Blair's faith-based debut

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."

In the United States, where talk of God and church can sometimes seem a prerequisite to getting elected, these open expressions of belief would not be unusual; in secular Europe, where religiosity tends to be viewed with suspicion, Blair said he kept his belief long under wraps for fear of being dismissed as "a nutter."

"One of the oddest questions I get asked in interviews, and I get asked a lot of questions, is: Is faith important to your politics? It's like asking someone whether their health is important to them or their family. If you are someone 'of faith,' it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn't affect your politics," Blair said.

"But there is a reason why my former press secretary Alastair Campbell once famously said, 'We don't do God.' In our culture, here in Britain and in many other parts of Europe, to admit to having faith leads to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practicing politician."

Blair's aides have long said that his policies on intervention in Iraq, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were motivated not by practicalities or even, in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, fear of weapons of mass destruction so much as a profound sense that they were the "right" thing to do.