Britain’s New Prime Minister Only Thinks He’s a Catholic—Really, He’s Anything But

The new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is a Catholic—which may cause some problems, given that the Constitution of the officially Anglican nation he now leads implies that this may be technically illegal, at least for the performance of certain obscure duties of the office. But not to worry, Burnham can always get around this simply by virtue of compliant constitutional scholars pointing out that, when it really comes down to it, Burnham is not actually a Catholic at all; he just thinks he is.

To judge by his past utterances on the matter, the new Prime Minister is an adherent of something called CST. CST may sound like some form of horrific neurological disease but, as contracted by Burnham, it is actually something far more virulent and debilitating: Catholic Social Teaching. In some of its forms, CST does have a certain amount of genuine validity. Yet in Burnham’s own misguided personal terms, CST is best thought of as being a more milquetoast version of the far-left Liberation Theology of Latin America: that is, socialism in disguise.

Catholicism is a religion for people who believe in God. Socialism is a religion for people who don’t believe in God. In the specific form I am discussing here, CST is for people who can’t quite decide either way, just like the notoriously vacillating Mr. Burnham.

From Communion to Communism

Andy Burnham has one big chief policy for high office office above all else: shouting, “I’m from the North-West of England!” while boasting about how he loves the many famous rock and pop bands of the region, from The Beatles to The Smiths. Slightly more substantially, he also grabs the microphone and croons away to anyone who will listen about his sacred promise to devolve more political power away from the English capital of London, where Parliament sits, back toward northern cities like Manchester, where he used to be mayor, and Liverpool, where he was born. Whatever the merits or otherwise of this policy may be, it initially sounds like just another standard proposal of bloodless modern technocracy. Yet, to Burnham, it appears to count as something far higher and more spiritual in nature: an outright administrative form of Catholicism in action.

CST partly centers upon a concept called “subsidiarity,” which, in very simplified terms, means that matters which can best be handled at a local level ought to be so rather than getting a more central, higher authority involved: if the village church’s roof is leaking, ask the parish priest, not the pope, to mend it. This seems to be the simpleminded fashion in which Andy Burnham interprets the term: if Manchester’s buses are always late, get the mayor of Manchester onto the case, not the Prime Minister or the Head of the UN Security Council. Whether this genuinely represents “Catholicism in action” or simply ordinary common sense, I shall leave for you to decide.       

Andy Burnham’s idea of Catholicism appears to be very closely formed by his beloved Liverpool roots, where a left-wing form of CST is preached from pulpits as a matter of course: many a Liverpudlian priest effectively tells his flock to vote for the left-wing Labour Party which Burnham now leads without explicitly using those exact words, even though they are really not supposed to.

Similar unspoken doctrines are expounded in the region’s Catholic-subsidized schools, from which students are clearly intended to emerge as good little left-wingers. Like Burnham, I attended Catholic schools in the wider Liverpool area, and, like the new PM’s two headmaster brothers, later taught in a few too, so I know perfectly well the precise regional strain of CST Catholicism Burnham was exposed to as a child. In my own case, I eventually developed immunity to it. Burnham, however, became a lifelong patient.

Liverpool was one of the main English cities Irish immigrants settled in during the 19th century, meaning that today it and its surrounding area of Merseyside enjoy an abnormally large Catholic population compared to most of the rest of the United Kingdom. Plenty of Catholics naturally means plenty of Catholic schools. Part-funded by the state, part by the local Catholic diocese, most of these institutions teach variants of basic CST values like the ones listed below.

The key principles of Catholic Social Teaching—such as the dignity of the human person, the common good, solidarity, care for creation, and preferential option for the poor—are woven through our curriculum, prayer life, and school culture.

In practice, this looks like:

• Respecting the dignity of every person: We foster a welcoming, inclusive environment where every child knows they are valued and loved by God.
• Promoting the common good: Children are encouraged to work together, support one another, and make decisions that help everyone in the community.
• Standing in solidarity: We learn about the lives of others in our local and global community and take action to support those in need through fundraising, awareness campaigns, and service projects.
• Caring for God’s creation: Environmental responsibility is taught through eco-projects, outdoor learning, and stewardship of our school grounds.
• Living out faith in action: Through RE lessons, liturgies, assemblies, and social justice initiatives, children learn to connect their faith with real-world challenges.  

