Tony Blair joins the Catholic Church. Like everyone else I’m glad to see him come on board. One thing I worry a little bit about, though. Does this give him precedence over me? I mean, I’ve been a Catholic all my life, and he’s only just arrived. Somehow, though, I get the feeling that if we were both waiting to see the Pope, he’d go in first.

Mustn’t let it bother me. After all, the Bible says there is more rejoicing in heaven for one finding the one lost sheep than for the ninety-nine who never strayed. Also the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

\I didn’t just swot up those quotes from a handy copy of the Bible I happen to have lying around, but from my memory of hearing them once every year as the good book got read in weekly installments to the congregation.

It’s a remarkable piece of news whatever way you look at it. There hasn’t been anything as spectacular since 1845. That was when John Henry Newman, the leading priest in the Church of England, came over, many years later becoming Cardinal Newman. This was the religious sensation of the century. It was the first crack in the wall of the edifice that Henry VIII and his successors had erected to replace the Roman church. They had turned the population from Catholics into Pope-haters, showing what propaganda and pressure can do even with such a “bulldog breed’ as the British claim to be.

However, according to one historian, the English Church had become...comfortable. The clergy, enabled to marry by Henry’s reformation, naturally got to thinking more about their families than their flocks and less about salvation than remuneration. This re-opened people’s minds to the advantages of a priesthood who wanted to be spiritual fathers only and who, in short, were more inclined to enthusiasm than careerism. Newman thought this way and he found many followers to join him. This came to be called the Oxford Movement from their association with Oxford University.

The activists mostly moved into the Catholic Church, but even those who didn’t worked to Romanize the English church, causing it to become in part Anglo-Catholic, with ceremonies, vestments and practices similar to the old Catholic ones suppressed by the Reformers. The great difference made by the Movement was in the way it familiarized Anglicans in all the English-speaking countries with the idea of conversion as an option for them whereas before it had been almost unthinkable no matter what doubts they had about the established church. It would be hard to find any conversions before Newman’s.  Without a doubt now that a Prime Minister has joined there will be Catholics on the alert for candidates from the Royal Family.

If this sound like I’m cheerleading, well what about it. I think consolidation of Christians is a perfectly good idea, to erase the distinctions and divisions among them as much as possible. That doesn’t mean that I think all Christian religions will merge into one. But any movement toward unity is a good one in my opinion. It wouldn’t hurt a bit for the same thing to happen among the Moslems. I’m tired of reading, every time a bomb goes off, that the “outrage” has been condemned by “moderate” Moslems. They seem to exist only for the purpose of cushioning the blows from the immoderate ones. Until such time as the Moslems speak with one, civilized, voice, no one can be expected to trust them or believe in the
elusive “moderates.”

When I see the attention the pope gets and the crowds that surround him, it’s a lesson in the usefulness of unity and, well, hierarchy, in preserving great organizations like the church. In 1870 the Catholic Church was at another low ebb comparable to the one it experienced during the French Revolution seventy years before. This time it had been stripped of its last remaining territorial possession, Rome, by the new Italian Republic and was reduced to its present territory of the Vatican and its surroundings. No matter, the first Vatican Council went ahead as scheduled.

Not only did it go ahead, it went haywire, in the opinion of progressive people all over the western world. It actually pronounced a new and shocking doctrine, the infallibility of the Pope when giving out the law on faith and morals. How medieval can you get? Even some of the attendants at the Council held out against it and many of those who were for it thought it wasn’t the best time to issue it. But it went through anyway with the following results: (a) The most dissident people left the church and formed their own, thereby promoting unity as against discord; (b) The question of authority in the church was settled for good and; © The prestige of the Papacy was strengthened in the eyes of the world. It was all win-win.

The church is about authority, which a man like Blair understands if anyone does. Converts are often accused of being wimps who want a pope to tell them what to think and what to do, but that’s not it. What they want is a church telling all its people what to believe, which happens to be what the converts believe and which they want to see the church enforce. They often come from backgrounds where there is no belief of any kind and no one thinks there should be any.

This is an essay, not a speech, so it’s all right for me to end with a joke instead of opening with it, as is customary. It’s a story George Jessel used to tell on the Ed Sullivan show in the last century. It was about an Irish girl who fell in love with a Jewish boy, but whose family demanded that he become a Catholic before he could be allowed to marry her (no snickering, please). So Joe agreed to be instructed in the faith. The family kept tabs on his progress by quizzing the daughter. “Oh, he’s learning about Christ and the Holy Family and he loves it.” The following week, “He’s been hearing about the Pope and the College of Cardinals and Rome and all and he’s absolutely fascinated. ” Things are going so well that the mother is shocked when she makes another inquiry sometime later on and the girl bursts into tears. “What’s the matter, dear?” says the mother, “Is something wrong?” “Oh Mother, now he wants to be a priest!”