Martin Scicluna gives the impression he is driven by emotions that necessarily cloud his judgement.
Take his contribution on Tuesday which, to all intents and purposes, was supposed to deal with the government’s child offenders’ register. For most of the time he rattled on about clerical child abuse, the Church’s apparent inability to deal conclusively with abuse cases, the Church’s function “as a sort of state within a state”, the separation of Church and state and, with not a little arrogance, the assertion that the Church, as a consequence of the clerical abuse scandal, “does not hold a monopoly on establishing the moral foundations in society”. But it remains its mission and she has established the moral foundations of society.
His negative assumption is, however, juvenile. By the same argument, society, through its government, is not in a position to legislate on child abuse once parents, carers, policemen, nurses, doctors, judges, lawyers and thieves, who form part of society, have abused children – and the evidence is overwhelming that the incidence of child abuse by these groups (reported and known and often known and unreported in many countries) is significantly and proportionately greater. When the world is manifestly and consistently guilty of worldliness it is not in a position to stand in judgement over anybody’s worldliness. Fifteen years before he became a Catholic, Chesterton, whom Mr Scicluna regards balefully because one of the greatest writers (if not the greatest) of the 20th century cannot help bringing God or the Catholic Church into his arguments, wrote in one of his contributions to the Illustrated London News that “When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been as superstitious as the world is when left to itself”.
Perhaps Mr Scicluna’s idlest comment was his ill-informed and tasteless reference to Bishop Mario Grech “taking on the mantle of Savonarola” for he failed to tell us which of Savonarola’s mantles he had in mind – the Dominican’s preaching against the Medicis or the preacher’s defiance of the worldly Pope, against whom Savonarola was prepared to establish an anti-Pope.
A child offenders’ register is to be welcomed and, Mr Scicluna seems to be unaware of this, Bishop Grech welcomed it before most; that its legislative creation should serve as a whip to lash him is deplorable.