But he is curiously remote from the people he seeks to govern. He does not empathise. He cannot always feel his way to judgements that embrace popular opinion.

It seems to be his Catholicism. We have had other Catholic prime ministers - Joe Lyons, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Paul Keating - but Abbott is the only one who had part of his education in a seminary, and the only one who is defined as a Catholic. Curtin was a pacifist, Chifley a socialist, and if Lyons were devout, then it was in an age when most people were. He was defined, if at all, by his large family.

Mostly, you don’t know their faith until you attend their funerals, and even then in this ecumenical age you can’t be sure. Bob Menzies service was conducted in a Presbyterian church in Melbourne. So he must have been a Presbyterian. Sophie Panopoulos was married in a Church of England cathedral with the ceremony conducted by Greek Orthodox clergy. Alby Schultz’s funeral service the other day took place in a large Catholic church in Cootamundra, but with the Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, Stuart Robinson, presiding. Alby was Church of England, but only Cootamundra’s Catholic Church could hold the large number of people attending. Gough Whitlam’s religion-free service was in the Sydney Town Hall. I’ve been called on to deliver two eulogies, one for a fellow journalist, David O’Reilly, in a garden at Murrumbateman, and another for Rob Chalmers, also a fellow journalist, at the National Press Club. Murray Sayle was given a secular service at Rookwood, and Peter Harvey a memorial at the Sydney Town Hall. Mostly, my former colleagues were seen off at the Canberra Crematorium.

Morals and faith divide people on other than those issues of economic management, national security and law and order that are the proper concern of a modern democracy. Paul Keating decided to have a referendum on whether we should become a republic as a soon as the number of Catholics exceeded the number of Anglicans. What a misreading that turned out to be in this ecumenical, tolerant and increasingly secular age.

As health minister in the Howard government Abbott worried people over abortion, contraception and stem cell research. He is equivocating over homosexual marriage, dividing his cabinet, his party and the electorate. It is politically dangerous.

Moreover, reinforcing John Howard’s unwise legislated ban on homosexual marriage is not what he and his government were elected to do. The stakes are too high for theological self-indulgence in these perilous times.