National Catholic Register portal reports on the resignation of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the likely succession of Andy Burnham, a self-described “cultural Catholic” and socialist mayor of Greater Manchester, to the highest office in the land. The article, authored by Edward Pentin and published on June 22, 2026 — the feast of St. Thomas More — presents Burnham as a figure whose Catholic identity is reduced to a vague social sensibility while explicitly rejecting the Church’s moral teaching on sexuality, marriage, and the sanctity of life. That this portrait is offered without substantive doctrinal critique, and indeed with a tone of mild admiration for Burnham’s “warmth” and “compassion,” reveals the depth of the conciliar capitulation to the spirit of the age.
The Emptiness of “Cultural Catholicism”: A Faith Without the Faith
The article presents Andy Burnham as a man “deeply marked by a formative Catholic upbringing,” yet the content of that formation, as he himself describes it, amounts to nothing more than a sentimental attachment to social equality and fairness — values that, far from being distinctively Catholic, are the common currency of secular progressive humanism. Burnham is quoted as saying the Church of his youth spoke up for “social equality and fairness in its broadest sense,” and that he internalized “Catholic social teaching as a kind of moral grammar.” But this is a grotesque reduction of the Faith. Catholic social teaching is not an autonomous ethical system that can be detached from the totality of revealed doctrine; it flows from the Kingship of Christ, the reality of sin, the necessity of grace, the existence of eternal judgment, and the supernatural end of man. Strip these away, and what remains is not Catholic social teaching but mere humanitarianism — the very “cult of man” condemned by Quas Primas.
Pius XI taught in Quas Primas that “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” Burnham’s “moral grammar” is precisely such a renunciation: it takes the language of justice and solidarity and empties it of all supernatural content. The article notes that Burnham’s children attend Catholic schools because he believes in “the values and the grounding it gives you,” but he simultaneously “takes issue with the Church’s moral teaching in key areas, especially on sexual ethics.” This is not a tension to be gently observed; it is a formal contradiction. One cannot profess to value Catholic formation while publicly repudiating the Church’s definitive moral teaching. Our Lord Himself declared: “He that is not with Me is against Me” (Matt. 12:30). There is no middle ground between fidelity and dissent.
The Heresy of Selective Obedience
Burnham’s record is not merely one of private doubt or struggling conscience. He has been, by his own account, an active and public promoter of causes that the Church condemns as gravely sinful. The article states plainly that he was “proud” of being the first Labour frontbencher to call for the legalization of “same-sex marriage” — legislation that the Catholic Church teaches is intrinsically contrary to the natural law and divine positive law. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (pre-conciliar teaching, consistent with the perennial magisterium) teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that “under no circumstances can they be approved.” Burnham does not merely hold a private opinion at odds with this teaching; he has labored politically to enshrine the contrary as the law of the land.
Furthermore, the article notes that Burnham is firmly pro-abortion and has criticized those seeking to restrict abortion rights. The killing of the innocent unborn is not a matter of prudential political judgment; it is a crime against the Fifth Commandment, and those who promote it place themselves outside the communion of the Church. As the Council of Trent anathematizes anyone who says that the Church errs in teaching that the soul of the unborn is created and infused at conception, so too does the perennial magisterium condemn those who would legalize or promote the destruction of innocent life. Burnham’s position is not a “difference of emphasis”; it is formal cooperation with evil.
The article further reports that Burnham was “a strong supporter of Pope Francis,” whom he praised as a humble man with “great warmth” and a “fantastic character,” and that he had “high hopes” Francis would move the Church to become increasingly “pro-LGBT.” This is a telling admission. The post-conciliar pontificates, beginning with John XXIII, have been characterized by a systematic dismantling of the Church’s public opposition to the errors of modernity — precisely the errors catalogued in the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX and condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis of St. Pius X. Burnham’s enthusiasm for Francis is not incidental; it is the natural affinity of a man who has embraced the conciliar revolution’s substitution of “dialogue” and “compassion” for the uncompromising proclamation of truth.
The Irony of St. Thomas More’s Feast
The article itself notes, almost casually, the “historical irony” that Starmer’s resignation came on June 22, the feast of St. Thomas More — the 16th-century English martyr who chose death rather than compromise his fidelity to the Church. The author writes that “the contrast between Burnham’s dissenting Catholicism… and More’s martyrdom… could not be clearer.” Yet this observation is left as a literary flourish, a piece of historical color, rather than drawn out to its necessary conclusion. St. Thomas More died precisely because he refused to separate his Catholic conscience from the demands of public life. He understood that the Faith is not a private sentiment or a “moral grammar” to be applied selectively; it is the deposit of divine revelation, guarded by the Church’s magisterium, and binding on every Catholic in every sphere of life — including, and especially, political life.
