[NYTr] UK:Tony Blair to be accepted into Roman Catholic church

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy 

The Guardian - Nov 9, 2007
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tonyblair/story/0,,2208165,00.html

Former PM to be accepted into Roman Catholic church

by Stephen Bates

Tony Blair will convert to Roman Catholicism within weeks when he is
received into the church by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, according to the Catholic magazine the Tablet.

There has been speculation for months that the former prime minister
would be received into the church following his resignation from
office. A report by the magazine's editor, Catherine Pepinster, says
the ceremony will take place during a private mass in the cardinal's
official residence behind Westminster Cathedral in Victoria, London.

Mr Blair, now a Middle East peace envoy, was baptised as an Anglican
but has been known to be interested in Catholicism for many years. He
refrained from conversion earlier because of constitutional
sensitivities. The Blair government pursued a number of policies which
the church opposed: introducing civil partnerships, authorising stem
cell research, extending equality regulations to adoptions by gay
couples, failing to restrict abortions and going to war in Iraq.
Famously, Mr Blair accepted the advice of his press secretary that "We
don't do God," cutting a reference to the Almighty from a prime
ministerial broadcast on the eve of the war.

Although there is no bar to a prime minister being a Catholic and both
the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have had Catholic leaders in
recent years, there has never been a Catholic in Number 10. Only the
sovereign and heirs to the crown and their spouses are legally barred
from membership of the faith because of the Act of Settlement following
the Glorious Revolution, which overthrew the last Catholic monarch,
James II, in 1688.

Mr Blair's wife Cherie and their four children are Catholic and he
himself accompanied them to Sunday mass while in office. Mr Blair also
attended mass alone and took communion in the 1980s before being warned
off by Cardinal Basil Hume.

The Tablet report says Mr Blair has been receiving instruction in the
faith from Fr John Walsh, an RAF chaplain, and Fr Mark O'Toole, the
cardinal's secretary. It adds: "The cardinal's involvement as if he
were Mr Blair's parish priest would suggest that the process of
conversion did in fact begin during his tenure of Number 10." It quotes
an unnamed friend of Mr Blair as saying the imminence of his conversion
was "a rumour not without substance".