May God protect the Church from its friends

I was away on a conference during Pope Benedict XVI's visit. The occasion that drew me away was the quadrennial Christian Social Week (as the somewhat awkward official translation from the German puts it) held at Cologne's Catholic Institute. I expected the event, a pan-European gathering of laity interested in economic democracy, culture and Catholic social thought, to make the Pope's visit seem less distant.

Instead, it did the opposite. The Maltese overtures and commentary on the visit came across as peculiar. The thumping about Malta's Catholic roots, especially, seemed to me to show symptoms of the secularisation and privatisation of religion that it inveighed against.

Admittedly, the distance may have served to estrange me in ways I have not detected. (After all, in a matter of a few days I came to see six-foot-four central European men as simply tall, rather than huge.) Because when President George Abela was reported as saying that, in Malta as elsewhere, "secularism" was laying siege to Catholicism, I had no idea what he was referring to.

The last time I looked, the problem was not a siege but a growing indifference to Catholicism, a sense that it does not have much to say that is true to experience. "Religion" is increasingly becoming perceived as the stuff of the gothic tales told in our TV drama series (a Dan Brown idea of religion, if you like) or of the contemporary comedies where the priest is dressed in an old-fashioned cassock, as though to symbolise how out of place he is.

That is a problem of dissipation from within. It has to do with Catholicism becoming separated from everyday culture, so that its teachings seem abstract, remote and impractical.

One issue explicitly alluded to even by the Pope was, of course, divorce. But whatever one makes of his intervention, the Pope cannot have been referring to secularisation on this point. Divorce is already a thoroughly secularised issue, since it concerns the 100 per cent secular institution of civil marriage.

Indeed, all the arguments made against it so far in Malta have been secular. If proposing divorce is made out to be a "secularist" attack, one would be granting what divorce proponents have long claimed: that Malta does not have divorce for religious reasons, and that this constitutes an unwarranted intrusion by religion in the life of the state. With friends like these, does Catholicism need to be besieged?

But the signs that Maltese Catholicism needs God's protection from its friends were more vivid in the major part of the commentary on Pope Benedict's recommendation to nurture Malta's Christian identity.

Virtually all the commentary I have read understood "Christian identity" to involve only "roots", that is, a backward look at the past. If it were this, then nurturing Christian identity would be just like nurturing an ethnic or national identity. That is, a purely secular matter.

Christian identity, however, is different. As the Dutch theologian Erik Borgman pointed out at the German conference, whereas secular cultural identities are based on what one has that others have not, Christian identity is at least as much based on what it does not have - on what it seeks to become and what it needs to give up in order to fulfil itself.

Archbishop Paul Cremona put across the idea when he presented the Maltese Church as one that must change if it is to remain true to itself. Whereas those who conflated national identity with a Christian one showed just how far they themselves are secularised, no matter how much they might view secularisation as a bad thing.

Following the visit from Germany, however, helped me see something I might not have seen clearly otherwise. I was in the company of people who believe the Church has an important witness to give in the development of economic democracy - in how work is organised, in forms of property and work relations that give people not just greater dignity but more control over their career and greater resilience in the face of economic crises.

With this goal in mind, money has been invested in research institutes to explore alternative economic forms of mutuality, in conferences, in organised lobbies and networks and in cooperation with non-Christian organisations with similar goals. The Catholic Institute that hosted us was a virtual museum of contemporary art that spoke of and to this experience.

To utter the word "social" in this context is to invoke a range of associations to do with economic, social and cultural life. The full range of civil society.

To utter the same word in connection with the Maltese Church, however, is to invoke a much more limited range of associations, mostly to do with the family and social work. In other words, interventions in fields largely associated with private life.

Is it all that far-fetched to think that, even as friends of the Maltese Church inveigh against the privatisation of religion, that process is being extended by the very ways in which many Maltese Catholics project their social vision?

ranierfsadni@europe.com