The contrast is not merely “clear”; it is absolute and damning. More went to the block rather than acknowledge a king’s supremacy over the Church. Burnham seeks the highest political office in the land while publicly repudiating the Church’s teaching on marriage, sexuality, and the sanctity of life. More witnessed to the Faith by dying for it; Burnham witnesses against it by living in contradiction to it. The article’s failure to draw this contrast into a coherent moral judgment is itself symptomatic of the conciliar mentality: the reluctance to condemn error, the preference for “nuance” over clarity, the substitution of journalistic observation for prophetic witness.
Socialism and the Church’s Condemnation
The article acknowledges, in passing, that Burnham’s socialism is “at odds with the traditional teachings of the Church, notably the papal magisterium of Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X and Pius XII,” but immediately qualifies this by noting that these popes “strongly supported social reforms, workers’ rights and state action for the common good.” This is a classic conciliar maneuver: to acknowledge the Church’s condemnation of socialism while simultaneously suggesting that the substance of socialist aims is compatible with Catholic teaching, differing only in “means” or “emphasis.”
This is false. The Church’s condemnation of socialism is not a prudential judgment about policy mechanisms; it is a doctrinal judgment about the nature of society, property, and the human person. Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, taught that the right to private property is natural and inviolable, and that socialism, by seeking to abolish private property and place all goods in common under state control, is “directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind” and “would injure the very ones whom it is intended to help.” Pius XI, in Quadragesimo Anno, reiterated that “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX condemns socialism, communism, secret societies, and clerico-liberal societies as “pests” to be “reprobated in the severest terms.” St. Pius X, in Lamentabili and Pascendi, identified the synthesis of all these errors as Modernism — the very heresy that denies the immutability of dogma and substitutes the evolution of doctrine for the unchanging truth revealed by Christ.
Burnham’s socialism is not an accident or a secondary feature of his political identity; it is of a piece with his rejection of Catholic moral teaching. Both flow from the same root: the substitution of human autonomy for divine authority, of naturalistic humanitarianism for supernatural charity, of the city of man for the City of God.
The Post-Conciliar Captivity of “Catholic” Public Life
The article describes Burnham as potentially “the most overtly Catholic figure to hold the office in cultural terms,” and notes the “symbolic significance” of a Catholic ascending to the premiership given the historical exclusion of Catholics from Parliament before 1829. But this “symbolic significance” is, in reality, a bitter irony. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 was itself a product of the liberal revolution — the same revolution that the Church has consistently condemned. The “freedom” it conferred was the freedom to participate in a political order increasingly organized on principles hostile to the Faith: religious indifferentism, the sovereignty of the state, the exclusion of God from public life.
What does it profit a nation to have a “Catholic” prime minister if that prime minister publicly repudiates the Church’s teaching on the most fundamental moral questions of the age? The article’s framing — treating Burnham’s “cultural Catholicism” as a legitimate and even admirable form of Catholic identity — is itself a product of the post-conciliar disaster. The conciliar sect, having abandoned the Church’s mission of converting nations to Christ the King, now celebrates the presence of “Catholic” figures in public life regardless of their fidelity to the Faith. This is not evangelization; it is capitulation. It is the reduction of Catholicism to a cultural artifact, a nostalgic attachment to parish schools and social solidarity, stripped of all doctrinal and moral substance.
As Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” Burnham’s ascent, far from being a cause for Catholic celebration, is a symptom of the profound apostasy that has overtaken not only the conciliar structures but the Catholic populations of the Western world. A “Catholic” who promotes abortion, celebrates “same-sex marriage,” supports the conciar sect’s most destructive pontiff, and embraces socialism is not a Catholic in any meaningful theological sense. He is, at best, a lapsed Catholic; at worst, an enemy of the Faith operating under its name.
The faithful are called not to celebrate such figures but to pray for their conversion — and to recognize in the spectacle of “Catholic” public life as it now exists in the West the fulfillment of Our Lord’s warning: “When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).
Source:
UK’s Starmer Resigns, Opening Path to No. 10 Downing Street for ‘Cultural Catholic’ Andy Burnham (ncregister.com)
Date: 22.06.2026