Six months after stepping down as Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair has completed his long-expected conversion to Roman Catholicism from Britain’s established church, Anglicanism, Catholics officials said in a statement on Saturday.
Mr. Blair, now a Middle East envoy, was received into the Catholic Church during a Mass held on Friday night at a chapel in the residence of the leading Catholic in Britain, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the statement said. It said Mr. Blair had been “received into full communion with the Catholic Church” by the cardinal.
Mr. Blair’s convent-educated wife, Cherie, and four children are Catholics, and Mr. Blair had for many years made a practice of attending Mass with them, saying he did so to keep his family together on Sundays.
Aides have said he delayed his formal conversion until after leaving office to avoid making his religious beliefs a political issue, and because of the risk of stirring controversy over his role, as prime minister, in appointing Anglican bishops.
Mr. Blair also faced concerns within the Catholic hierarchy in London and Rome, centering on policies adopted by his government during his 10 years in power that drew fierce criticism from the conservative hierarchy of the church. Among these were the Blair government’s support for stem cell research, gay adoptions and the legalization of gay civil unions, as well as its resistance to toughening Britain’s abortion laws.
In 1996, the year before Mr. Blair became prime minister, Cardinal Basil Hume, then the head of the Catholic Church in Britain, wrote to Mr. Blair asking him to stop taking communion at a Catholic church in the London district of Islington, near his home.
Mr. Blair accepted the decision, but wrote back to the cardinal, according to the account given by his aides later, saying, “I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.”
The church statement released Saturday made no reference to the tensions within the Catholic Church that have arisen as a result of Mr. Blair’s desire to convert. It said only that he had undergone, as Catholic converts usually do, a period of “spiritual preparation.” His preparatory sessions were under the guidance of a Catholic priest, Mark O’Toole, who is Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s private secretary.
The statement quoted Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor as saying, referring to Mr. Blair: “For a long time, he has been a regular worshiper at Mass with his family, and in recent months he has been following a program of formation to prepare for his reception into full communion. My prayers are with him, his wife and family in this joyful moment in their journey of faith together.”
According to the Catholic custom ordinarily followed in Britain, a convert, before acceptance at communion, is usually required to undergo the Rite of Reception, which includes the declaration, “I believe and profess all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.”
In June, after meeting Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Mr. Blair met with the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and accounts by Vatican officials said the cardinal laid out the church’s objections to some of the Blair government’s legislation in uncompromising terms.
Among some Catholics in Britain, there have been questions about how Mr. Blair, who has described himself as an “ecumenical Christian,” could meet the standards normally set for converts.
“St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus would pale into insignificance by comparison,” John Smeaton, director of Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said in an interview published earlier this month in The Spectator, a weekly journal popular among conservatives. “We need to hear a full repudiation from him. Without one, having Blair as a Catholic is like having a vegetarian in a meat-eating club. It simply does not make sense”
Mr. Blair has spent much of his time since resigning as prime minister on his work as the envoy of the so-called Middle East diplomatic quartet — comprising the United Nations, the European Union, the Russian Federation and the United States — from a base at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.
In his private capacity, he has also traveled widely making highly paid speeches, some of them in the United States.
He has also spoken with growing candor about his religious convictions, and what he has described as the “moral” dimension of politics. These were issues he often avoided while in office, when critics in his ruling Labor Party, uneasy with what they regarded as a break with the secular tradition of British politics, often pointed to his faith as a factor in his close relationship with President Bush.
The criticism focused on Mr. Blair’s decision to commit British troops to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, which he often defended, in the face of fierce criticism, as “the right thing to do.”
In an interview recorded for a three-part television documentary broadcast last month on the BBC, “The Blair Years,” Mr. Blair acknowledged the importance of his religious beliefs in guiding his years as prime minister and also the care he had taken not to talk about those beliefs in public.
“You know, if I am honest about it, yes of course it was hugely important,” he said.
But he added that while politicians could speak freely about their faith in the United States, it was hard to do so in Britain because “you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”
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