FOOTBALLER: Ricardo Kaka
The world’s most valuable footballer, Brazilian midfielder Kaka, said no thanks to a £100 million transfer from AC Milan to Manchester City. Wasn’t meant to be – this time at least.
Deeply religious, twenty-something Kaka usually points his fingers to Heaven after scoring and wants to become an evangelical minister when he quits football.
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COMMEDIAN: Frank Skinner
Cheeky chappy Frank Skinner used to be embarassed about his Catholic faith and stopped going to Mass as a teenager, but returned after reading a book by theologian Hans Küng.
Says Skinner: “I read that the Church is ‘on the road to truth’, but it takes many cul-de-sacs. And I thought that’s basically as close as I’m going to get.”
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MANCHESTER UNITED MANAGER: Sir Alex Ferguson
Showing remarkable calm when under pressure from journalists and larger-than-life football players, Sir Alex is grateful for his Christian values.
“I pray every day,’ Sir Alex has said. “And my Christian faith is so important.”
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POP STAR: Sir Cliff Richard
Sir Cliff may have just marked 50 years in showbiz, but in another eight years he will be celebrating his Golden Jubilee as a devout Christian.
A popular singer, he merrily combines his Christian faith with songs such as Devil Woman and cute hip movements on stage. Cliffy was once voted more famous than the Pope.
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ATTORNEY GENERAL: Baroness Scotland
Born in Dominica, the Caribbean Sea, brought up in East London, made a life peer and the first female Attorney General in 2007, Patricia, Baroness Scotland is true success story.
But as a socialist Catholic, she puts a major part of her rise down to God – as do some of her colleagues who once teasingly said it’s God who won her cases. “I have never been ashamed of being a Christian,” she says. “I used to pray for my clients, for the cases I did, for the judiciary and am not ashamed of any of that, because it is actually who I am.”
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ACTOR: Jeremy Irons
Jeremy Irons, Oscar-winning actor (Reversal of Fortune) regards himself as a Christian of no fixed denomination as he is ‘not a club man’.
Irons occasionally expresses his views on religious affairs and lives with his actress wife Sinead Cusack in a restored castle in West Cork, Ireland. He asked a local priest to bless the castle when work began.
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TV JOURNALIST: Jeremy Vine
BBC’s Panorama and radio presenter Jeremy Vine has struggled with the combination of being a hard-hitting news reporter and a Christian. ‘A journalist is paid not to have views,’ he says.
However, he says of his conversion in his 20s: ‘I was just praying and God became suddenly very real for me. You don’t see anything, you don’t hear anything, you don’t fall over! But it became very real for me then. To search for something you just brushed against once. It was a moment and it certainly re-oriented me.’
