Jitters of secularism

President George Abela has expressed his admiration for US President Barack Obama who has just visited Turkey. But I doubt Dr Abela anticipated that, in a matter of hours, he and Mr Obama would generate a similar reaction from very different publics.

In Turkey, Mr Obama gave a speech in which he spoke warmly of Turkey's Islamic identity. The usual jitters about Turkish identity arose, particularly among the secularists, who see mention of Islam as a wedge being driven between them and Europe. Yet, what Mr Obama, a practising Christian with Muslim kin, meant to drive home was that Turkey's proper identity embraced both secularism and religion. It did not have to choose; it would be a false step to do so.

In Malta, another country on Europe's margins, similar jitters are to be found. We are in Europe but we have found 99 ways of fearing, and crowing, that we are not of it. Dr Abela's decision to precede his investiture ceremony with Mass was met with quizzical eyebrows in the media and even among some of those who were at St John's Co-Cathedral.

The implication was that he was somehow fudging the line between Church and state. He was directly asked if identifying himself so explicitly as Christian would impede him from representing all Maltese.

The question is in its way extraordinary. Both before and after becoming President, Dr Abela quipped about being a man from Qormi - but no one asked if this put into question whether he could represent either women or the rest of Malta. Some identities, apparently, are more toxic than others.

If only Dr Abela had celebrated with a concert that combined Maltese classical composers and folk singers, his soprano daughter singing alongside the talented għannej, Ċikku Tal-Fjuri Degiorgio (from Qormi, of course). Then we might all have praised the class of his classless vision and how it represents all of us, even if only small minorities really care for either kind of music, let alone both.

For why go to church if you are about to become President of the Republic? In his recent book on why anyone should go at all (Why Go To Church? The Drama Of The Eucharist; published by Continuum), the Dominican friar Timothy Radcliffe sets out, in three acts, each part of the Mass, almost line by line. The result is a dense triptych of the wisdom of human experience - Christian, Jewish, irreligious... - of faith, hope and love; in the wake of the death camps as well as of moments of extraordinary thanksgiving (and Fr Timothy has had glancing personal contact with people who have experienced either one or the other or even both).

Fr Timothy's writing is a profound meditation on the casting off of fear and on the freedom to be oneself that Mass both represents (if only as religious dramatic theatre) and is meant to bring about. However boring one's experience of the ordinary Sunday Mass is, on occasions like weddings and funerals there is a glimpse of the longer arc of human history and the wider span of human experience that a beautiful Mass can capture.

It was within such a historic arc and cross-cultural span that Dr Abela inserted himself and his family on Saturday. It was within this drama that he and his wife took up gifts to the altar, that his daughter sang and his son read. There is something deeply odd about believing that if a man chooses to be portrayed as part of humanity, he is somehow being factional while if he situates himself within a portrait of a small island in the present fleeting moment then he is being universal.

Of course, the religious portrait is rooted in a particular perspective. All portraits are, whether rooted in faith or scepticism. It is unavoidable. Without perspective they could not be painted.

But so hung up about religion have we become, especially we in the media, that the analysis of Dr Abela's self-portrait - his own idea of realism, suffering and blessing; why he identifies with the Easter Cross - was ignored, in favour of the reality-TV coverage of everything and nothing.

Good journalism was among the victims of the hang-up. Two kinds of narrowing visions are among its causes.

One is a narrowing religious vision to be increasingly found among Maltese Catholics: increasingly sectarian behaviour whose consequence is that, whenever somebody declares his or her Catholicism publicly, others wonder if it is a sectarian gesture rather than the address from which one reaches out to everyone.

The other is a narrow vision of what secularism is. Instead of keeping up with the thinking of leading secular philosophers, like Juergen Habermas, who believe that a 21st-century liberal society should have place for believers who use religious language to engage in the public sphere, regrettably too much of Maltese secular thinking tends to be stuck with nervous complexes like those of unreconstructed 1920s Turkish secularism.

ranierfsadni@europe.com