British public life cannot be a "God-free zone", the head of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales warned tonight.Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor said he was unhappy about attempts to "eliminate the Christian voice" from the public forum.
He urged Catholics to prevent the country from becoming a "world devoid of religious faith" through a deeper engagement with God by praying, studying and performing charitable acts.
In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral the cardinal observed there was "considerable spiritual homelessness" and, even if people wanted to believe, they felt faith was no longer an option.
"Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience. This is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a personal need. You cannot banish religion to the church premises. There are social currents that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it."
The cardinal said modern culture prevented people from expressing their aspirations. An individual's spiritual and religious impulses were not being channelled deeply enough because there was a "pervasive message" that committing oneself to God was to "take a step back from being independent and mature".
He suggested, however, that Christians were partly to blame for the prevalence of modern atheism, which was a product of a "distorted kind of Christianity".
"What did we do to generate unbelief? We need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading idea of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of our believers."
He called for a better dialogue between believers and non-believers based on mutual esteem, rather than a rejection of difference, in order to address the split between the Gospels and culture. He also questioned the grounds on which some prominent atheists attacked faith.
"The interesting question about atheism is what is the theism being denied? Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins does not believe in? The God that is being rejected by such people is a God I don't believe in either."
Murphy O'Connor's lecture was the last in a series on faith and public life in Britain. Other speakers have included the former prime minister Tony Blair, who said religion needed rescuing from extremism and irrelevance, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who said religion could provide a solid foundation for human rights. Williams has differed from his Catholic counterpart by taking a more flexible approach to a multicultural and multifaith Britain.
The cardinal has been outspoken in his attempt to secure the place of Christianity in society. He has attacked the caricature of the Catholic church as "some heartless, insular institution that wants to deny people their freedom", describing it as a distortion to persuade people the church had no constructive role to play.
Last month, in an interview with the Guardian, he hit out at the representatives of an "aggressive secularism" he believed was gaining ground in the UK. In that interview he defended the church's role in the debate over "hybrid" embryos, and argued that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the representatives of other faiths when it came to their input into public policy in Britain.
He has also criticised the government for being motivated by anti-religious thinking over adoption laws and single faith schools.
Earlier this year Catholic outcries over the human fertilisation and embryology bill angered scientists, who accused the church of "misrepresenting" and even "lying" about human-animal embryos for scientific research.
This followed comments by cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, who said that the bill would allow "grotesque procedures" of "Frankenstein proportions". The intervention persuaded the prime minister, Gordon Brown, to back down and allow MPs a free vote.
It is expected Murphy O'Connor will step down as archbishop of Westminster in January or February 2009 and it will be the first time this has happened since the position was created in 1850.
His 10 predecessors all died while in office.
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