Things, as Alice remarked, simply get curiosser and curiouser.

It has now been reported that Francis has described critics of the Amazon Synod as ‘racists’. Nothing could more plainly illustrate the Looking Glass world he presently inhabits.

The racists, surely, are those who impose the myth of the ‘noble savage’ – and the theology of German liberals – on the unsuspecting peoples of the Amazon. This is the real and destructive colonialism. The manipulation of the synod has been flagrant and apparent. Indigenous peoples would never speak of themselves as the final document of the synod speaks of them.

They are being rendered pawns in the game of Western relativists, who seek to foist on them, in the name of diversity, a denuded and ersatz Catholicism. That this is allowed to pass as a ‘new evangelism’ further compounds the offence.