Is Tony Blair a Catholic?

So Tony Blair’s criticism of Ratzinger and his Holy Mafia has not gone down too well in the Reichstag in Rome. Surprise, surprise!

The former UK Prime Minister, who converted to Catholicism after his resignation, said the Vatican needed to rethink “entrenched” attitudes towards homosexuality, which, he said, are out of step with the feelings of most Catholics.

An article in the Catholics’ weekly mag, the Tablet, says that, once the news broke of Blair’s conversion to Catholicism, “it did not take long for some in the Church to raise doubts about whether Mr Blair could keep the promise he had made in the declaration of faith: ‘I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.’ ”

And this is why the Catholic Church is either full of liars or full of Nazis. Well, the truth lies somewhere in between. Not all stick to these “rules”, clearly, and those who do cannot call themselves human beings in the sense of displaying human qualities of kindness and compassion. Indeed, they often display the morality of the sewer.

Those who don’t stick to them can’t call themselves Catholics, because they’ve broken the very promise that made them Catholics in the first place.

The Tablet piece says, “The question marks were caused by Mr Blair’s liberal views and his parliamentary record of voting well outside the boundaries of Catholic teaching on abortion, stem-cell research and civil partnerships, not to mention the invasion of Iraq.”

Well, as one of Ratzinger’s generals, Monsignor Andrew Faley, assistant general secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said, the profession of faith “does not mean we have to go over his past actions and ask him to explain them all again. The future starts here.”

OK, so Blair has now ceased to be a Catholic. Should he be excommunicated?`

After all, the mother of that little girl referred to in our “morality of the sewer” link above was excommunicated, and so were a group of medical staff, because they were complicit in, or performed, an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who was carrying twins and could have died if she’d gone to full term with the pregnancy.

Abortion is seen as a venal sin, and so is homosexuality. What’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, shouldn’t it?