British Prime Minister Tony Blair holds long talks with Pope

[lovuian]

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2007/06/23/4284728-ap.html

VATICAN CITY (AP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a long talk with Pope Benedict at the Vatican on Saturday, a stop on his farewell tour that's fuelled rumours he plans to become a Roman Catholic.
snip...
As for reports Blair is on the verge of converting to Catholicism, a spokesman for the prime minister repeated the official line that "he remains a member of the Church of England."

more...
Tony has been a closeted Catholic

[sueh]

1. Was Bliar going to confession??

[lovuian]

3. I bet he was and expecting the Popes forgiveness

the mind games played are amazing

[rwenos]

2. Is it Time for Oliver Cromwell?

Blair's the son of an Anglican minister. If he's flirting with Catholicism, it would most likely be of the "Anglo-Catholic" variety, which exists within the Anglican Communion.

On the other hand, perhaps it's time to look up the bloodline of James III, the "Old Pretender," eh?

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. No, he's the son of a conservative lawyer

He spent the first few years of his life in Adelaide, Australia, where Leo lectured in law at the city's university.

They returned to the UK in late 1950s and Blair spent the remainder of his childhood in Durham, where he was a day pupil at the fee-paying Choristers School.

Leo was chairman of the local Conservative association but had to abandon his ambition to become a Tory MP when he suffered a stroke.

His political leanings appeared to have rubbed off on the young Tony, who stood in a mock school election as the Conservative candidate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6506365.stm

[rwenos]

5. My Bad

I thought Tony Blair's father was a clergyman. :-(

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Gordon Brown is the son of a Church of Scotland minister

but that's considerably further from the Catholics:

For 80 years, Bryan has been remembered mainly as the blustering fool who defended creationism and damned Darwin at the Scopes Trial. But increasingly, Bryan is being recalled also as the man who ran as Democratic candidate for President on a radical left-wing ticket, offering the first vision of an American welfare state. He always presented these as evangelical Christian ideas, announcing that the poor were being "crucified on a cross of gold". The churches flocked to him.

Brown grew up in the British version of this tradition. His father, John Brown, was, famously, a minister in the Church of Scotland, radicalised during the Second World War by being sent to Glasgow and witnessing the sunken poverty of the children there. In the early 1990s, Brown Jnr explained his dad's faith: "My father was more a social Christian than a fundamentalist. There was always a constant stream of people passing through our front door. As a child growing up in a minister's family, you get to see all the hardships that are going on around you at first hand. All of them had been hit hard."

Our next Prime Minister also identified with the rebellious, privilege-hating grassroots of the Church of Scotland. In 1843, the Church split when ordinary churchgoers insisted on their right to pick their own ministers, rather than have the aristocracy hand-pick one for them. As Brown summarised it happily: "They refused to be bound by the Lords." This blunt egalitarian persisted into Brown's youth.

But how does this affect his practical politics? The best hint can be found in Brown's little-noticed endorsement in 2005 of a book called God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it by the theologian Jim Wallis. The author damns the right for focusing "on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice." So the book is an attack on Falwellian poison - but also on what it calls "secular fundamentalism." Secularists, Wallis writes, "mistakenly dismiss spirituality as irrelevant to social change." Wallis believes religion should be a presence perpetually motivating people to pursue "justice" for the poor.

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2588941.ece