Strict Church-State separation

In his speech on the Pope's arrival in Malta, President George Abela showed considerable courage in speaking bluntly about the abuse of children, which he labelled "the reprehensible indiscretions of the few". Paedophilia was clearly not a subject which the Pope wanted to talk about.

But the President was misguided - to be charitable, misadvised - to talk about the "wave of secularism which has as its starting point the strict separation of church and state: a laicist (sic) model advocating that the State should be strictly separate from religion which is conceived as belonging exclusively to the private domain. This profane (sic) character which has developed in some European states is driving people to be laicist (sic) or even anti-Christian".

There is, as far as I know, not a single country in Europe which, in the definition of secularism, "holds the belief that religion and religious bodies should have no part in political or civil affairs or in running public institutions". Nor are there any "anti-Christian" countries. Moreover, the President was actually contradicting what the Pope himself had said on this subject only five years ago in the first ever encyclical of his Pontificate.

In his encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict had defined very clearly the clear separation of Church and State. "The just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics... The two spheres [of State and Church] are distinct, yet always interrelated... The Church," he said, "cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the side-lines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to re-awaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifices, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church".

My reading of this is that the Pope has laid down a very strict separation of Church and State, albeit highlighting that the Church (among others) also has a role to play in any public debate on moral issues. What the Pontiff has said fits well with what all of us, brought up in secular democracies (that is, one where the State is concerned with the affairs of this world, not controlled by a religious body, or concerned with spiritual or religious matters), such as Malta, and every European democracy I can think of, know should be the case.

Perhaps the President got carried away with the rhetorical build-up to the next point he wanted to make, which was that "the moral foundations of a society as a whole... are better served... with the re-invigoration of the moral consciousness of the State". Nobody - and no secular democracy in Europe - could possibly disagree with that.

Nor, I hope, can there be any argument that the Catholic Church does not hold a monopoly on establishing moral foundations in society. As the President himself alluded to child abuse in the next part of his speech, he would realise that if you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards.

Malta is a secular, liberal, parliamentary democracy. It is not a theocracy. In a democracy, Parliament's decisions about what sort of behaviour should be lawful are not necessarily the same as what is considered right on purely religious grounds. The need for strict separation of Church and State in Malta, with its long and sometimes painful history of ecclesiastical intrusion in matters strictly the preserve of the State, is paramount if justice for all of its citizens - the laity, believers, agnostics and lapsed Catholics - is to be done.

It would be a great pity if our own Head of State - for whom we have a great affection - (or his advisers) were inadvertently to forget this by arguing that the strict separation of Church and State is not a desirable and healthy objective in its own right.