President is guardian of secular democracy

I was surprised at the wounded tone of Francis Saliba's letter of April 21 (Congratulations to President Abela). In my article of April 20, Strict Church-State Separation, I had merely pointed out that what President Abela had said about the separation of Church and State had run directly counter to what His Holiness the Pope himself had said only five years earlier in his first-ever encyclical letter. In this the Pope laid down a very clearly defined separation of Church and State, a position which our Archbishop also upholds.

I also pointed out that the President's accusation that some European States were anti-Christian was simply not supported by the facts. Indeed, every secular, democratic country in Europe would rightly take issue with such a sweeping and unsubstantiated statement.

I must therefore assume that what he said as Head of State on the Pope's arrival had been written for him, as is normal on such occasions, by the government. If so, it failed to do its homework and thereby placed President Abela in an embarrassing position.

The President is the ultimate guardian of our Constitution. What he says on the separation of Church and State, therefore, matters enormously. And what he said could not have been further from Malta's constitutional position as a liberal, secular, Parliamentary democracy, albeit one which recognises the Catholic faith as the religion of Malta. As Malta knows from its experiences in the 1980s, it behoves all of us to guard our Constitution carefully.