Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is exactly the kind of Catholic that America needs.
That might sound odd, especially given that Mr. Burnham was raised Catholic but rarely attends Mass and leads the center-left party in one of the West’s least churchgoing nations. But Mr. Burnham’s Catholicism is still central to who he is as a leader, and it informs his approach to policy, which is oriented toward the common good rather than culture wars.
“Catholic social teaching underpins my politics,” he once said. In an expansive talk last year for the British religion and politics think tank Theos, Mr. Burnham called for moving from a crisis of trust between people and their government to a “culture of encounter,” a phrase he learned from Pope Francis.
That approach to politics — a “healthy ‘culture of negotiation,’” as Pope Leo XIV recently called it, that leaves no one behind — has gone missing from the American church and American politics, to the detriment of both.
For decades, Catholic politics in the United States has been more of an internecine battlefield than a search for common ground. Catholic politicians such as Al Smith, the “happy warrior,” in the 1920s, and R. Sargent Shriver, who helped found the Peace Corps and other programs in the war on poverty, in the 1960s, once found in politics a way to acceptance in society by focusing on social justice and the well-being of all.
More recently, Catholics in the political realm focused on divisive social issues such as the legal status of gay rights or abortion. (In their official political guidance, U.S. bishops called abortion the “preeminent priority” as markers to divide good Catholics from bad Catholics.) Those who didn’t measure up could be threatened with being barred from communion.
Prominent Catholic politicians including Vice President JD Vance spend time arguing with the pope about who is better at theology, while other Catholics argue over how much Latin to use at Mass.
The day Mr. Burnham took office, he visited one of London’s leading centers dealing with the homeless, which had been founded by Cardinal Basil Hume. Later that day, standing in front of 10 Downing Street, he pledged to end homelessness across the country. His first speeches as the new Labour leader and as prime minister read like a compendium of Catholic social principles. He called for rebalancing power to emphasize local issues and not just centralized control, harmonizing what Catholic social teaching calls subsidiarity and solidarity, as well as seeking common ground in “a new sense of unity and common cause.”
“His vocabulary is moral, framing politics in terms of fairness, dignity and belonging,” Paul Vallely wrote in the Catholic magazine America. “But its roots are clear.”
Those roots are in northern England, the working-class area between Manchester (where he later became mayor) and Liverpool, a region with a large concentration of Catholics, many from Ireland, who once faced discrimination for their religion or their ethnicity or both. They experienced the effects of the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government, which accelerated the decline of the area’s heavy industries in the 1980s.
Mr. Burnham was an altar boy at the time, back when Liverpool’s archbishop, Derek Worlock, effectively attacked Thatcher’s economic program on cassette tapes that were played at Mass across his diocese. Archbishop Worlock sought to give northern Catholics a voice and express their grievances, “to tell them that they were right to be angry,” the journalist Clifford Longley wrote in The Tablet, a Catholic publication.
“There was, and still is, a direct read-across between what I was learning at school and church and Labour values,” Mr. Burnham has said.
Little wonder that Burnham listed Catholicism — along with the Labour Party and Everton F.C., Liverpool’s second team for most of its recent history — as his formative influences. “I’ve always felt that there’s a connection between the three in terms of identity and that’s about the underdog, a sense of solidarity, and values.”
Amid an intense debate on a bill that would legalize medically assisted death in England and Wales, Mr. Burnham weighed in with a measured and compassionate response. “There’s something that needs to happen first,” Mr. Burnham told reporters when asked about the bill. “That is the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care.” It was important, he argued, to consider the larger context — the need to improve care and give “peace of mind about that care.” The bill was defeated in the House of Commons on Friday.
Mr. Burnham’s comments won praise from British Catholic bishops and from The Catholic Herald and The Telegraph, groups and outlets not normally welcoming of liberal-sounding policy proposals. That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t imagine happening in the United States, at least until recent changes in the political landscape.
Overturning Roe v. Wade deprived abortion opponents of an easy cudgel against their foes, and some social conservatives are increasingly questioning not only the ostensibly anti-abortion promises of Donald Trump but also a G.O.P. domestic agenda that makes life harder for the poor and struggling. They are looking for effective public policy, not just effusive public piety.
Catholic bishops are increasingly united against the Trump administration’s demonizing of immigrants. Leo XIV, the first American pope, is seeking to bring all sides together in his concerns over artificial intelligence while promoting a “Christian” form of political engagement that eschews “shouts” and “slogans” and instead “requires a realistic perspective that starts with people’s concrete concerns.”
Mr. Burnham’s style also has lessons for social justice progressives who often mirror their foes on issues like abortion and euthanasia by focusing on legalization or bans instead of on proposals that address why people are stuck with often agonizing moral choices. At a rare moment when longstanding political agendas are in flux, Mr. Burnham’s approach is one avenue out of a zero-sum politics and toward the kind of policymaking and society-building that Catholic politicians in America used to be known for.
The British prime minister may not be the ideal Catholic. But he ought to be seen as a helpful corrective to an American Catholicism that often sees the faith less as a way of life and more as an avenue to an argument. Andy Burnham can always work on his spiritual life. So can we.
David Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and has covered the Vatican as a journalist for four decades.
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