Last weekend’s upset divorce referendum result should spur both ruling politicians and the Church to seriously start reordering their priorities. Both have just been given a serious drubbing at the polls.
The Church is in shock, the ruling Nationalist Party punch drunk, its size 10 pride shrunk to pinhead size. In just one day, 212,547 voters hauled Malta into the heart of liberal democracy, the default setting of modern governance.
Much of the ordeal politics and the Church find themselves in is the result of the thick gruel they brew.
For decades they have relied on measurements priests and politicians cut, make, and trim for the rest of us. The problem is that people’s trust in the country’s traditional yardsticks is slipping.
As a result, victims of broken political pledges and those whose social distress becomes daily more pressing are waking up to different, painful realisms.
Signs of disenchantment with a Church that is weak and dull and a state whose promises are often hollow are everywhere to be seen.
Possibly we are at a point where people, now at their furthermost point of forbearance, may be losing faith in bedrock precepts that weld people, the state and the Church together. We may be at the start of a more faithless future.
That would be hugely unwelcome.
Faithlessness breeds inertia which in turn spawns all sorts of social diseases. Luckily, Church and political party leaders can still pull us all back together from the brink.
For all that was suggested by Yes campaigners, the notion of promoting greater separation between Church and state sounds hugely suspect. If anything, the answer, I would think, lies in both forging closer affinities. Two galactic institutions working apart in an island this small serves a struggling nation no purpose, except to step into more muddy puddles.
The Catholic Church in Malta is a massive positive force for good. Nothing can seriously disfigure its contributions to society. Its absolute truths are valid, its wealth of human experience invaluable, its institutions praiseworthy.
Here’s one truth: the Catholic Church will not compromise its values, even in the face of inevitable events that mark man’s journey on earth, like divorce. Therein lies its strength.
But away from what is truly sinful or not, it can modify its strategy largely by taking an axe to long festering dogmatic problems.
It must, above all today, accept the supremacy of institutions whose job is to grant people greater freedoms. Said simply, the Church needs to attach less equivocal certitudes to its pronouncements.
To come of age it has to show a kinder face, certainly more than that of clergymen whose passion for Christ often equals their zeal for party politics.
It’s the bishops’ job to seize the moment. All they need do is trust us more. We may be not half as sinning as prelates fear.
Politicians deserve even more pelting with their own misgivings.
Government sending the divorce issue to the hustings epitomises the political mediocrity which produces divisive blunders.
Possibly, the Nationalist Party, its image with voters wrinkled, had hoped its Catholic credentials were enough to safeguard its fortunes at the polls. It’s the stuff of comedy stores.
Clearly the country is less conservative than imagined. Consequently the PN was again caught on a hind leg. As in the case of the Church the Nationalist Party needs embrace some very nettlesome truths. The obsession with producing endless self- congratulatory certificates for the evening TV news bulletin and the morning papers is delusionary.
Each day, government news stories sound far more like new cures than new blessings.
Last week’s electoral result may suggest Labour could be picking up fresh winds in its sail. That’s yet to be seen.
Time will tell whether voters will judge Labour to be a credible transformer to a more temperate, less painful future.
Still, in the minds of many, the cachet of moral leadership seems to have passed from Lawrence Gonzi to Joseph Muscat.
Easing the social and economic stress bearing down on families and businesses will remain a massive undertaking more so until the international investments climate settles down.
A lay state run by Catholics making cause with the Church seems to be more than a perfect fit.
Pseudo intellectuals and fruitcake political scientists may disagree but this is bound to generate heaps of increased equilibrium to society.
Even better, we might finally get to see the backs of clergymen, politicians – and journalists – whose survival rests exclusively on them selling magic potions and snakes’ oil to a trusting audience.