Christian Leaders Call for Peace and Respect for Environment

Religious leaders used their Christmas messages to call for peace, compassion and respect. In his sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, warned that "human greed" threatened to distort the "fragile balance" of the environment.

He told worshipers at Canterbury Cathedral that the message of Christmas was about God's love for creation and that there was a subsequent need for humanity to protect the world God had created.

Williams, the head of the 77-million-strong Anglican Communion, cautioned against using the world as a "warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness", and told Christians they should do more to protect the environment.

The same respect and care should be shown towards other human beings, he added. "The delight and reverence we should have towards the things of creation is intensified many times where human relationships are concerned," he said.

"Every person and every diverse sort of person exists for a unique joy, the joy of being who they are in relation to God, a joy which each person will experience differently. And if peace is to be more than a pause in open conflict, it must be grounded in this passionate, amazed reverence for others." The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said the Christmas message challenged complacency and prejudice. Preaching in York Minster without his clerical collar after he cut it up in a televised protest against the regime of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, Sentamu said injustices such as the abduction of Madeleine McCann, the murder of schoolboy Rhys Jones and the failure of anyone to take responsibility for the Omagh bombing were examples of God being "violated and blasphemed".

He said every individual was a "stand-in for God" and needed to be treated with value, dignity and respect.

He called on people to show their love for God by working together to put a stop to human rights violations.

Respect for others was also the theme for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor's homily at Westminster Cathedral. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales called on people to be more welcoming to immigrants, saying he was concerned by the national attitude towards this less fortunate group. "Many of these people are trying, for perfectly good reasons, to enter Britain and they need to be welcomed. I understand that immigration needs to be controlled. However, sometimes they must feel like Joseph when he returned to Bethlehem after exile in Egypt, simply excluded because they are outsiders."

Pope Benedict XVI used his address in St Peter's Square, Rome, to call for the "grim sound of arms" to cease in war zones around the world, and warned of ethnic tensions in Africa and the Middle East.