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 tomorrow/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.