Civil servants should learn more about religion, according to Britain’s ambassador to the Vatican.Francis Campbell said that politicians are usually aware of the importance of faith because of their “lived experience” in constituencies.
But he claimed that government officials are less knowledgeable, and suggested they try to find out more from devout colleagues.
Mr Campbell, Britain’s first Roman Catholic ambassador to the Holy See, said that the Western belief that religion was in decline had been proved wrong and that faith should be an important consideration in foreign policy.
It comes after he was forced to apologise to the Vatican on behalf of the Foreign Office after diplomats wrote a memo mocking Pope Benedict XVI and traditional Catholic teaching.
The document suggested that during the pontiff’s forthcoming state visit to Britain, he should launch a brand of condoms, open an abortion clinic and bless a civil partnership.
Giving a lecture on Tuesday evening to members of the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust, which debates politics and Europe, Mr Campbell did not refer directly to the scandal over the papal memo.
But asked by The Daily Telegraph whether he agreed with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that governments treat religion as a problem, he replied: “I make this observation in general on what I’ve found in four and a half years in this post and beyond, around politics and religion and civil servants.
“I’ve often found politicians and ministers have a far better grasp of religion than officials. I think it’s because ministers and politicians are grounded in constituencies, they have that lived experience of religion.
“The Soviet Union had many centres for the study of religion but they didn’t understand it. They saw it as some distant species, they didn’t have that lived experience.”
Asked later how he would improve knowledge of religion among policy-makers, Mr Campbell said: “One of the things I would do is perhaps to encourage people who are in these departments to be a little bit more forthcoming with their insight into this concept of religion. If you have a colleague who is practicing their faith and you know this person, it’s more difficult to marginalise them or dismiss where they’re coming from.
“How do you challenge that theory that somehow we’re on some sort of trajectory where we’re going to secularise ourselves out of religion? In actual fact that’s going to create more problems for us, because if the rest of the world is getting more religious and we’re getting less religious how do we have that grammar and conversation?
“The more that people are encouraged to step forward a little bit and challenge this notion that we can compartmentalise religion between 9 and 5 and then you can be religious again, it just doesn’t function like that. Politicians and ministers appreciate the role that religion plays in peoples’ lives rather than being something remote that we study.”
Mr Campbell said there had been a “groupthink” idea among Western societies throughout the 20th century that religion was dying out and so irrelevant to foreign policy, but recent figures and events showed that was wrong.
But he also cautioned against faith being seen as the sole cause of disputes around the world, and against ignoring its positive role in conflict resolution.
SIC: TCUK