Our 2025 Annual Lecture with Andy Burnham was featured in The Observer. 19/07/2026

“Today his identity is still wrapped up in football and politics, but his relationship with the church is more equivocal. Last October he gave a lecture on religion and society to the thinktank Theos. In the Q&A afterwards he acknowledged his debt to one of the great voices of liberal Catholic social teaching, the former Archbishop of Liverpool. “Derek Worlock was a big influence. I was an altar boy. I used to have to press the button on his tape–recorded messages in the church. And to me, that kind of church was always about speaking for people without power; those who needed to be built up.”

But in the lecture itself, Burnham mentioned Pope Francis just twice, Jesus and spirituality not at all, and devolution 14 times. It was an orthodox political text with no religious flavour and – through what it left out more than what it said – placed Burnham in the right pigeon hole: a cultural Catholic who ‘doesn’t do God’. Religion is a piece of the Burnham jigsaw but far from the whole picture.”

Read the full piece by Ceri Thomas in the Observer here.

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