Many people appear to be labouring under the false impression that Britain’s former Prime Minister has converted to Catholicism. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that for some bizarre reason the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, received Blair into the Church in December 2007 but Blair is not a Catholic and, as such, the Cardinal was failing in his duties when he permitted and presided over Blair’s reception. Blair and his cradle Catholic wife, Cherie, have always supported in utero infanticide, contrary to the teaching of the Church, and now, in a recent example of outrageous arrogance and sheer chutzpah, Blair has lectured the Holy Father for being “out of step” with the majority of Catholics in failing to endorse homosexuality.

           Clearly Blair does not understand that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ and that Christ cannot be “out of step” with the majority of Catholics. The Church, as the only authentic voice of Christ in the world, has always condemned the sin of Sodom, and the present Holy Father, as a defender of the Faith, continues to teach this unchanging truth. Any so-called “Catholic” who is “out of step” with this infallible Church teaching is not a Catholic at all. He is a heretic.

           Why did Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor allow such a heretic to be received into the Church? Why indeed did the Cardinal receive him personally into the Church at a private ceremony in Archbishop’s House, the Cardinal’s own private residence? These are good questions to which concerned Catholics deserve an answer.

Such questions remind me of my one and only meeting with the Cardinal. When Father Fessio and I were leading a group of Americans on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the English Martyrs, we received an invitation from the Cardinal to meet him in Archbishop’s House. Everything was warm and cozy until one of our pilgrims asked the Cardinal what he was doing to address the scandal of well-known pro-abortion Catholics receiving communion. I contributed to the discussion by mentioning the name of Cherie Blair as Britain’s best-known pro-abortion Catholic. Her husband had not yet been received into the Church. The Cardinal shifted uneasily in his seat and failed to give any sort of answer. I knew then that England’s Catholics could not expect any orthodox leadership from the head of the English hierarchy.

In the absence of any answers from the Cardinal, perhaps we’ll settle for the words of John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, who described Blair’s decision to become a Catholic as “decidedly strange.”

“We are very concerned,” said Smeaton. “During his premiership, Tony Blair became one of the world’s most significant architects of the culture of death: promoting abortion, experiments on human embryos — including on cloned human embryos — and euthanasia by neglect. We are writing to Tony Blair to ask him whether he has repented of the anti-life positions he has so openly advocated throughout his political career.”

One wonders whether the Cardinal asked Blair to repent of these grievous sins prior to his being accepted into the Church. One also wonders whether Blair was asked to repent of his endorsement of sodomy. One suspects that the issues were never considered “relevant” to Blair’s “Catholic formation”.

Ultimately Blair has the right to choose whether he wants to become a real Catholic or whether he wants to remain a non-Catholic. There is no in-between. Those who are “out of step” with the Church are wrong, even if they are the majority (like the majority who bayed for the blood of Christ and demanded His Crucifixion). Those who are “out of step” with the Church should “step out” of the Church and join the majority to which they are evidently so anxious to belong.