BRITAIN’S two most senior church leaders have used their Christmas sermons to criticise western governments for being more interested in waging war and combating terrorism than in tackling global poverty.

The attacks by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will put pressure on Tony Blair to honour his pledge to do more to alleviate suffering in developing nations. Britain takes over the presidency of the G8 group of industrialised nations next year.

Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, used his Christmas midnight mass sermon at Westminster Cathedral to question the war in Iraq and violence in the Holy Land.

“What a terrible thing it is that billions of pounds are being spent on war in the Middle East which could have been spent bringing people out of dire poverty, malnourishment and disease,” he said.

Yesterday, Williams, the leader of the Anglican church, weighed into the debate by claiming that little progress had been made towards the attainment of the United Nations’ millennium development goals, which include by 2015 halving the number of people living in poverty.

Delivering his Christmas homily at Canterbury Cathedral, Williams said: “Some developed nations appear deeply indifferent to the goals agreed. It is all too easy to be more interested in other matters — not least the profound anxieties about security that are at the moment so pervasive, massaged by various forces in our public life in the West.”

Williams also used his sermon to launch a thinly veiled attack on the government for indefinitely imprisoning foreign terror suspects without charge.

“We struggle for a secure world; so we should,” he said. “But what if our only passion is to be protected and we lose sight of what we positively and concretely want for ourselves and one another, what we want for the human family.

“We are not going to be living in the truth if we have no passion for the liberty of God’s children and no share in the generosity of God.”

Earlier in the day, Williams attended a service at Canterbury prison and visited a refuge for homeless people, where he helped to serve meals.

Addressing thousands of followers in St Peter’s Square in Rome, Pope John Paul II said he was following the conflict in Iraq with “grave apprehension” and spoke of the “tragedy of Darfur” in Sudan.

The 84-year-old pontiff’s message was his shortest in 27 years, a concession to the Parkinson’s disease that makes it difficult for him to speak.

He said: “Let there be an end to the spread of violence in its many forms, the source of untold suffering.”

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