Come all ye faithful: just don’t expect a joyful and triumphant welcome

ANYONE who has read Alistair Campbell’s eponymous account of the Blair years knows Tony Blair is already in the running for sainthood, if only for his unremitting kindness to and patience with Campbell and the other infighting inadequates who surrounded him during his leadership of New Labour.

As of last Saturday however, if he is canonised, he will join the rapidly growing roster of Catholic saints, having officially converted to Catholicism just before the weekend.

When the news of his move away from Anglicanism came through, sceptics — agnostics and atheists, for the most part — raised an eyebrow or two, shrugged and moved on, their attitude a version of “whatever you’re having yourself, Tony”.

They could have pointed out that the Church he’s just joined has been responsible for inquisitions, persecutions and the preservation of social inequities. But for the most part, they shut up about the past or simply wished him well.

It was one of his fellow-converts, former Conservative MP Ann Widdicombe, who welcomed him into the community of Catholicism with a land-mine, externally applied.

Having herself joined the Catholic Church in 1993, she’s got an interesting take on the process. The way she sees it, it starts, not with baptism, but with confession. She wants Mr Blair to confess that he was wrong in some of his lifelong views and announce out loud: “I believe everything the Church teaches to be revealed truth.”

Ms Widdicombe has a little list of views she requires Mr Blair to abjure, starting with his pro-choice stance on abortion, taking in stem cell research and contraception, and ending up, oddly, with Sunday trading.

She says if people don’t get the assurance that he’s given up all that bad stuff, they will think the Church abandoned the rules, letting him in only because he’s a bit special. Clearly, nobody who approves of Sunday trading is going to get into Heaven, even if they get received into the Church by a double-barreled Cardinal, as happened with Mr Blair.

Ms Widdicombe is an interesting bundle of molecules. Her novels are distinguished by a humanity and compassion which doesn’t characterise her own off-the-cuff utterances. She certainly doesn’t seem to think humanity and compassion are the place to start when welcoming a newcomer to the RC flock.

If she was the parent in the story of the Prodigal Son, you can imagine her at the front door, demanding a written contract be signed by the returned offspring, guaranteeing that he rejects high living and global vagabonding for the future and regrets it in the past. You wouldn’t hear instructions to kill the fatted calf and feed up the new arrival. Ann Widdicombe believes in the conditional welcome.

Which, in itself, demonstrates the unchanging nature of human personality, despite conversion, whether religious or of some other form. People change their affiliations. They rarely change themselves.

A good example of this is the tendency of criminals to find God when behind bars, although, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, this doesn’t seem to be a major feature of imprisonment in this country.

It happens all the time in America, not least because of the impassioned prison ministry of another convert, Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s manipulators, who found God when imprisoned after Watergate and has devoted the rest of his life to serving the needs of prisoners.

Police officers, worldwide, tend to cast eyes to Heaven when Colson’s name is mentioned and to be deeply cynical about Bible-bashing prison converts: forget the label, say the cops, the man wearing the label doesn’t change.

The label or conversion, in the case of violent prisoners, does not always have to be religious. More than one murderer has undergone what might be termed a literary conversion while incarcerated, moving, through prison education, from illiteracy to the capacity to read extensively and write well. Jack Henry Abbott, a killer before he was 25, underwent precisely this kind of literary conversion with the help of the late Norman Mailer.

MAILER, always fascinated by violence and a sporadic practitioner of it, came across Abbot through prison letters which the author found sufficiently insightful to merit Mailer’s push for their inclusion in a literary magazine and subsequent publication as part of Abbott’s critically-acclaimed book, In the Belly of the Beast.

The book led to efforts to parole Abbott, led by Mailer and his literary friends, and the prisoner was transferred to a half-way house wherefrom he could become the toast of literary New York.

Six weeks after his release from high-security prison, he stabbed a waiter to death.

Similarly, when a European murderer named Jack Unterweger wrote a play and an autobiography which attracted the attention of the literary elite of Austria, his literary conversion was presumed to underpin profound personal change. In fact, once released, he embarked on the serial murder of countless prostitutes.

Converts tend to change their context, their overarching beliefs and their means of earning a living. They rarely — as Ann Widdicombe’s intervention about Tony Blair demonstrates — change their fundamental nature.

While this should (but won’t) lead literary figures in future to doubt that nicely -worded insight, on the part of an imprisoned killer, necessarily means he will never raise a hand to damage another in the future, it certainly should (but won’t) lead religious converts to look to the founder of the religion into which they have bought, rather than into their own hearts, for the appropriate response to new members of their community.

At Calvary, when one of the two thieves crucified along with Christ requested that he be remembered when he “came into his kingdom,” the response was not to insist, Widdicombe-style, that he make public declaration of his unquestioning faith in what he was buying into. Instead, he got a welcome on a scale he could never have anticipated: a promise that “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise”.

An unchanging thread in religious conversion is the immediate desire, on the part of many new converts, to exclude others.

Instead of being transfigured with the confidence and comfort of inclusion in a community and in a way of life leading, the convert believes, to eternal life, the emphasis and energy go into defining what qualifies and disqualifies others as co-religionists.

It is unlikely that Mr Blair will be much affected by Ms Widdicombe’s conditional welcome. His conversion was calmly timed and followed years of consideration.

More generous Catholics, or perhaps Catholics with more years of Catholicism behind them than has the former Conservative MP, would hope that his conversion experience is as fulfilling as that of an earlier convert, Malcolm Muggeridge.

“I have found a resting place in the Church,” he wrote. “A sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”