The Roman Catholic Archbishop who is favourite to become the next Archbishop of Westminster has launched an attack on the values of the "market" and called on the Government to look to Christian and spiritual ethics for solutions to the credit crisis this Christmas. The Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, said it would take more than financial measures to take Britain out of recession and that the answers were to be found in faith.
"The Christian faith is a guardian of the true human virtues we need as we begin to live in a time of austerity and hardship", he said in a sermon in Birmingham that came on the eve of the Chancellor's pre-budge report today (Monday).
"The root causes of the financial crisis are ethical. Indeed the very term 'credit' comes from 'credere' and indicates that trust and belief are central," said the Archbishop.
Some senior insiders in the banking industry agree with the Archbishop's analysis.
A senior manager told The Times that he believed it no accident that the world's strongest private-sector bank, HSBC, criticised in the "good times" for being too conservative but now well placed to survive the crisis, is headed by an Anglican lay preacher, Stephen Green.
Mr Green has made no secret of how his religious convictions inform his business life.
Archbishop Nichols said: "A market controlled only by regulation, sooner or later, will succumb to its inherent drive for profit at all costs. Of course the profit motive is crucial and responsibility to investors is a significant balancing factor in risk taking."
Archbishop Nichols, who as The Times disclosed on Saturday heads the list of names or the "terna" being sent to Rome imminently to aid Pope Benedict XVI in his choice of bishop to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor at Westminster, said the past few weeks had shown that left to itself, the financial market has norobust external frame of reference nor a wider economic framework.
"The financial market has behaved as if it exists for itself and within itself and to the benefit of those who are part of it.
"What the market lacked was the perspective and practice of true virtue, which builds trust, and without which every human endeavour is unstable", he said.
Speaking to the city's civic leaders at their annual Mass at the annual Mass at Birmingham's St Chad's, where the congregation also included representatives of other faiths and Christian denominations, Archbishop Nichols said Church was not a place that could offer financial solutions. "But we should gain some insight into our situation, in the light of the truth about our human nature which this Feast expresses, and which faith in God makes clear," he said.
"As a society we have neglected the development of shared ethical values and principles to guide and shape our behaviour, believing that to be an unattainable goal, and we have substituted raft after raft of regulation.
Society needs the perspective and practice of true virtue.
"Whereas the notion of 'values' is a flexible and friendly one - because a person can establish or negotiate their own values, and accommodate them to their own behaviour - virtues are more demanding.
"A virtue is a personal capacity for action and a power for progress and perfection. The rules of the game alone have never produced a masterful performance. Only dedication, sacrifice and true skill do that. This is the arena of virtue.
"The human virtues guarded by the Church are those of prudence, courage, justice and temperance. These human virtues have their true foundation in the greater, theological virtues: faith hope and love, which bind us to God and to each other", explained the Archbishop, who also spoke about the virtue of mercy.
"Mercy is the virtue by which the application of expected rules is suspended, out of love and compassion," he said.
"A family or society that is incapable of showing mercy to its weak and vulnerable is dead from within. The wooden application of regulation squeezes the life out of us, and can only be rescued or redeemed, by lives of true virtue and above all by mercy, the most precious quality of God."
One senior London bank official told The Times: "The Archbishop is right about trust and belief having suffered, but whether he is right about the solution depending on spiritual confidence is a slightly separate thing. There is a money-at-all-costs attitude that goes across the entire industry. But I wonder whether it applies just to the financial industry, or whether it reflects more deeply what is going on in society as a whole. The financial industry let people to take out big mortgages and debts so they could live in fancy houses and go on foreign holidays, but there was a big demand that the industry was respsonding to.
"So it is not quite right to say there is a Christian solution to the 'paradox of thrift' [the paradox which means the less people spend, the poorer everyone gets because money supply stops going round.] I think the problems go much deeper. Really what is happening in the financial industry is a reflection on society as a whole."
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(Source: TTO)