head of the English church for two and a half years; he still is not on the list. That is almost beyond belief. Since the days of Nicholas Wiseman, first Archbishop of Westminster in the days of Queen Victoria, there has never been a head of the English Catholic Church who was not fairly swiftly promoted to Cardinal. It almost goes with the office. Compare and contrast with the current Archbishop of Prague, just made Cardinal in spite of being the head of a shrunken and despised church, numerically much smaller than England's, in the only European country where atheists are the majority. This shows that the Pope thinks as much of his performance in office as I do - and as the real Damian Thompson could have been counted on to do.

So, what did Damian Thompson post on today?

A nasty anecdote about JM Escriva' Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei.

Something is very wrong here.

Comments

[filialucis]

Wow.

I stopped reading Thompson's blog some time ago because I got tired of the splenetic political stuff and there's only so much time I can spare for reading blogs in the first place, so I hadn't picked up on this. But you're right; the Damian Thompson that once was would have been the first to pounce on the list of cardinals-to-be and the absence of Abp. Nichols' name on it.

Why has Thompson got his knife into Opus Dei all of a sudden? The anecdote about the bugs in the waiting room of the Opus Dei HQ isn't lacking in creepiness, but the overall tone of his piece seems unnecessarily polemical and the rest of the anecdotes he relates could mean pretty much anything depending on who the people are whose opinions and analyses he's citing. (The kids' confessions? I know priests who'd say you had excessive scruples if you went to confession at all for anything less than murdering your grandmother, so I'm inclined to reserve judgement about that story until I know who was reporting on it.) But the "thickly accented Spaniard" takes the biscuit. How in the world does his accent or his nationality have a bearing on his qualifications whether or not he was in fact the right man for the job? What's the line of reasoning here? OD was founded by a Spaniard, and they brought in a Spaniard as a spokesman for Cdl. Newman's beatification, therefore they have a nefarious ulterior motive? I smell an albino monk...

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I have a bad feeling that we may be witnessing another Andrew Sullivan type collapse. Thompson is in the demanding situation of being a Catholic, a homosexual, a Tory, and a rationalist, a delicate balance that can suddenly be upset.

[filialucis]

Oh dear. I don't think I've heard of Andrew Sullivan, but parts of that little list reminds me of the circumstances that led to the demise (or the re-opening, if you will) of the Closed Cafeteria.

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Sullivan was a well known Catholic-homosexual-conservative blogger in America, who ended up swerving further and further to the left till he is now an enemy of the Church (one of those who claim to be better Catholics than the Pope) and a rabid enemy of anything conservative, with an especial sore spot for Sarah Palin. I am also thinking of Charles Johnson of Little Green Football, who was for a time a strong opponent of Islamism and Jihad, but suddenly snapped back to his hippy-left origins, leaving all of us who had been his fans disappointed. The interesting thing about bloggers is how often you see this happen - people taking a sudden swerve while keeping their tone and the certainty that they are in the right. Makes me wonder how often it happens in ordinary life, where it leaves fewer written traces.