In the abstract, generic sense, many of these concepts sound admirable, unobjectionable, and compatible with Catholicism. Who could object to children being “encouraged to work together, support one another, and make decisions that help everyone in the community”? When I was a child, we would do that by bringing in a tin of food from home for the priest to collect and donate to the poor or the elderly of the parish every so often. That isn’t communism, it’s charity. The trouble is, it only takes a slight reemphasis to be imposed upon such innocent concepts by a left-wing teacher or priest for simple Christian charity to become a watered-down version of socialism.

Worlock versus Witch

Being a traditional port city and factory zone, Merseyside is a very left-wing area, having been a hotbed of trade unionism for decades. The archbishop of Liverpool during my 1980s prepubescence, which was Burnham’s own adolescence, was no exception. The aptly named Derek Worlock was obsessed with bizarre nonissues, like persuading the Vatican to allow gluten-free communion wafers and endlessly promoting “racial and economic justice.”

When black criminals in the Toxteth area of Liverpool rioted because of their “mistreatment” at the hands of the local police (i.e., they kept on arresting them for being criminals) and burned down their own home district in 1981, Worlock made certain to redirect the motorcade of the subsequently visiting Pope John Paul II through the smoking ash—for supposed “timekeeping reasons” but, really, to make an obvious political point. Whenever Liverpool dockers were striking, criminals were rioting, or anything of that sort, you can bet Worlock would be there standing alongside them in solidarity.

Young Andy Burnham loved Archbishop Worlock. It was from him he partly learned what it meant to “truly” be a Catholic: to be a left-winger in a cassock. And it was also from him that he partly learned what the “true” Satan looked like: conservative, free-market politicians like the Left’s 1980s U.K. arch-nemesis Margaret Thatcher, derided in lefty Liverpool as an evil old witch.

Worlock would record sermons onto tape cassette, and Burnham, as a youthful altar boy, would be employed to take them to obscure parishes without any permanent priest, press “play,” then stand there listening to his master’s voice demonizing Thatcher in disguise. According to one scholarly assessment, “As an altar boy, he would have heard messages from Derek Worlock criticizing the way central government was failing parts of the North-West.” So, there you have it, Archbishop Derek Worlock is now writing policy for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from beyond the grave.

Transubstantiation of the Host

As Archbishop Worlock well knew, the superficial similarity of some Catholic terminology and some left-wing terminology is easily exploited. Notice how the Merseyside school whose CST material I quoted above promises to promote “social justice initiatives,” for example. If “social justice” just means giving free peas to pensioners, like I did as a kid, then great. But what if “social justice” means being asked to do things like fly the trans flag in the classroom?

Despite being a “Catholic,” Andy Burnham has a long record of pro-queer activism—voting, campaigning, and marching for gay marriage, gay adoption, and “gender recognition” (if that actually meant recognizing what real-life biological males and females are, I’d be all for the concept). In 2015, when previously standing unsuccessfully to become leader of the Labour Party, he called upon the then-new Pope Francis to declare his own support for gay marriage, saying:

Our new Pope has brought back a forgiving and warm-hearted style that seemed to characterize the Catholic Church in my youth [i.e., the Liverpudlian one of Archbishop Worlock]. He is the right man to seize this moment and, taking his cue from his flock…bring the Church into the 21st century.

Mr. Burnham doesn’t seem to comprehend the concept of flocks of sheep; they are supposed to be led by a shepherd, aren’t they? Not under left-wing subsidiarity doctrine as he and Derek Worlock understand it. Sure, the little people’s views should always be listened to and taken seriously upon worldly, temporal matters of politics (unless they start asking for “un-Christian” things like closed borders or lower taxes, obviously). If they want better regional bus routes, or cleaner town centers, then give it to them!

But religious matters are not, ultimately, temporal at all. They are matters of eternity, and the eternal truth is that men are men and women are women and marriage is between a man and a woman only. Burnham has been mis-raised by the left-wing Liverpudlian strain of CST Catholicism to view papal bulls as political policy announcements rather than attempted expressions of the perpetual Word of God. There’s a reason why the Ten Commandments were written in stone—not in an ephemeral electronic policy document to be voted through the House of Commons; but Burnham knows not what it is, having zero understanding of the concept of eternity at all.

