LA Times: Tony Blair details role of his faith

LONDON -- A cathedral is an odd place for a coming-out party.

But not, as it turns out, if you're a former prime minister of Britain and you're preparing to tell the world that God was one of your senior advisors during your 10 years in power.

Speaking one recent evening under the lofty Byzantine vaults of Westminster Cathedral, Tony Blair ended his self-imposed silence on the subject, declaring that his faith has formed the essential backdrop to much of his political life.

Blair had begun to pick at the subject haltingly over the last year, announcing his conversion to Catholicism (after years of secretly attending Mass as prime minister) in December. But only now is he discussing it fully and openly, and acknowledging the degree to which his religious faith informed his years leading America's closest ally.

"Today, precisely because all the fixed points of reference seem unfixed and constantly in flux, today is more than ever when we need to discover and rediscover our essential humility before God," Blair told an audience of 1,600 invited guests at the chief Roman Catholic cathedral in England and Wales.

"I can't prove that religious faith offers something more than humanism," he said. "But I believe profoundly that it does." Read more
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