Newly appointed British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, centre, chops mushrooms as he helps prepare breakfast during a visit to The Passage, a homelessness charity in London, on Monday.Christopher Furlong/Reuters
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and a senior fellow of Massey College.
Perhaps this time it will be different. Seven prime ministers in a decade is not a good augury for Britain. There must be a radical course correction.
Andy Burnham knows this, as does the King who appointed him, the political party that elected him and the people who yearn for a dollop of stability, a mite of prosperity in a parched land.
It is no small point, no inconsequential symbolism, that en route to 10 Downing St. he chose to visit the Passage, home to one of the country’s largest homeless centres. Like Pope Francis and his inaugural trip outside Rome to Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Italy that had become a sanctuary for fleeing migrants, Mr. Burnham has signalled his priorities. The former mayor of Greater Manchester gave 15 per cent of his salary to the Bed Every Night Scheme he had created to provide shelter for rough sleepers. His pledge to address the issue nationally has teeth.
Beside his robust attitude to necessary change in Britain’s political culture, his easy way with the electorate, his winning smile and his convictions of steel, there is the matter of his Catholicism.
He is the first (or arguably the second) Roman Catholic prime minister in a country known for its fear of popery. After all, the last leading Catholic adviser (prime ministers as we recognize them didn’t appear until the early 18th century) was Cardinal Reginald Pole, confidant of the doomed Queen Mary. The most prominent Catholic political eminence was Chancellor Thomas More during the reign of Henry VIII, and we know how that ended.
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Catholics were suspect for centuries until the Catholic Emancipation or Relief Act of 1829 finally allowed them a role in political life. But even then there was controversy; in 1874, four-time prime minister William Gladstone launched his broadside “The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance,” prompting Cardinal John Henry Newman to write his equally fiery response, in which he disputed Gladstone’s reasoning behind what Newman saw to be the central question: “Can Catholics be trustworthy subjects of the State?”
Well, there have been Catholics aplenty since these two towering Victorians, including in recent time such luminaries as baroness Shirley Williams, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party; Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the Conservative Party; and Christopher Lord Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong.
But the top job went first to Boris Johnson, whose religious DNA is as slippery and porous as his political beliefs. Baptized a Catholic, confirmed an Anglican while at Eton College, woefully indifferent to religious concerns and practices for decades and then – courtesy of canon law – married to his third wife in a Catholic ceremony despite his prior marriages.
He is really more a Boris Catholic than a Roman Catholic and I suspect that is the way he would have it.
Mr. Burnham, by contrast, has firmer Catholic cred, even if he is more lapsed than constant in his practising. As he notes of the trinity of institutions that have shaped him – Everton Football Club, the Labour Party and the Roman Catholic Church, in that sequence – “I’ve always felt that there’s a connection between the three in terms of identity and that’s about the underdog, a sense of solidarity and values.”
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Those values were inculcated by the deep Catholic and Irish culture of Liverpool, the Catholic schools he attended, the masses he assisted at as an earnest altar boy and the constitutive role played by Catholic Social Teaching in his life and politics.
Mr. Burnham has acknowledged the importance for his own thinking of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 ur-text of papal social teaching; the concept of subsidiarity drawn from Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931); and the heightened emphasis on solidarity and the common good by more recent popes.
He has wedded them subtly and non-confessionally to his iteration of Manchesterism, a socio-economic school of thinking that originated in Manchester in the 19th century.
Not a political scientist by profession – he read English at Cambridge – and disinclined to wear his Catholicism on his sleeve, he has a pragmatic streak that has earned him plaudits for his time as mayor.
His approach, though not his style, echoes Prime Minister Mark Carney’s moral pragmatism, builds on values embedded in a Catholic humanism and he thinks in terms of bold projects conceived in a time of crisis.
Gladstone got it wrong.