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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damien Thompson.

It's a year since, to general astonishment, the crowds in St. Peter Square heard the words

Habamus Papam followed by the name of an American cardinal, Robert Francis Prevost, who'd been

a relatively obscure Augustinian bishop in Peru until just two years earlier.

Pope Francis had catapulted him into the Vatican to become the powerful prefect of the Dachshad for bishops.

People were charmed by the Chicago-born Pope Leo the 14th, but weren't sure what to make of him, and to an extent

they still aren't.

Is Leo a conservative or a liberal, or are those categories redundant?

He's declared that Pope Francis is in heaven.

He speaks Francis's language of synodality.

And he hasn't cancelled the partial ban on the Latin Mass.

But he is more friendly to tradition, allowing the Tridentine Mass back into St. Peter's.

And so far as we can tell, he's firmly orthodox on teachings on sexuality,

opposed to transgender ideology, the surgical same-sex blessings, and indeed sex before marriage.

But one thing we knew about Cardinal Prevost before his election is that he didn't like Trump's

policies on immigration, and recently he

and the president have clashed, when it mildly, over the war in Iran. And indeed, Trump has

attacked Leo for, as he very dubiously claims, wanting Iran to have nuclear weapons.

...