What about the Church?

The whole point about barnacles is their zealous introversion and their ability to shut it all out. Yet even they must engage in a picky dialogue with the sea that surrounds them and gives them life.

The upshot is that even as barnacles are condemned to be marine creatures, they play the game rather well.

I’ve found this particular aspect of marine biology to be an excellent model for an approach to the ‘divorce debate’. Yes it’s boring, pointless, anachronistic, mind-numbing, and worse. There’s this thing about it though that makes it hard for one to pretend it’s nothappening at all.

The question itself is bad, unredeemably so in fact. Should Malta legislate for divorce? Think such timeless mind-benders as, Should Protestants be suffered to live?; Should women have the right to vote?; Do black people feel pain?; and so on.

The reason historians and anthropologists take an interest in such questions has little to do with the answers.

Rather, it’s because the dynamics of the ‘debates’ can tell us a lot about the societies in which they took place. The trick, as our marine sage teaches us, is to be choosy about what’s really useful.

There are at least two things which make the national soul searching interesting. First, questions are being raised about the coherence of the Catholic Church and its teachings.

I suppose most Catholic theologians today would hold that it’s perfectly acceptable for churchmen (nuns seem to have no opinion on divorce) to differ over certain important matters. They would probably argue that the Church, certainly in principle and to a lesser extent in practice, is very much like other vast organisations in that it must find room for a range of different viewpoints to coexist. Hardly surprising for a religion of the book, i.e. one based on interpretations of the revealed Word.

And yet, that’s not how most of us in Malta are trained to think. We’ve been brought up (in part by churchmen) to imagine the Church as some sort of North Korea but with finer tastes in art and haute couture. Whether we like them or not, we tend to think of people like Mark Montebello as dissidents and misfits, just because they dare to speak their minds.

The ‘divorce debate’ is fascinating in that its dynamics challenge this deep-rooted belief. Factions of churchmen seem to be springing up all over the place who have little in common apart from their gender. Some talk of grave sin, others of conscience, of dogma or individual judgement. Switzerland it ain’t but it turns out it’s no Pyongyang either.

Understandably, this leaves many people confused. The bishops have a hairy one on their hands, and that is to try to balance the obvious (that different people have different opinions) with the popularly assumed (that the word ‘difference’ is not in the Church’s dictionary).

That’s their problem. For the rest of us, it will be interesting to watch as images of Church coherence are sparred over and possibly redrawn. The ‘divorce debate’ may yet change the way Maltese people in general imagine the character of Catholicism. That would probably be very consequential indeed, in more ways than a Sunday morning read might dare explore.

There’s a second thing. It’s becoming pretty obvious that the blessed Church-State relation is once again up for grabs. That’s why Mgr Arthur Said Pullicino’s sermon at the opening of the forensic year caused such a stir (should probably have caused a major whirlpool, but anyway).

The greater part of the current had to do with the usual arguments about throwbacks to the 1960s, unconsecrated ground, and so on. I was more interested in what Daphne Caruana Galizia had to say in last Sunday’s Malta Independent.

Her arguments were basically twofold. First, that the members of the audience who apparently found the sermon unacceptable should have had the self-respect to walk out there and then. Second, that they had it coming, because it was they who chose to celebrate the opening of the forensic year with a Mass in the first place.

I agree with her on the first, less so on the second point. My own take has to do with the Church’s ritual presence at secular State occasions. For it wasn’t just the forensic year that opened with a dash of magic. University, for example, also took off with a Mass.

The whole thing seems to go against the principles of a modern civil society. Ernest Gellner once quipped that a civil society is one in which “you can join (say) the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep”. Sheep slaughter being the equivalent of Mass in his part of the world, Gellner’s point is really about Church-State separation and the public role of ritual.

The problem is not really that the forensic and academic years required the blood of sheep. It’s that, at least in the case of the former, the throat slitter overstepped his mark.

I honestly have no issue with religious ritual as a form of state tradition. In any case, the courts are crawling with ritual of a more secular sort. Why should I prefer funny hats, togas, and lace over mitres and vestments?

In fact I don’t. I’m very happy indeed to live with Catholicism as ritual, simply because that’s the set of symbols and tradition we’ve inherited, and because ritual is all about symbols and continuity. (That’s also why I have no problem with crucifixes in public places.)

As I see it, the judiciary were not necessarily wrong in participating in a traditional event the traditional way. And Said Pullicino was probably right in agreeing to slaughter the sheep and say the magic words.

His sin – a very grave one – was that he overstepped the limits of the ritual. Put differently, he showed little sense of occasion. He seems to have assumed that saying Mass at the opening of the forensic year entitled him to talk down to the judiciary about the morality of their work. (Just imagine, the officiating priest at the University Mass telling professors in the congregation what they should and shouldn’t teach.)

Thus the second lesson taught us by the ‘divorce debate’. Church-state separation needn’t necessarily mean banishing the Church from state ritual. It does mean, however, that churchmen should stick to doing what they do best, i.e. slit sheep’s throats.

Said Pullicino would be wise to limit next year’s sermon to explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

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