Like Burnham, I was an altar boy. His Catholic upbringing is shaping the way he governs | Julian Coman

Like Andy Burnham, I was once an enthusiastic altar boy, although I don’t recall competing to be at the front with the communion plate as the prime minister apparently did. Much of my motivation had little to do with piety. The tips received for serving at weddings were often very generous and I got on well with Father Jerome, an engagingly worldly monk from Ampleforth who shared my passion for Manchester United.

I’m five years older than Burnham, but the atmosphere of the small-town northern Catholicism we grew up with will have been much the same. The second Vatican council’s reforms, responding to the social changes under way since the 1960s, were “democratising” the tone and style of worship, and traditionalists were mourning the sidelining of the old Latin mass. The huge success of Pope John Paul II’s groundbreaking visit to Britain in 1982 – the first by a reigning pontiff – had made the faith seem more mainstream and less rarefied. Politically, most Catholics voted Labour, and the large number of Celtic surnames in parish registers testified to a demographic significantly different from Anglican congregations, which were both more English and more Tory.

Burnham is the first British prime minister to have been raised in this kind of environment, and he has been explicit about its influence upon him. To which the response of many secular well-wishers may well be polite indifference. Catholicism gets a better press among progressives these days, as Rome takes a stand against the cruelties and excesses of Maga-style xenophobia and nationalism. But most liberals would be wary of any Catholic proselytising in areas beyond migration and human rights.

They should look deeper. Like Burnham, I lapsed – in my case when I went to university and started looking for different kinds of truths in western Marxism and leftwing social theory. But unlike Burnham, I went back to the church in my 30s. So I have watched with some fascination as the significance of the new prime minister’s cradle Catholicism has been pondered beyond the confines of the religious press.

Two weeks into Burnham’s premiership, it is already clear that something important is at stake here that meshes with Burnham’s conventionally political critique of “40 years of neoliberalism”. He himself talks of “a direct read-across between what I was learning at … church and Labour values”, which might sound a bit broad brush and a bit obvious, in a “be kind” type of way. In fact it is anything but, and it matters that the church was a Catholic one.

During the 1980s – the decade Burnham has pledged to “roll back” – Margaret Thatcher did not attempt to disguise the theological roots of a political vision that emphasised self-reliance and the Protestant work ethic as primary virtues. The Methodist worldview she inherited from her lay-preacher father translated into a strident individualism, and a contempt for the collectivist institutions and ethos of the postwar welfare society. As Thatcher asserted in the first phase of her premiership: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.”

As she evangelised, the surplice-clad Burnham was immersed in the Catholic resistance to this harsh new social doctrine, digesting and disseminating the sermons of the archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock. Based on the social teaching of papal encyclicals, Worlock’s politics (and those of his Anglican counterpart, David Sheppard) emphasised fraternity, solidarity and mutual obligation. “I am my brother’s keeper,” he observed in 1990. “And he’s sleeping pretty rough these days.”

Cut to Burnham’s first big policy announcement , when he vowed to use his premiership to end rough sleeping across the country. Commentary, understandably enough, has focused on the practical difficulties he encountered in delivering a similar pledge in Greater Manchester as mayor. But just as important is the message it sent about priorities: in the early morning of his first day in the country’s highest office of state, Burnham made a point of going to talk to homeless people on the streets of central London.

The Catholic church would call this the “preferential option for the poor”, a way of systematising the gospel idea that the last should be first. In the ethical architecture of Catholic social teaching, it is accompanied by other pillars designed to protect people from both an overmighty technocratic state and the moral indifference of the market. Subsidiarity, the idea that power should not be hoarded at the top but devolved downwards, is clearly at the heart of nascent Burnhamism. The dignity of work, elaborated upon in papal encyclicals such as John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens, has been at the core of our angst-ridden debates about the legacy of deindustrialisation and the future of AI.

The clue is in the word “social”. Thatcher’s assertion that “there is no such thing” as society channelled a Protestant emphasis on individual responsibility. It revealed a perspective with a lineage going back to post-Reformation distrust of a Catholicism that, with its smells, bells and rituals, inserted its clerics between the believer and their Bible. Burnham’s much-quoted naming of his chief influences as “Everton FC, the Labour party and the Catholic church” indicates a quite different sensibility; one which finds meaning and truth in relationships and social institutions, and is at heart convivial. His determination to present the crisis in social care as an issue to be collectively faced and resolved comes from the same source.

One could go on. Burnham’s love of Philip Larkin, a (self-described “agnostic”) poet who captured the pathos and sadness – but also the beauty – in ordinary lives, is of a piece with an understanding of the world that is not obsessed with individual achievement and material wealth. It was Labour’s grievous error in the 90s and 00s to succumb to the meritocratic, aspirational creed, alienating vast swathes of its traditional support that looked to the party for different, associational values.

Burnham’s Catholic upbringing appears to have provided him with convictions that allowed him to emerge relatively intact from that heretical turn. The intriguing possibility is that as a result, the country finally has a prime minister able to understand the deeper origins of the anomie gripping a country in which former sources of social solidarity are under threat, or have already disappeared. The nation’s discontents are of course eminently practical, with the cost of living and the degradation of public services taking their place at the top of the list. But they can also be attributed to a sense that the common good – another concept of Catholic social teaching – has been chronically neglected in many ways, in an unbalanced, unequal society.

That is a moral issue about the way we live now, as much as it is a technical policy challenge. If Burnham’s stint as an ambitious altar boy can help him resolve it, it will be good news for a largely secular nation.

• Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor

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