In this lecture I want to give a personal perspective on Faith in Britain today. And I do so with humility because everything I have, indeed everything I am, comes from how others have lived out their faith in Britain. No one generates their own faith: it always comes to us through the goodness, example and insight of others: that is the meaning of tradition and the roots of this tradition lie in the goodness, example and insight of our Lord Jesus, God’s Word made flesh, the Jewish tradition on which he draws and the Christian tradition which he creates by his risen presence.

At the simplest level, this is what it means to be Catholic, to belong to a living community of faith that extends across the centuries and will extend until the end of time. Christ is the Lord of human time, active in all of human history. With great humility, I feel that I stand in an unbroken line of teaching and holiness that goes back to the first apostles who knew Christ. I belong to a community in which Christ establishes a precious relationship to each person and brings us into blessedness.

The French theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, tells of a priest who lost his faith. When a visitor congratulated the priest on having finally got rid of this religious nonsense, the priest said, ‘From now onward, I am no more than a philosopher – in other words, a man alone’. De Lubac says that this bitter reflection was true because ‘he has left the home, outside which there will never be anything but exile and solitude’.

That home, of course, is the Church which, according to de Lubac, ‘is the only completely “open” society’, for it opens up an entry into the very life of God. He speaks of the Church as ‘the place where this gathering of all things in the Trinity begins in this world’. Being in the Church is being at home, and home, as they say, is the place where they always have to take you in. When we go to Mass we are taken up in to Christ’s love for the Father and we are filled, as he was, with divine love, the Holy Spirit of God. My family, my people, my fellow-Catholics, know this. These lectures, Faith in Britain, should not ignore the deep experience of the felt presence of God found in parish communities up and down the country.

But in Britain today there is considerable spiritual homelessness. At the same time as there is a lot of public interest in religion. Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience. They think that even if they wanted to believe, faith is no longer an option for them.

To some extent this is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us. I heard of a Muslim scholar recently who expressed an admiration for Pope Benedict on the grounds that he thought that Benedict understood exactly what religion is about. ‘Pope Benedict knows,’ he said, ‘that religion is about truth and not social cohesion.’ A very accurate remark I think.

TS Eliot once observed that it was a dangerous inversion to advocate Christianity not because of its truth, but because of its benefit.

Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude, but the tradition of Catholicism is that Christianity is profoundly social. How can it be otherwise if the first commandment to love God is inseparable from the second commandment to love our neighbour? True Christianity always becomes culture. One of the aims of the Christian religion is to create and foster a culture and society in which human beings flourish and God is glorified by his presence in a holy people. Because the Word becomes flesh and makes his home among us, the human community is to become a dwelling place for God: that’s the Christian vision of society and it is why the Gospel must find a dwelling place in the social and cultural order. You cannot banish religion to the church premises and I am unhappy about the various attempts to eliminate the Christian voice from the public forum. Our life together in Britain cannot be a God-free zone and we must not allow Britain to become a world devoid of religious faith and its powerful contribution to the common good.

There are social currents today that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it. One of the things which I challenge is the desire to separate Christianity from rational inquiry. Many of our ‘new atheists’ seem unable to cope with the notion of an intelligent, reflective Christian faith. But the Catholic Christian tradition is characterised by a close relationship between reasoned understanding and religious faith. Faith for us is the flowering of reason, not its betrayal. Catholic Christianity is characterised by three things: first of all, the richness of its spiritual and mystical traditions; secondly, the clarity of its theology which brings theology and philosophy together and gives us an articulate intellectual expression of the knowledge born of faith; and thirdly, the stability and strength of its structure as a community held in communion and truth by the Pope and Bishops.

Our faith is not founded on the conclusions of reason, but it is grounded in the Logos, the expressive Word that comes from God, and it is compatible with reasoned thought. Pope Benedict has drawn our attention to this in the early Christian centuries when he said that the ‘inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance’ for world history. This can be seen even in the New Testament where St Paul is not afraid to draw upon ideas from Stoic philosophy which he weaves into his Biblical, Jewish and Christian themes. He says that Christians should keep a right mind, practising a discernment to choose the better, aiming at the right end, seeking contentment (in Greek: autarkeia) in their state of life, with joy even when suffering, because they live in a commonwealth (in Greek: politeuma).

St Paul derives these ideas from Stoic philosophers and he uses them as a Christian thinker. Non-Christian ideas have found their way into the Christian Scriptures. The Wisdom writings of the Old Testament are permeated by Greek philosophical ideas. And why not? As Pope Benedict has reminded us, from its very beginning Christian thought has drawn upon ideas in non-Christian philosophy and culture and seen them as ‘seeds’ of the divine Word that becomes enfleshed in Christ. Christ is the fulfilment of the divine presence in the minds and hearts of all human beings, the fulfilment of culture and social life.

This is one of the reasons why, for this lecture series, I wanted this Cathedral to be a place for people to listen to matters pertaining to religion in the secular society in which we live here in Britain. I wanted religion to be seen to be open to the questions of those who do not believe; those who call themselves agnostic or atheistic. As always, the interesting question about atheism is ‘what is the theism that is being denied?’ Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in? I usually find that the God that is being rejected by such people is a God I don’t believe in either. I simply don’t recognise my faith in what is presented by these critics as Christian faith.