Last week I posted a video clip of “famous Catholic converts”, which I thought very edifying and worth sharing with visitors to this site. In response, Diego posted a comment querying Tony Blair’s inclusion on the list. I confess that I winced at Blair’s inlcusion, and that of one or two other “converts” on the list, but felt that the overall power of the video still made it edifying viewing. As for my own views on Blair’s so-called “conversion”, I have documented my own disgust at this phoney Catholic’s sheer chutzpah in declaring himself a Catholic and immediately lecturing the Pope on how the Holy Father and the Church have got things wrong. See my post, “The Non-Conversion of Tony Blair”, posted several months ago, in the archive section of this site.

As for Blair’s position vis à vis the Church, I can put the matter no better than the way it was expressed in the Spanish magazine, Diplomacia, sent to me recently by my good friend José Luis Orella, which emblazoned “La nueva religión de Tony Blair” on its cover, alongside a photograph of a suitably smug-looking Blair. A feature article inside the magazine was headlined, “Tony Blair: El Papa de una nueva religión” (Tony Blair: The Pope of a New Religion), which depicts Blair alongside Obama as being at the vanguard of a new messianic secular fundamentalism. I am honoured to be quoted in the article, describing Blair as “un católico a la carta” (a cafeteria Catholic) who picks and chooses what he wants from the menu, without coherence, and who resolutely continues to support the culture of death and abortion, in defiance of the magisterial teaching of the Church. Elsewhere, the article again states that Blair “has become a catholic à la carte” and refers to his creation of the “Tony Blair Faith Foundation” which aims to remake all the major religions into Blair’s own image. Blair’s ideas for a new “catholic” religion, which accepts that “attitudes and thinking evolve over time”, were revealed, appropriately enough, in Attitude, a homosexual magazine, in which he described himself as “a religious man in favour of homosexuals”. How singularly appropriate that Blair should “come out” as a heretic in such a magazine, the very title of which says all that needs to be said. Life is not about truth but about “attitude”. It’s not about adhering to a coherent Creed because “attitudes and thinking evolve over time”. If only Jesus had been born in the Twenty-First Century, and if only he had listened to Tony Blair, everything would be just fine!