The Conversion

It's one of the best-trailed conversions in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, an Anglican, is to be formally received into the Church in the next few weeks, according to The Tablet, a London-based Catholic newspaper. Blair has regularly, though quietly, attended Catholic services over the years with his wife and four children, all of whom are Catholics, and his conversion was rumored for the 10 years he was in office.

As his biographer Anthony Seldon points out in "Blair Unbound," post-9/11 security concerns made it increasingly difficult for the Blairs to go to public places of worship. So the Blairs arranged for a Catholic Royal Air Force chaplain to visit Chequers, the prime minister's country residence, virtually every Saturday to say Mass for the family in private.

While in office, Blair, 54, was reluctant to move across the aisle, as it were, in a country where the Church of England is the officially established religion, where the monarch is the supreme governor of the church, and where the prime minister, acting for the crown, signs off on episcopal appointments, including that of the senior prelate, the archbishop of Canterbury.

Blair, who left office in June, has always tried to keep his religiosity out of the public spotlight. As an elected head of government, his conversion would have sparked controversy not only because of the prime minister's Church of England role but also because Britain, despite the status of the C of E, is a resolutely secular country where politicians are discouraged from wearing their religion on their sleeves. Blair's former communications czar, Alastair Campbell, made it clear to Blair that he should steer clear of religion in all interviews. "We don't do God," Campbell once said pithily.

Though Blair didn't wear his faith on his sleeve, his beliefs were a strong influence on his foreign policy agenda over the years, including in particular his belief that governments have a moral duty to intervene in humanitarian crises. He had no doubt about the justness of certain causes: Operation Desert Fox in Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Sierra Leone (2000), Afghanistan (2001) and, of course, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The 9/11 attacks only deepened Blair's convictions. To him, the war on terror is, as he once asserted, "a battle of values and for progress." Earlier this year one of his close aides told me, "There's no holding him back." Said another, "He's not a relativist at all. He's very Manichaean about it. It's cowboys versus Indians."

In 1992 Blair joined the Christian Socialist Movement and remains a member. In 1995 he told a reporter, "My Christianity and my politics came together at the same time." In 1996, a year before his Labour Party ended 18 years of Conservative Party rule in Britain, he wrote an Easter essay for a newspaper in which he said the Tories "have too selfish a definition of self-interest" and "fail to look beyond, to the community." At the time he was pilloried for this very un-British mixing of religion and politics.