make an impact on ensuring that people from different faiths, living alongside each other in our major cities, were at ease with one another? And how could this be done without them losing their distinctive identities? In the UK, more than 46,000 hate crimes were reported to the police in 2008. So this did not seem to me a trivial question. The answer was not entirely what we


expected. Our international educational work in schools and universities, where we have been trying to build religious literacy, and through it respect and understanding between the faiths, was directly targeted at the problem. Interestingly, interfaith action most notably had the same effect. Friendships were developed and discussions about religion ensued, with the net result that most of our Fellows realised that they needed to deepen and learn more about their own faith. My conclusion: journeys of empathy usually bring you home. My sense is that we can now identify dif- ferent periods in situating religion in the public square. The Victorian era saw an extraordinarily robust vitality in this respect with the building up of a rich texture of public- facing religious organisations as safety nets for the poor. The Salvation Army is perhaps the most obvious example, but it was the fore- runner of countless other initiatives. This tradition of creating religiously motivated organisations for protecting the poor has proved a sustainable feature of a very British form of citizenship.


The affluent society did not need that sort of thing any more. Suddenly heroic figures became “do-gooders”. Religion became some- thing to laugh about. Yet whatever the new challenge, wherever the new wave of immi- grants came from, faith-motivated groups continued to emerge to serve the most mar- ginalised and persistently challenge Government on its record towards the poor. I can vouch for that, too. It seems to me that we are now moving into another and new period, when interfaith action will slowly but surely come into its own. It is in this complex context that Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate speaks to the condition of today’s globalised world, and presents an understanding of the social reality of the human person. Above all, it is a powerful call to compassionate action in civil society, commerce and the state, a call that resonates both ecumenically and with the deepest moral sentiments of the different world religions.


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■Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland between 1997 and 2007. As well as being patron of the Faith Foundation, he is the special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the Diplomat Quartet formed of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia.


owever, the post-Second World War boom gave many people the idea that such organisations had become quaint and superfluous.


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