Blair to Convert to Catholicism

Tony Blair will officially become a Catholic in the next few weeks, a Catholic newspaper says, after years of signing off on Anglican appointments as prime minister. The conversion isn't a shock—Blair often attended Mass with his Catholic wife and child. But the Church of England’s official status, along with British disdain for mixing religion and politics, kept Blair from converting in office.

The Church of England is nominally the national faith in England, but Britons reject overtly religious politicians, Newsweek observes, picking up on the Blair report in London's Tablet newspaper. “We don’t do God,” a Blair adviser once said. But Blair’s faith deeply influenced his interventionist foreign policy, including his partnership with George Bush over Iraq, which both saw as a righteous confrontation of evil. (More Tony Blair stories.)