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

As a working-class party, Labor still naturally attracted many Protestants as voters and parliamentarians, but it was disproportionately Catholic at least until 1955. But sectarian feeling was high in the 1950s and contributed to a split in the Labor party that led to many Catholics departing, some of them forming the breakaway Democratic Labor party. Albanese’s evocation of a Catholic tribalism in his “three faiths” quip harks back to an earlier Australia. But his claim to a share in the broader cultural and political influence of Catholicism on Australian politics and society is thoroughly modern. It is the impulse that might move an Australian prime minister to the brink of tears on the death of a pope.