Andy Burnham, a Catholic in name only

Rome. And what about the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829? It is a law, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act, which, in its benevolence, allows British Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold almost any public office, but which prohibits them from advising the King on the appointment of bishops in England. This restriction makes sense: it would be akin to the Pope seeking advice from a Moscow-aligned Orthodox Christian on who to appoint as Archbishop of Milan. It simply cannot be done. The issue now arises with the appointment of Andy Burnham as Prime Minister, the first Catholic in five hundred years to take up residence at Downing Street. According to experts, nothing can be done: dura lex, sed lex, and so it will now be the Lord Chancellor who advises King Charles. That said, the problem would not even arise, given that Burnham’s Catholicism is rather lukewarm – he has, not coincidentally, described it as ‘discreet’. 

Andy Burnham is, in fact, a staunch supporter of abortion; he is firmly in favour of same-sex marriage and has no reservations whatsoever about assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Or rather, he did have some reservations about the bill put forward by his party, but not on moral or ethical grounds: he was not convinced that hospices dedicated to ending the lives of those requesting it had sufficient funding. The Times, in an attempt to frame all this within a Catholic or at least Christian framework, wrote that he focuses on the substance of the matter – people’s lived experiences – rather than on ‘theological abstractions’. Such as, to be clear, those of Benedict XVI, whom he criticised for an exaggerated ‘prescriptive approach’. His spiritual ethos, he said, is inspired by the motto ‘live and let live’ – not exactly the Christian sign of contradiction, in short. And yet he ought to know a thing or two about the subject: as a boy, he never missed a Sunday Mass; his mother (who is Irish) recounted that he was always arguing with his brothers over who should be the leader of the altar boys, and of course ‘Andy always had to be the one at the front, holding the communion plate’. He doesn’t seem to remember this; on the contrary, in an interview some time ago he said that his Catholicism had been lived “without ostentation”. He also used a colourful but undoubtedly effective expression: “We don’t lick (he was referring to himself and his wife) the steps of the altar”. Nowadays he either doesn’t go to Mass at all or goes very rarely (at Christmas and Easter), and the National Catholic Register has, not coincidentally, described him as an “à la carte Catholic”. For him, the Church’s social doctrine means applying the principles of fairness and justice to public policy – nothing more. He was very fond of Pope Francis, whom he met in 2023; that encounter was, for him, “the most moving experience of my life”. He presented him with an autographed shirt belonging to Lisandro Martínez, a Manchester United defender (though the new Prime Minister is a die-hard Everton fan) and, above all, an Argentine. Bergoglio thanked him for the gift, but above all for his commitment to the homeless: after all, the care provided to them in Manchester was the same as that seen beneath Bernini’s colonnade in St Peter’s Square. A shared sentiment, then. However, once the excitement of having been in the presence of the Vicar of Christ on earth had subsided, Burnham urged the Pontiff to bring the Church into the twenty-first century, as it had fallen behind by at least two hundred years in matters of rights, in true Martinian fashion. In any case, Andy Burnham, who used to insist on being the leader of the altar boys, now says he is not quite sure whether God really exists. What he had gleaned from the catechism, when he studied it tirelessly, was that the practical, earthly realisation of what was written there was the Labour Party. A rather confused form of Catholicism, to say the least.