Some observers were surprised at the depth of emotion that Anthony Albanese showed when delivering his statement responding to the death of Pope Francis. The status of Australia’s prime minister as “mourner-in-chief” is now well established but at this time of the year it is normally displayed in a rather different context – the Anzac Day ceremony.

Albanese was mourning a foreign head of state but also a man recognised as a spiritual leader by Australia’s Catholics, who were a fifth of the population at the last census. We don’t know if Albanese marks that box on his census form. We do know, from things he had to say since the Pope’s death and from other statements over the years, that his Catholic heritage is meaningful to him.

“I think what people do is they draw on who they are and certainly my Catholicism is just a part of me,” he said, after he took questions from journalists. And he repeated a comment he has made often over the years: that his mother raised him in three great faiths, the Catholic church, the Labor party and South Sydney football club, or the Rabbitohs. What seems to have begun as an amusing quip seems to have solidified into a more serious statement of........

© The Guardian