Albanese’s brand of cultural Catholicism harks back to an earlier Australia – but it’s also thoroughly modern | Frank Bongiorno

Anthony Albanese said that his Catholic heritage is meaningful to him.

He was mourning a foreign head of state but also a spiritual leader by Australia ’s Catholics .

Catholics were a fifth of the population at the last census.

Catholics could be punitive and unforgiving, especially to single mothers, but Francis was a man who said it was a religion for the poor and oppressed.

He does not appear to be a regular churchgoer. He is not a “practising Catholic”, we would once have said. Rather he is what is sometimes called a “cultural Catholic”. When I first heard that term in the mid-1980s I assumed that it was a handy euphemism for not going to church. Almost 40 years on I can see that it is more meaningful. It is the impulse that might move an Australian prime minister to the brink of tears on the death of a pope..