Archbishop Paul Cremona is demonstrating a remarkable reluctance to recognise the enormity of his misjudgement in the way and manner he led his Church in a most divisive divorce referendum campaign. He appears to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.
Displaying all the brazen self-delusion of a politician who has been roundly defeated but is not prepared to admit it, he said when announcing the almost €200,000 spent by the Maltese Church in underwriting the doomed anti-divorce campaign: “We did our duty when we made a financial contribution to the campaign against divorce.” He added that he wished the Church had been in a position to make an even bigger financial contribution, failing to grasp, even now, that it was not a matter of how much advertising and funding could be poured into the campaign but whether justice, freedom and civil rights should prevail. They did.
That alone should raise questions in his mind on whether the money he has so gratuitously spent on running an essentially political campaign should instead have gone on the many desperate cases of human hardship supported by the Maltese Church. How can he look these poor people in the eye now as the person accountable for the Church’s financial expenditure and say that the €180,000 was a cost-effective use of scarce resources when compared with the €1,300 raised by the Yes campaign?
There is an urgent need for a clear re-calibration of Church-state relations in Malta. It is a lesson for the government as much as for the Maltese Church. It had been thought that the lesson had been learnt on Good Friday in 1969 when the then Archbishop signed a “concordat” with the Malta Labour Party that “In modern society it is necessary that distinction be made between the political community and the Church. The very nature of the Church demands she does not interfere in politics... The Church does not impose mortal sin as a censure…”
It is necessary, 40 years later, to draw up a fresh agreement between Church and state.
The outline for an updated agreement, or concordat, of this nature already exists. There is no need to try to change the Constitution to do this. All it requires is that a formal agreement is signed between the Church and the three political parties laying down the Church’s code of conduct. Archbishop Cremona had made it clear in the context of divorce some time ago that while he considered the Catholic Church in Malta had a valid contribution to make to the debate, the Church would not seek to interfere – as opposed to participate – in this process because it was fundamental to ensuring that legislators and society were not placed under duress when considering the issue. A spirit of democratic dialogue stemming from willingness to be open-minded and open to persuasion should prevail, he said.
If the Maltese Church had stuck within the parameters the Archbishop himself had set, he would not find himself in the invidious position he is in today. Contributing almost €200,000 to a civil campaign and overlaying that campaign with threats, unstated and not so unstated, about “committing mortal sin” and “offending Jesus Christ” if one voted in one direction and not the other, went well beyond his contention that the Church’s views should be properly heard in the public square, and fully into the realm where the Church’s doctrine should automatically have the force of law. This is unacceptable in a liberal, secular, pluralistic parliamentary democracy. If the law happens to coincide with the Church’s specific teachings it is because the law reflects some value independent of religious belief – whether it be on divorce, IVF treatment, euthanasia, birth control, abortion or gay rights.
This was the red line which was crossed by the Maltese Church in the referendum campaign. It is a red line which a future concordat should make plain must not to be crossed again.
The days when the Maltese Church could function as a sort of state within a state – administering its own affairs, and often the affairs of its flock, by a system of law and authority that run in parallel with, and can even trump, the authority of the state must now be formally brought to an end. A start has been made with the Child Offenders’ Register, which ensures that cases of clerical abuse of children are dealt with under the criminal law not under the Church’s own secretive, defensive and arcane procedures. But there is also an undisputed need to overturn the special privileges needlessly accorded to the Church for ecclesiastical tribunals under the Marriage Act in 1995 and to bring these tribunals under the jurisdiction of the Family Court.
Without the need to amend our Constitution, a clear concordat, updating what was agreed with one party in 1969 to account for modern conditions, should now be put in place.