Documentary on UK Church Leaders' Pilgrimage to be Screened

A television documentary following UK church leaders on a recent pre-Christmas 'pilgrimage of peace' to the Holy Land is to be screened this forthcoming Sunday night on ITV1.

The one-hour programme is a co-production by Feed the Minds and Salt Pictures.

Bethlehem: No Room for Peace follows the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Westminster, His Eminence Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the Rev David Coffey, Moderator of the Free Churches, and Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian, Primate of the Armenian Church of Great Britain as they journey through the Holy Land in the days before Christmas 2006.

Following the three-day pilgrimage, Archbishop Williams has strongly criticised the government's "shortsighted" and "ignorant" policy in Iraq.

Writing in The Times, the Archbishop accused Tony Blair and the US of endangering the lives and futures of thousands of Christians in the Middle East who are stigmatised by their countrymen as supporters of the "crusading West".

He added that one prediction that was systematically ignored was that Western military action would put the whole of the Middle East's Christian population at risk.

Dr Williams went on to condemn the government for failing to devise a strategy to help Christians in the Middle East, where their numbers are in dramatic decline.