Translated material
Blair changed his faith
Former British Prime Minister became a Catholic
Yesterday it became known about the decision of former British Prime Minister and now UN envoy for the Middle East Tony Blair to convert to Catholicism. Society was prepared for this news in advance. Nevertheless, the event gave impetus to heated debate about the future fate of religion in Foggy Albion.According to the latest statistics, for the first time in the last 500 years, citizens professing Anglicanism are no longer the dominant group. Now they are outnumbered by the Catholics. Figures for attendance at Sunday services in 37 thousand churches show: the number of Anglican parishioners has decreased by 20% since 2000 and amounts to 852 thousand people, while the growing number of Catholics has already exceeded 860 thousand. The third place among Christian denominations is occupied by the Protestant Methodist church.
Experts explain these changes by serious demographic processes taking place within the country, and primarily by the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe - Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians. “Immigrants are now the most active parishioners of our church,” Father John, Catholic priest of the Cathedral in Greenwich, told Vremya Novostey. --They go to church regularly and participate in almost all church events. We do not want and do not intend to enter into competition with the Anglican Church. However, it is clear that many of our parishes are constantly growing.”
Father John recalled that the Anglican Church began in 1534. Then King Henry VIII needed a religious organization separate from Rome that would allow him to divorce his first wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon. This church is one of the varieties of Protestantism, closest to Catholicism. In its dogma, the Protestant idea of salvation by personal faith is combined with the position of Catholicism about the saving power of the church.
On the basis of the Act of Supremacy, adopted by Parliament at that time, the Church of England received state status, and the king was declared “the only supreme head in the land of the Church of England.” Thus, Henry got rid of the dictates of the Pope; for the next 200 years, the Catholic Church was under the strictest ban.
According to Father John, Tony Blair's decision to convert to Catholicism did not surprise him. “As far as I can tell, his wife, Sheri, played a major role in this. Gradually she convinced him to start attending Catholic mass on Sundays and talking with the priests. By the way, all four of their children are also Catholics,” our interlocutor noted.
Rumors that Blair prefers to go to Catholic Church on Sundays have circulated since the mid-1990s. Several times during the ten years of his premiership they intensified, and it seemed that for the first time since the mid-16th century the leader of the country would change his faith. There was especially much talk about Blair's conversion to Catholicism in the last weeks of his stay in Downing Street, when he paid his final official visit to Pope Benedict XVI.
The audience at the Vatican was clearly private and lasted 25 minutes. Sheri also took part in it. The journalists who were there expected that, upon leaving the Pope, the prime minister would make a corresponding statement. However, then Blair did not announce anything, saying only that the question of the final choice of confession was difficult for him.
Six months after leaving the post of prime minister and the British Parliament, Blair finally explained his behavior. In an interview broadcast on the BBC on Saturday evening, he said he had been hesitant to leave the Church of England during his premiership because "the issue could have gone beyond his private life and caused tension in society."
However, the prime minister could also have formal obstacles to changing his faith. The fact is that the Emancipation Act of 1829, which restored civil rights to Catholics, nevertheless did not allow the king to “have advisers on civil or military matters” from among the followers of Catholicism. And although lawyers believe that in our time these restrictions have lost their relevance, no one has formally canceled them. By the way, according to the constitution, neither the British monarch nor his wife (or spouse) can still belong to any faith other than the Anglican. According to Catherine Pepinster, editor of a British Catholic magazine, Blair was hesitant to announce a change in his religious preferences during his prime ministership because it could upset the balance of power in Northern Ireland and give separatist Catholics there an additional bargaining chip in peace negotiations.
British newspapers note that Tony Blair, who was born into a strict Anglican family, began to show interest in Catholicism after marrying staunch Catholic Cheri Booth. However, employees of the Prime Minister's Office claim that Blair himself was deeply imbued with the ideas of Catholicism and, even on business trips, did not miss the opportunity to pray in the Catholic Church. They say that although he was often called a "showman politician" by the opposition, Blair was in fact an extremely religious man. He himself recently admitted that faith played an important role during his ten-year tenure as prime minister.
Blair's action caused a controversial reaction in British society. Catholics doubt that a man who supported laws allowing abortion, the use of stem cells in medicine and blessed marriages between gays can be a true representative of the Catholic faith. “I wonder if he has changed his mind on these issues or was he just being a hypocrite when he pushed these laws through Parliament?” asks Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe. Some political observers believe that "it was not so much Blair who came to the Catholic Church, but that the Church dragged him into it in order to thereby achieve greater popularity."