# The worst kind of Catholic politician **By:** Edward Barrett-Shortt **Published:** 2026-07-25T06:36:00.000Z **Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/the-worst-kind-of-catholic-politician) --- More Related share There are, roughly, three kinds of Catholic politician in Britain. There is the kind who governs by catechism and seldom makes it off the back benches. There is the kind who is orthodox on some teachings and deeply disappointing on the rest. And there is the third kind: the kind who keeps the label and discards the contents, like a man who keeps an empty wine bottle on the shelf, in the hope it might impress someone someday. Andy Burnham is the third kind. He does not hide his connection to the Church. Altar boy at St Aelred's, raised by an Irish mother who kept the Sundays well enough to produce competition over who got to hold the Communion plate. He even went to Rome in 2023 and gave Pope Francis a Manchester United shirt, which the Holy Father presumably received with the same warmth one reserves for a gift one did not ask for and cannot use. Good stories perhaps but far from evidence of belief. Ask Andy Burnham what he actually believes and the answer becomes fashionably vague. In 2015 he told an interviewer he was "not particularly religious now," which is a fair description of a man who supports abortion, backs same-sex marriage, favours assisted suicide, has embraced the trans movement, and wants a ban on conversion therapy — a legislative wish list that manages to conflict with Catholic teaching at almost every available point. It's enough to make Beelzebub blush. He is not a heterodox Catholic wrestling with doctrine. He is a man who settled the question of faith as a teenager, and hasn't thought to revisit it since. To be fair to him, he has never really claimed otherwise, not really. He prefers instead to say that Catholicism "underpins" his politics, which is true in the sense that foundations underpin a house: entirely necessary, completely invisible, and never once inspected by anyone actually living upstairs. He has also complained that the Church took on "a more judgmental mode" under Pope Benedict XVI — judgmental, evidently, meaning it continued to hold the same view of the world as it has for two thousand years, and declined to update itself for Mr Burnham's convenience. None of this makes him unusual. In fact it makes him rather typical. What is unusual is the appetite, among certain commentators, to treat his Catholicism as a fact of some political consequence — as though a man's baptismal certificate tells you anything useful about how he will run the country. Expect standard progressive politics delivered by a man who happens to have been an altar server some forty years ago. There is a phrase used in the north-west of England for people like this: he "didn't lick the altar steps." It means he was raised in the Faith without ever being especially devout, and Burnham has used the phrase about himself, which at least has the merit of honesty. The trouble isn't really Burnham himself. The trouble is what happens when the press and popular culture treats "raised Catholic" as interchangeable with "Catholic in good standing." No one who supports legal abortion, same-sex marriage, assisted suicide, or any of the usual litany of left-wing causes can, in any meaningful sense, be called a practising Catholic — not because the Church has no room for sinners, but because these are not private failings, they are public, considered rejections of settled teaching. Call a man like that "a Catholic" often enough, on enough front pages, and the label stops meaning anything at all — not just for him, but for anyone in public life still trying to use the word with integrity. This isn't a hypothetical worry. America ran the same experiment under Joe Biden, and the result was a genuine crisis within the US bishops' conference over whether he should be receiving Communion at all. That crisis didn't happen because bishops enjoy picking fights with presidents. It happened because millions of people, Catholic and otherwise, were absorbing the lesson that support for abortion is compatible with being "a good Catholic," by example of the most powerful Catholic in the country. Britain risks running the same experiment now, on a smaller stage, with the same corrosive result. It's worth remembering, amid all this, that there are Catholic politicians who did it the other way round — who let doctrine set the limits of the politics, rather than the politics set the limits of the doctrine. Lord Alton is a fine example having resigned as his party's Chief Whip in 1987 to fight for a bill restricting late stage abortions, leaving the party altogether in 1992 rather than accept its further drift on the same issue. The late Ann Widdecombe spent much of her career paying a different kind of price for the same integrity. She was never offered the fond, indulgent coverage of her deep faith that has greeted Andy Burnham. It is worth asking why one kind of Catholic gets mocked and abused, and the other gets praised. Andy Burnham’s nostalgia for his Catholic upbringing is not nothing, and no one should sneer at the inheritance that supposedly shaped him. But the next time a headline calls him Britain's historic first “Catholic” prime minister, it is worth asking what, exactly, is being celebrated: a man's faith, or merely its costume. Continue reading with a free account Create a free account to read up to five articles each month Already have an account? 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