Roamer's column

Martin Scicluna's reactions to my piece on a report about the Today Public Policy Institute's document on divorce made one good point and several poor ones, so let's deal with the good one first. We are indeed, as he wrote, "very good, very old friend(s)". The style and content of his letter, with which I strongly disagree, did not change that; nor I hope will this.

Scicluna referred to observations I made on the TPPI document as "flippant" when these were made not so much on the document as on a newspaper report about it carried in The Times. To my expression of surprise that while a high-powered symposium held on World Family Day and addressed by Gozo Bishop Mario Grech and the President received not a column inch of recognition, his report received a heading across five columns, he remarked that the "subject of broken marriages and failed marriages" merited the "serious treatment" it received. He added that I, "as a veteran columnist", should have arrived at the same conclusion. I cannot for the life of me see why.

His imputation that I "deliberately misrepresent(ed)" what was said in the report about the relationship of Church and State in a liberal democracy I will not grace with a response; but I must take him up on a startlingly offensive accusation he made. ..."let us be clear" he wrote, "what agenda (Roamer) will be bringing to the argument". If there is to be a descent into this form of language, calm discussion there cannot be.

G.K. Chesterton for whom, he pointed out, I have a huge "admiration" was then trotted out. He described him, woefully, as a talented writer "who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda". Sack your source, Martin; or read your Chesterton. That he thought it necessary to use such a hostile word as propaganda places his objectivity in question.

The implication that I, as a huge admirer of Chesterton, can only bring to any discussion on divorce my own suppressed sensibilities and intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholicism, is serious. Why on earth should my Catholicism suppress my "sensibilities and intellectual honesty"? It may inform my opinions and for that I am eternally grateful, not least because it allows me to draw on two millenniums of wisdom. I could, of course, lob back the accusation and say he has chosen to "suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty" in the cause of a chaotic liberalism, but that will get us nowhere. Play fair, Martin.

In an incautious effort to tar Chesterton further, Scicluna made the absurd and disastrous claim that for the past 20 years of his life there was not a sentence he wrote, not "a scrap of dialogue" Chesterton indulged in that was not aimed at demonstrating "beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan religion". Does he want me to produce a volume of sentences to disabuse him of this untenable assertion? Sack this source, too, Martin.

Where do these works fit into that caricature? The Judgment of Dr Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Return of Don Quixote, The Poet and the Lunatics, William Cobbett, The End of the Roman Road, What I saw in America, Chaucer, Lord Kitchener, Utopia of Usurers, A Short History of England, Irish Impressions - to name but a few; and as a matter of interest, in The Superstition of Divorce he made not a single reference to the Catholic Church or to its teachings. He made much of the word 'vow', though. And to say that "Chesterton refused to believe in the idea of progress" - who supplied him with this nonsense?

Chesterton arrived at pretty much the entire belief structures of the Church years before he became a Catholic. He went on to become a prophet for his age (given the current liberal assault on the Church, for this one, too). Perhaps I may conclude with a passage from Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

"It is often suggested that all liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free. You might just as well say that all idealists would be high churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high...In modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas is particularly liberal... indeed almost all these ideas are illiberal..."

Collect your voting cards

There are serious problems wrapping themselves around the neck of the electorate like an albatross. Next Saturday we elect our representatives to 22 local councils and five candidates (plus one observer) to the European Parliament, two vastly different exercises. One deals with micro-management in the context of local politics, the other with macro-management in Brussels. Many people are failing to distinguish between them and intend to cast their vote as if the election of a councillor to look after the cleanliness of a street in Sliema were equivalent to the selection of a man, or a woman, to sit in a parliament of 27 nations.

Another problem is the temptation to see in both events an opportunity to lash out at the government for real or perceived misgovernment. This is why, for example, the Labour Party leader has been conducting his party's EU campaign as if, to use but three as ifs, the EU and the current international financial crisis did not exist; as if gross manipulation of what was said by a candidate for the Nationalist Party and left unsaid by his party media, did not matter; as if the new way of doing politics were the old way dressed as old.

Anybody who followed these and other antics must ask whether this approach, on top of the anti-EU pedigree from which it is coming, should earn the opposition a single seat in Brussels; whether the governing party's grounding in the EU context is not more credible and coherent than the opposition's. It is the answer to these questions that ought to decide the way one votes. Up to last Friday one poll forecast a 4-2 Labour majority in the European Parliament.

There is also the problem of cynicism, an affectation of world-weariness about the prospect of going out to vote - again, yawn, yawn. But voters gain nothing by abstaining except endless column inches of media speculation.

The need to send our best men and women to Brussels ought to be self-evident; men and women who truly believe in the European project, who have not come to it force majeure, who do not vote haphazardly in that parliament; men and women who helped to take this island into Europe because we now know for a fact that the alternative suggested by Labour would have been disastrous, politically and economically. To whom would we have turned if we were not members and had to deal alone with the phenomenon of illegal immigration? To whom, had Labour kept us out of Europe? The time has come to keep them out of Europe, but this, the polls are saying is not going to happen.

My personal preference for Simon Busuttil in these elections goes back a long time and remains. He has given an excellent account of himself and continues to do so. David Casa has done good work in the EP, too. I am most impressed by a newcomer, Alan Deidun, well-known to readers of this newspaper for his whistle-blower column and environment candidate par excellence, with whom I once crossed swords.

He is the first candidate to declare himself publicly and unreservedly in favour of the eight-point manifesto drawn up by the European bishops calling for life to be respected from conception to death and marriage to be strengthened. He urged politicians to beware of moving with the stream (only dead fish do that, Chesterton once remarked) and, if society is not to disintegrate, which it is doing, to hold fast to marriage, to Christian values, to the right of workers to an environment that respects their dignity. Here was a declaration each candidate can make before the week is out.

Way back in 2006, the chairman of the EPP-ED group, Hans-Gert Poettering, spoke of his group's determination "to work on the religious dimension of Europe in addressing the crisis of culture, which affects all our people". The Pope, whom he addressed, spoke in reply and among other things, about non-negotiable principles that included the "recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family - as a union between a man and a woman based on marriage - and its defence from attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different forms of union which in reality harm it and contribute to its destabilisation..." about "protection of life in all its stages" and "the right of parents to educate their children".

In a Europe that shows signs of walking blindly to the brink, will our candidates have the courage to try, at least, to haul it back?