{"id":3470,"date":"2006-04-02T00:47:31","date_gmt":"2006-04-02T00:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/more-blair-rc-rumors.html"},"modified":"2006-04-02T00:47:31","modified_gmt":"2006-04-02T00:47:31","slug":"more-blair-rc-rumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/more-blair-rc-rumors.html","title":{"rendered":"More Blair RC rumors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is a Franciscan secretly saying Mass at 10 Downing Street? Where’s the priest hide?<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Franciscan friar who helped convert the Tory MP Ann Widdecombe to Catholicism is now holding private Mass for the Prime Minister at Downing Street. <\/p>\n

Tony Blair has been attending private Roman Catholic Mass with Father Michael Seed, prompting speculation that he plans to become a Catholic when he leaves office.<\/p>\n

Father Michael, who is well known for converting establishment figures to Catholicism, was reported in The Sunday Times to have held services for the Blair family at Downing Street and at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence.<\/p>\n

Father Michael Seed helped convert the Conservative MP John Gummer to Catholicism and is a popular figure among London’s Catholic aristocracy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is a Franciscan secretly saying Mass at 10 Downing Street? Where’s the priest hide? The Franciscan friar who helped convert the Tory MP Ann Widdecombe to Catholicism is now holding private Mass for the Prime Minister at Downing Street. Tony Blair has been attending private Roman Catholic Mass with Father Michael Seed, prompting speculation that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMore Blair RC rumors - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/more-blair-rc-rumors.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"More Blair RC rumors - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is a Franciscan secretly saying Mass at 10 Downing Street? Where’s the priest hide? The Franciscan friar who helped convert the Tory MP Ann Widdecombe to Catholicism is now holding private Mass for the Prime Minister at Downing Street. 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Where’s the priest hide? The Franciscan friar who helped convert the Tory MP Ann Widdecombe to Catholicism is now holding private Mass for the Prime Minister at Downing Street. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}