What in the Worldly is Happening at the Vatican
by John Zmirak, The Stream:
We Asked a Leading Rome-Based Journalist & Bible Scholar, Dr. Jules Gomes.
The most journalistically driven, polished, professional reporting on the Catholic church and its worldview comes from Church Militant. That news source, founded and run by laymen, turns a probing eye at church people and doings. It frequently makes enemies. Which means it’s doing its job.
But is Pope Francis? The Stream’s John Zmirak interviewed Church Militant’s Vatican correspondent, Dr. Jules Gomes on that and related topics.
With the Chaplain to the Queen
John Zmirak: Can you please tell Stream readers about yourself — your religious journey, your academic accomplishments, your journalistic work?
Jules Gomes: After two decades as an Anglican priest, I swam the Tiber with my bishop — a former Chaplain to the Queen — at the beginning of 2020. My weekly biblical exegesis in preparation for my sermons, my study of the Church Fathers, and a historical re-reading of the Protestant Reformation left me with no option.
I was also shocked by the Babylonian captivity of British evangelicalism to the zeitgeist. Protestantism there was no longer the Church Militant, but the Church Compliant. I experienced a profound hermeneutical fracture.
As a child, I was in love with literature. In the days when professors did not brainwash students with a lesbian post-colonial reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I graduated from Bombay University in English literature. We began with Chaucer and Shakespeare and ended with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.
My love for words led to a love for the Word and I began my scriptural odyssey doing a four-year postgrad degree, a two-year Masters’ degree, and my doctorate from the University of Cambridge in the Hebrew Bible.
God has a sense of humor. My first career was in journalism. As a reporter in Bombay, I exposed the dirty deeds of seven of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies — including Pfizer. Years later, I returned to my newspaper for a short stint as sub-editor to pick up skills in copy editing, page-making, and bullying cub reporters!
Now I’ve come full circle returning to my first love — journalism.
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