Writer Guy Stagg threw in his job to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome - choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up only by his rucksack. 

On this episode of Holy Smoke, from the archives, Guy explains why his journey was a pilgrimage, not just travels. And Damian Thompson talks to Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, about why he’s irresistibly drawn to church buildings while remaining an unbeliever - albeit an agnostic rather than an atheist.

In this week's Holy Smoke episode Damian Thompson welcomes back Eduard Habsburg, Hungary's Ambassador to the Holy See and also, to give him his family title, Archduke Eduard of Austria. Last year he published The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Turbulent Times, which offered advice on how to live a good life based on the panoramic history of his dynasty. 

One reason it was such a success is that Eduard has a cult following on X, formerly Twitter, made up of people who initially followed him because he's a Habsburg but stayed to absorb his spiritual wisdom and good cheer. In this episode, with Damian speaking as someone who frequently gets drawn into (or starts) catfights on that platform (his words!), he asks if Eduard has any advice for struggling social media sociopaths. And he does.

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

In this festive episode of Holy Smoke, we're taken back to the Christmasses of the 1950s and 60s by Raymond Arroyo, Fox News and EWTN presenter, whose enemies in the Vatican have been trying to silence him for years. 

They've failed, thankfully – and now silencing him is even harder. Raymond, who trained in musical theatre, has produced an album entitled Christmas Merry and Bright in which he sings well-loved Christmas songs and carols in spectacular big-band arrangements inspired by one of his musical heroes, Frank Sinatra. And in one track, 'Feliz Navidad', he's joined by its composer – his friend the legendary José Feliciano. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. One thing's for sure: you'll never hear 'White Christmas' the same way after you've heard Raymond tell the story of how it came to be written...

With Dr Tim Stanley, journalist and historian.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

We're all sick of celebrities making a meal of their mental health problems – but that doesn't mean that we aren't facing a potential crisis. The unique strains of living in the technology-driven 21st century are taking their toll on people who, in an earlier era, would have been psychologically robust. Many of us are affected by anxiety, depression, addiction and eating disorders; all sorts of compulsive behaviour are flourishing as never before.

And the mainstream churches have got nothing useful to say about it. Many bishops seem content to blame it on Brexit.

Damian Thompson talks to Professor Stephen Bullivant, Britain's foremost expert on patterns of religious belief. Both talk frankly – 'bravely', as they say of celebrities – about their struggles with mental illness.

On today's Holy Smoke Damian Thompson meets a one-of-a-kind bishop: one whose most important dialogue is with armed warlords and their teenage mercenaries. South Sudan's Bishop Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala runs a hospital that is desperately short of doctors and medicine amid a humanitarian crisis in which over 200,000 people have died. On the podcast, he talks about his work, and the apparent corruption of various NGOs who have set up shop in this terribly troubled part of Africa.

Last week, Vatican police raided the Church's own money-laundering watchdog. Meanwhile, in a simultaneous raid on the Vatican Secretariat of State, prosecutors seized documents, computers, telephones and passports.

It seems to be a dirty business. According to the Italian press, police want to know more about a multi-million-pound real estate transaction in Mayfair. Significantly, all the seized documents reportedly relate to the years when Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a close papal ally, was running the Secretariat of State’s offices. 

In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian joined by Vatican-watcher Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith. We discuss what he calls Rome's culture of 'obsessive secrecy', the unwillingness of the mainstream media to investigate Vatican scandals, and ask what John Henry Newman, who will be canonised this weekend, would have made of the cringe-making Amazon Synod...

In this week's episode of Holy Smoke Damian is joined by Jamie Bartlett, one of the world’s leading experts on the dark web, radical politics and technology, whose gripping podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen is currently being broadcast by the BBC. It tells the story of a shady Bulgarian tech entrepreneur, Dr Ruja Ignatova, who vanished just as her dodgy cryptocurrency OneCoin was raking in billions of euros from investors – or true believers – all over the world.

Despite her disappearance, it still has footholds in African villages, the Chinese business community, Scottish housing estates and Britain’s Muslims – it claims to be Sharia-compliant. Not only does Dr Ruja's operation resemble a religious cult, it also gives us a glimpse of how technology and belief are combining in ever stranger patterns, often inspired by the utopians of Silicon Valley.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

Damian talks to Jewish pianist Ariel Lanyi about the cruel cat-and-mouse game that the Soviet Union played with Jewish classical musicians at a time when it was sneakily trying to extinguish both their religion and their ethnic identity.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

The new episode of Holy Smoke is about the persecution of Christians. That's a familiar concept, even if we don't read much about it in the media. Damian is joined on the podcast by a fearless campaigner on behalf of the suffering Church, Fr Benedict Kiely, founder of the charity Nasrean.Org. Tune in to what he has to say about the Vatican's cynical deal with China – and Britain's wretched Department for International Development.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast discusses two looming disasters for Pope Francis. 
The first is the ‘Amazon Synod’ in October, at which the world’s bishops will discuss a bizarre plan to ordain Amazon ‘village elders’ as priests. The framework for the synod has already been published; Damian's guest Dr Ed Condon uses the word ‘Orwellian’ to describe the language it employs. 
The second threat to Francis is more personal. When he became pope he lost no time making his friend Gustavo Zanchetta a bishop in Argentina. Bad move. Within a short time Zanchetta was facing allegations of sexual and financial impropriety. The Pope was informed of these allegations (and if you google them you’ll discover that they were pretty lurid). 
His response? He plucked Zanchetta out of his diocese and created a plum job for him in Rome... managing the Vatican’s finances. Another bad move, now that Zanchetta, back in Argentina, is facing charges of molesting seminarians and other allegations of misusing money. 
A mood of despair has set in at the Vatican. You’ll understand why if you listen to the podcast. 

