Word around the Vatican is that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will finally become a Roman Catholic this December, in a private ceremony at the London residence of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

Longstanding rumors of a Blair conversion gained credibility this past June when the British leader, whose wife Cherie is a Catholic, visited Pope Benedict in the Vatican. It was widely noted at the time that Blair gave the pope three framed photographs of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a 19th-century English convert to Catholicism.

And speaking of Newman, Britain’s Telegraph reported earlier this month that the Vatican is on the verge of attributing a miracle to him, which would make possible his beatification and eventually his canonization as a saint.