Like Andy Burnham, I was once an enthusiastic altar boy, although I don’t recall competing to be at the front with the communion plate as the prime minister apparently did. Much of my motivation had little to do with piety. The tips received for serving at weddings were often very generous and I got on well with Father Jerome, an engagingly worldly monk from Ampleforth who shared my passion for Manchester United.

I’m five years older than Burnham, but the atmosphere of the small-town northern Catholicism we grew up with will have been much the same. The second Vatican council’s reforms, responding to the social changes under way since the 1960s, were “democratising” the tone and style of worship, and traditionalists were mourning the sidelining of the old Latin mass. The huge success of Pope John Paul II’s groundbreaking visit to Britain in 1982 – the first by a reigning pontiff – had made the faith seem more mainstream and less rarefied. Politically, most Catholics voted Labour, and the large number of Celtic surnames in parish registers testified to a demographic significantly different from Anglican congregations, which were both more English and more Tory.

Burnham is the first British prime minister to have been raised in this kind of environment, and he has been explicit about its influence upon him. To which the response of many secular well-wishers may well be polite indifference. Catholicism gets a better press among progressives these days, as Rome takes a stand against the cruelties and excesses of Maga-style xenophobia and nationalism. But most liberals would be wary of any Catholic proselytising in areas beyond migration and human rights.

They should look deeper. Like Burnham, I lapsed – in my case when I went to university and started looking for different kinds of truths in western........

© The Guardian