Presented by Damian Thompson.

Damian speaks to journalist Catherine Lafferty, who was in court for Carl Beech's trial, about the sensitivities surrounding sex abuse allegations. Have the police jumped to conclusions in Cardinal Pell's case too?

Presented by Damian Thompson.

It's less than four years since Jeremy Corbyn's hard-left sect seized control of the Labour Party, and yet already its anti-Semitic views – so alien to Labour tradition – seem too deeply rooted to eradicate.

Today's 'Holy Smoke' podcast puts this sinister development in the broader context of the 'Red-Green' alliance – the love affair between the progressive Left and the Jew-haters of jihadist Islam.

On the face of it, this is an unlikely, even surreal, relationship. But as Damian's guest, the historian Richard Landes, argues, the two have something in common: millennialism, the belief that some sort of Heaven on Earth, is not only imminent but historically inevitable.

In theory, progressives believe that this transition to a new era will be peaceful; Jihadists, by definition, don't. But, as Landes explains, it's not as simple as that...

You might imagine that a political project to place modern nation states under the supreme authority of the Catholic Church would stand zero chance of success anywhere in the world, including in traditionally Catholic countries. And you'd be right. Even so, a movement known as Integralism – whose 20th-century incarnations were closely related to fascism – has gripped the imaginations of ultra-conservative Catholics in America, and especially on campuses. The Eastern Orthodox political philosopher Kevin Vallier has written a book, All the Kingdoms of the World, about this bizarre development. It's thoughtful and fair-minded – but Integralists have not taken kindly to his analysis and Vallier has found himself drawn into some unnerving exchanges on social media. I'm all the more grateful to him, therefore, for agreeing to be my guest on this episode of Holy Smoke. 

With Harry Mount, editor of the Oldie and author of the Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With the Daily Telegraph's Tim Stanley and Father Benedict Kiely, from the charity Nasarean.org, which campaigns in support of persecuted Christians.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

Every year around the world, many people around the world listen to Bach's three-hour musical depiction of Jesus' trial and execution. Why? 

Host Damian Thompson is joined by Thelma Lovell, musical scholar and writer, to discuss why St Matthew Passion exerts such a strong grip on our imagination.

For 30 years Damian Thompson has been bored senseless by the public pronouncements of bishops – Anglicans and Catholics. Why do they feel the need to speak in such dreary jargon? Why do interesting clergy never make it to bishop? He's joined by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie.

The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. But is it really the 'bombshell' exposé that it is billed as being? And what can we glean from the sex abuse summit this week?

Damian Thompson talks to Ed Condon, canon lawyer and contributor to the Catholic Herald.

This is a picture of my sister Carmel and I having tea a few days after our mother’s funeral. She looks cheerful, doesn’t she? That’s because she was: although we both missed our mother intensely, and always will, we had done most of our grieving before she died, as we watched her tortured by Parkinson’s disease and severe dementia. 

Carmel looks well, too. And she thought she was. Ovarian cancer plays that trick on women. The first symptoms tend to be annoying rather than alarming. A few weeks after this photograph was taken, I was reassuring her that Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a common response to bereavement – which it is. But that’s not what was wrong with her. On November 1, I was sitting next to her in the consulting room at Guy’s Hospital when the specialist confirmed that she had advanced ovarian cancer. 

Carmel is my guest on today’s Holy Smoke podcast. Please listen to it. I guarantee that you’ll be surprised by what she has to say. And you will understand why I’m so proud of my sister.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, moral theologian, and Lara Prendergast, Assistant Editor of the Spectator.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

Just how much do those at the highest echelons of the Vatican know about former Archbishop McCarrick's sexual abuse through the years? Has Pope Francis been turning a blind eye to abuse carried out by his favourites, and will this be the end of his papacy?

Damian Thompson talks to author Henry Sire.

With Hardeep Singh, journalist and press officer for Lord Singh of Wimbledon.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

The Catholic church is reeling from its most significant sex abuse scandal for many years. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington DC, has been suspended from ministry following a wave of detailed allegations that he molested seminarians. 