Famously, he doesn’t even understand why debts eventually have to be paid back on the international loan market. When the new PM speaks of the need to “bring the Church into the 21st century” by making it gay, this demonstrates a deep confusion on his behalf. This is a real newspaper headline from his previous 2015 leadership bid:

Andy Burnham: I’m a gay rights, feminist, football-loving Catholic kind of guy
Labour leadership candidate says Catholic church is out of touch on gay rights as he calls for end to tampon tax and allowing gay men to give blood

Sounds more like a “non-Catholic Catholic kind of guy” to me.

Sadly, under the purely temporal reign of “progressive” politicians like Burnham, many Liverpool religious schools have already entered the dismal 21st century he so loves anyway, papal blessing for their doing so or not. I used to teach at the specific Liverpool Catholic all-girls’ school (which now might even also admit girls who think they are boys too?) mentioned in the pathetic website material reproduced below, although I will not embarrass it by mentioning it by name here, or even providing a link, lest I upset any of my old remaining colleagues still unhappily trapped there. According to CST principles, as interpreted in left-wing Merseyside, this is what “being a Catholic” now means, as taught to the empty vessels of its easily manipulated youth:

During the raising of the flag, this prayer was said:

Creator God,
We give thanks for the amazing diversity of creation.
Help us to remember that we are all created in your image
and are worthy of dignity and respect, however we identify.
We ask this in your Holy Name. AMEN

When I was teaching there 15 years ago, the school was still run by a nun. I’m guessing it probably isn’t now.

Seize the Means of Surplice Production

During my own time as a schoolboy, gay rights as an “expression” of left-wing Merseyside CST Catholicism were still some way in the future. We were made to learn how Catholicism was really just an expression of left-wing economics instead.

Alongside 1990s school-leaving exams, students had to produce a piece of coursework: an extended essay about a pressing matter of Christian concern. The subject chosen for our class had nothing to do with Christianity, though! We were simply asked to examine a famous left-wing document called “The Brandt Report,” explained by the teacher as calling for First-World Nations to cancel the debt of Third-World nations. We were then basically asked to write about what Jesus would have thought of it all. The answer we were all guided toward giving, of course, was “Wipe it all out!” If Christ could forgive sins, then why would He not also forgive sovereign debt liabilities too?

Answer in the correct, desired, left-wing way (as of course I did because back then I knew no better), and you got full marks. But what would have happened to some less compliant child who answered, “Jesus lived 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire and so would have had no concept of international debt-markets, and in any case His Kingdom was not of this world,” supported with actual biblical citations like “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”? F for Fail, presumably.

This will be the precise sort of educational CST socialism in disguise Andy Burnham will himself have also absorbed when he was at school in the 1970s and ’80s. In 2022, Burnham spoke of how “When I was at these Catholic schools…the vast majority of the staff were kind of Labour-leaning people and encouraged me in that direction.”

I also left school supporting Labour, partly as a result of what Burnham there describes; but, unlike him, I eventually began thinking about such matters properly, and as a result I later shed my inculcated infant leftist beliefs. But Burnham was not like this: far from thinking about his politics, fused at is was from childhood with a mutant strain of pseudo-Catholicism, he still prefers to simply accept its chiefs tenets are articles of unquestioned faith. As he said in 2012, “what I used to read in the [Catholic] catechism, the enfranchisement of it on Earth was the Labour Party.” And here is that Labour Catechism in full:

Question: Who is to blame for all earthly ills?

Response: The rich.

Question: What should be done about them?

Response: Tax the *******s.

For Burnham, in politics, it’s all just question and pre-scripted response, question and pre-scripted response, ad infinitum, no contrary evidence ever admissible. Yet, when it comes to actual Catholic dogma, like marriage being between a man and a woman only, he seems perfectly content to admit as many alternative viewpoints into the catechism as is post-humanly possible.

How, precisely, is this man even a Catholic at all? There’s a very telling photo here of Burnham, while still in his previous job as mayor of Manchester, going on a city-center gay march in the company of a giant rainbow placard saying “QUEER KIDS DESERVE SAFE SCHOOLS.” Would he ever go on a march where the word “queer” was replaced with “normal” or “Catholic”? No. He thinks men in dresses should be allowed into girls’ bathrooms. How’s that keeping kids safe?

This is what Liverpudlian CST dogma does to you. As a youngster, Andy Burnham proudly served as an altar boy. Now, as an equally proud trans-friendly adult, it seems he just wants to alter boys instead.