Fintan O’Toole: Most notable thing about Johnson’s Catholicism is how much it doesn’t matter

I have it on good authority that the papal briefing on world events last Monday morning went something like this. Holy Father, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that Boris Johnson is a Roman Catholic and that the breach between Rome and England created by Henry VIII is now healed. The bad news is that he's hoping to beat Henry VIII's record for the number of wives an English ruler can accumulate.

Somehow, the news that the United Kingdom has its first ever serving Catholic prime minister ought to feel more momentous than it does. Something quite epic is coming to an end. But the moment is oddly tinged with absurdity.

The British state was shaped, not so much by Protestantism as by anti-Catholicism. The “papists” – embodied by the French, the Spanish and the Catholic Irish – served for nearly 500 years as the Other by which Britain defined itself.

The most notable thing about Johnson's seeming reversion to the religion of his baptism is not how much it matters. It is how much it doesn't matter

As recently as 2008, a practising Catholic could not, in effect, be prime minister of the UK. The holder of that office was required to advise the monarch, not just on secular matters, but on the governance of the Church of England, including the appointment of bishops.

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That such a nakedly sectarian provision could survive for so long is a reminder of how much the British state was shaped around the Protestant settlement. That nobody much cared when it was scrapped by Gordon Brown is, however, a mark of how anachronistic the fusion of Britishness and Protestantism has become.

In this light, the most notable thing about Johnson’s seeming reversion to the religion of his baptism is not how much it matters. It is how much it doesn’t matter.

Absence of fuss

It is similar, in this respect, to Ireland getting a taoiseach who happened to be gay – the very fact that such an event can be a non-event is a mark of profound change.

In both cases, the absence of fuss suggests that something is dying. Leo Varadkar’s uncontroversial accession marked the demise of Catholic Ireland. The ho-hum reaction to Johnson’s outing of himself as a reborn Romanist speaks of the death of a version of Englishness and Britishness that held sway for centuries.

So this is – or ought to be – a pivotal moment. Except that the sense of occasion is undercut by hypocrisy and irony.

The hypocrisy lies on the Catholic side of the business. People in Ireland will not be too surprised to find that the Church, so harsh on ordinary divorcees and same-sex couples, discovers its soft side when prime ministers need to be accommodated.

It is a clear rule, for example, that those who are in relationships with partners who are not their indissolubly-wedded spouses may not receive Holy Communion at Mass. In 1998, when Bertie Ahern was taoiseach, the Catholic bishops of Ireland, England and Wales, and Scotland issued a joint document called One Bread, One Body.

It is quite explicit: “There are Catholics who are in new relationships established after one or both partners have suffered the trauma of breakdown in their marriages, and who are unable therefore to participate fully in the Eucharist they celebrate. Some Catholics present may be in irregular marriage relationships and for that reason may not go to communion.”

At the time, and subsequently, Bertie Ahern was in a relationship with Celia Larkin. This was not a private affair: Ms Larkin accompanied the Taoiseach on State occasions and foreign visits and her name appeared on invitations to State functions. Yet Mr Ahern also regularly received communion at Mass.

Asked to explain this apparent anomaly, a Church spokesman replied: “We do not know the nature of their relationship.”

Similar courtesy

An institution that had policed our private lives, and had those it suspected of the sin of company-keeping “read off the altar”, was happy to pretend that Bertie and Celia were just pals. (The relationship became an issue for the Church only when Bertie took things a bit too far by issuing, in Ms Larkin’s name as well as his own, the invitations to a State reception to honour the elevation of Desmond Connell as a cardinal.)

It seems only fair, then, that the Church extend a similar courtesy to the British prime minister. It is equally happy to assume that his two previous marriages did not really exist and that the children born in the second one were produced out of wedlock.

The Church has a name for this process of making inconvenient realities disappear: mental reservation. Bertie and Celia were just friends. The women who thought they were married to Boris – Allegra Mostyn-Owen and Marina Wheeler – were just flings.

The suppression of religious minorities was common all over Europe. Ireland was unique in that it was the religious majority that was suppressed

But this capacity to define reality in any way that suits those in power got me wondering about the history of these islands. Contrary to its reputation for rigidity, Rome has shown that, when power and politics are at stake, it can adopt positions that would have the Cirque du Soleil’s star contortionists gasp in wonderment.

What a pity, then, that it did not do for Henry VIII what it has just done for Boris Johnson. All Henry wanted was an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon – in effect a declaration that, like Boris Johnson’s first two marriages, it did not exist. A bit of mental reservation would have gone a long way. Imagine all the trouble it might have saved.

English hegemony over Ireland was always, to put it mildly, problematic. But it became infinitely more so when religious difference was superimposed on national antagonism. The suppression of religious minorities was common all over Europe. Ireland was unique in that it was the religious majority that was suppressed.

Bent the rules

Sectarianism shaped both British rule and Irish resistance. It justified the exclusion of the “papist” majority from power – disloyalty to the established church was also treachery against the state. It created, in turn, an equal and opposite ideology in which only Catholics could be truly Irish.

If only Pope Paul III had bent the rules as generously for Henry VIII as the Church does for today’s rulers, who knows what grief we might have been spared? Where was holy hypocrisy when we needed it?

The other thing that undermines the grandeur of this moment is a deep historic irony. Anti-Catholicism in England was always bound up with anti-Europeanism. British distrust of the early Common Market was fuelled in part by the very prominent part played in its creation by Catholic politicians and intellectuals.

And yet, just as anti-Catholicism has evaporated as a force in English politics, anti-Europeanism is basking in its triumph. This is part of a larger shift: the Catholic vote in England (much of it the result of Irish immigration) has moved sharply to the right.

For all of the incongruities attendant on Boris Johnson’s Catholic wedding, it does dramatise the inescapable fact that the relationships between religion and political identity on these islands are altering rapidly and fundamentally. Given how crucial the relationships have been, the significance of these changes should not be lost in the absurdities of their most startling expression.