Damian Thompson is joined by Ed Condon

When I was in Rome last month, I watched the 'synod on synodality' fizzle out while the Marko Rupnik sex scandal took another sinister turn (and various Catholic journalists shamefully tried to suppress the story). But don't worry: this episode of Holy Smoke is devoted to more uplifting matters. I visited the ancient little church of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the edge of the Forum, which incorporates the remains of a pagan temple and a secular Roman basilica or meeting place. The contrast between the darkness of one and the light of the other had powerful theological significance for those Roman Christians who were encouraged to build their first official churches by Constantine. And I was lucky to have it explained to me by one of the world's leading architectural historians, Dr Elizabeth Lev. We spoke, sometimes sotto voce, inside the little church, with tour guides and visitors swirling around us. So, apologies for the inevitable background noise, but I hope you'll agree that it doesn't get in the way of Liz's gripping narrative. 

The young atheist writer Guy Stagg threw in his job a few years ago to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome - choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up only by his rucksack. 

On this week’s Holy Smoke podcast, Guy explains why his journey was a pilgrimage, not just travels. And Damian talks to Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, why he’s irresistibly drawn to church buildings while remaining an unbeliever - albeit an agnostic rather than an atheist.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

Produced by Connor O'Hara and Cindy Yu.

‘Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.'

These are the words allegedly spoken by Pope Francis to a Chilean man. He appears to have pressed the 'delete' button on the Church's teaching that homosexuality is 'intrinsically disordered'. In this Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson talks to Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, in a frank and sensitive discussion on homosexuality and the Church.

This summer, adherents of our national quasi-religion are marking the 70th anniversary of its foundation by St Aneurin Bevan. How did a secular model of delivering health care acquire this aura of holiness? 

Dr Max Pemberton and the Spectator's Deputy Editor, Freddy Gray talk to Damian Thompson.

With Tony Trowbridge.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Ysenda Maxtone Graham, author of the Church Hesitant and regular contributor to The Spectator.

Read her article here: https://specc.ie/2q9OztD.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at St Mary's University.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Alastair Thomas.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Ed Condon.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Lara Prendergast, Harry Mount and Freddy Gray.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Ed Condon and Dan Hitchens. Presented by Damian Thompson.

Pope Francis's much-hyped 'synod on synodality' began in Rome this week and to say that it has got off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. On Monday, five leading conservative cardinals bounced Francis into making a highly ambiguous statement apparently opening the door to gay blessings. Meanwhile, and this subject is being played down by certain media outlets, allegations of sexual abuse surrounds one of the Pope's friends. The world-renowned mosaic artist Fr Marko Rupnik has been expelled from the Jesuits after women claimed he sexually abused them – but he remains a priest and for some reason Pope Francis has yet to allow him to be prosecuted canonically. In this episode of Holy Smoke, I look at the basic facts, the possibility of a cover-up and suggest that the subject of Rupnik and what the Pope knew may overshadow the more fashionable topic of blessings for same-sex couples. 

With Thelma Lovell. Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Quentin Letts.

Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Tony Trowbridge. Presented by Damian Thompson.

With A.N. Wilson, author of The Victorians. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Jeremy Vine, author of What I Learnt. Presented by Cristina Odone and Damian Thompson.

With The Reverend Ravi Holy. Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Dennis Sewell. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Dr Ed Condon. Presented by Damian Thompson.

With Peter Tatchell Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Jon Anderson. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

Earlier this week, the Rome correspondent of the Times found himself mugging up on the history of Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, and this is what he reported: 

While the empire brought stability, it was created through the large-scale massacre of anyone who refused to submit to Mongol rule, leading to the death of millions. Mongol troops triggered famine in Iran by destroying ancient irrigation systems and catapulted diseased corpses into towns they besieged, a technique which reportedly introduced the Black Death into Europe.Why were the media suddenly writing about blood-crazed 13th-century warriors? Because, incredibly, Pope Francis – on a strange visit to Mongolia's minuscule Catholic community – had just been rhapsodising about the enlightened tolerance of Khan's Empire, without mentioning that its conquests came at the price of 40 million lives. Judged as a proportion of the global population at the time, that's the biggest slaughter in human history. 

This came just days after Francis, talking to young Russian Catholics by video link, told them to glory in Russia's imperial past, singling out the figures of Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine II, both of whom were committed to the destruction of the Ukrainian nation and culture. This is the same pope who nurtures delusions of acting as a peacemaker between Moscow and Kyiv. Good luck with that, your Holiness. Ukrainian Catholics feel utterly betrayed by Francis. Putin, on the other hand, was thrilled by the unhinged papal comments.

And there's more. In his flight to Mongolia, Pope Francis was allowed to use Chinese air space. Not coincidentally, he has recently surrendered the appointment of official Chinese Catholic Bishops to the Communist Party. Naturally he thanked Beijing effusively and, after Mass in Ulan Bator, departed from his script to send 'a warm greeting to the noble Chinese people' and urged them to be 'good citizens'. 

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I try to make sense of these unnerving developments. Why does the Pope feel so warmly towards dictators past and present – and why is he relentless in sniping at American Catholics who have never crushed anyone under their imperial heels? 

With Nick Cohen. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Anabel Inge, author of The Making of a Salafi Muslim Woman: Paths to Conversion. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.

With Fraser Nelson. Presented by Damian Thompson and Cristina Odone.