That extraordinary tirade of priest bashing by Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli in Parliament last week was an unwarranted flashback to those horror Mintoff years we do not need reminding of. Her outburst didn’t make sense, at first.
Parliament was discussing a Bill to amend the Marriage Act that would remove the supremacy of the ecclesiastical tribunal over the civil courts in cases of marriage annulments. True, it is becoming increasingly hard to praise anything this energetic government does as it stumbles into its second year, but amending that discordant concordat reached between the Nationalists in government and the Vatican was necessary and good. There was praise all round, even from the very same Nationalists. Now Dalli put her foot in it.
Taking the cue from the obvious need for separation between Church and State, she launched a scathing attack on paedophile priests and how, in her eyes, such priests got away with just being defrocked or reassigned to another diocese, while other mere mortals ended up in jail for committing the same crime.
She wasn’t exactly eloquent in how she phrased it; a housewife in a grocery store would have probably put it better. She meant to say it was not right if the Curia didn’t pass on to the police the names of abusive priests who came to its attention. In her frenzy to stress that “we must do more” to separate Church from State, it sounded like priests enjoyed some immunity and had a choice as to which court they appeared before.
The Curia said the obvious the next day. Paedophile priests were tried before both Church tribunals and the civil courts. They were actually tried twice, if the Church denounced them to the police, that is.
As Dalli expounded on the virtues of Church-State separation, she said the Church should not use sin to get at those politicians who disagreed with it, claiming this amounted to censorship. Then she slowly turned her sights on another target, Church-run orphanages. That’s when she began to make sense, or rather, when her priest bashing began to make sense.
She started off with praise, of course. Priests and nuns carry out priceless work inside those homes. But the homes depended on donations and volunteer work and this was not right, said the Civil Liberties Minister. Those Charles Dickens days, when orphans lived off charity, were over. Today, there is a welfare state and children in homes need to be included in government’s social policy.
Then she came out with it. Government needs to have a clear policy on children in care. It should take full responsibility to ensure that the children in Church homes are treated ‘justly’, and should also be ‘just’ with the religious staff and volunteers working in those homes. Government, she said, should be the “prime responsibility taker” to ensure those children are not at risk, ostensibly from paedophile priests.
Anyone who endured those horror years of Labour in the 1970s and 1980s knows exactly what this sounds like – Labour’s years-long campaign against Church schools and hospitals. At that time, the campaign was packaged within a socialist agenda. Today, liberal Dalli takes her cue from child abuse cases and says that the wounds of those abused by priests have not healed. Actually, the wounds of the Golden Years of Labour have not healed either.
The integration of Church homes into government social policy would mean, as Dalli herself says, that government would be the prime financial provider, with charity donations as an additional support. It also means that whoever holds the purse would most probably control policy, including adoptions.
Two years ago, a few feathers were ruffled when it emerged that a Maltese-run orphanage in Ethiopia was only accepting applications from couples and not single people. This was interpreted as a way for the Church to avoid giving children to gays wishing to adopt.
This bully government is bulldozing through Parliament gay adoption and it does not have a mandate for it
A Curia spokesman at the time had said that the Church in Malta had not issued any “formal instructions” to the orphanage. What had happened was that Archbishop Paul Cremona had expressed his ‘opinion’ to a religious person involved in the orphanage, that it would be preferable for children to be adopted by married couples.
Already then, the local Curia was pussyfooting around the issue of gay adoptions, despite the Catholic Church’s true stand on gays. This explains the Curia statement issued some time ago when it emerged that what Labour meant by civil union in its electoral manifesto was actually gay marriage and that this brought with it the right to adopt children.
It was a shameful statement by the Curia, riddled with vague words like ‘reflection’, ‘novelty’ and ‘new elements in reference to marriage’, saying that the Church’s position on the matter was clear, but never actually spelling it out.
The work was left up to Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna, who campaigned practically alone as the rest of the Curia hid in silence. Significantly last week, this bishop was appointed by the Vatican to take the testimony of clergy alleging sexual misconduct in a Scottish archdiocese. I suppose the Pope knows a man of principle when he sees one.
The vacuum left by the local Church leaves the field wide open to the likes of the River of Love Christian Fellowship. Their evangelical pastor Gordon-John Manchè presented a 10,500-signature petition to the whips of both parties in Parliament to block the introduction of gay adoptions.
That people are generally uncomfortable, if not outright against, gay adoption is easy to gauge. But as the local Church remains mum, an evangelical comes forward to do its work, in his own style, which is probably not to everyone’s liking.
His emergence is an interesting phenomenon, though nothing new. He comes from the US, where evangelical movements play a powerful role in society. For most of the last century, American evangelicalism kept a distance from politics. With time they became increasingly politically sensitive, particularly over issues like abortion, the sexual mores in society and the size of the federal government. As a result, there emerged a new Religious Right credited with helping bring about that much-needed conservative Reagan Revolution, that gave the US back its dignity after those disastrous liberal Carter years.
US evangelical groups are varied and not in complete accord with one another, neither over religious beliefs nor political issues. Evangelical prophetical interpretations, like an imminent ‘second coming’, can expose them to ridicule, as has happened to Pastor Manchè by some columnists.
What they fail to understand is that Manchè and his ilk are a symptom of an ever-receding local Catholic Church that is leaving a vacuum at a time when the country’s values are under attack from all sides.
Last weekend, the Curia disassociated itself from the River of Love. It didn’t have to do that; we all knew he does not speak for the Church, because the Church does not speak at all on a Bill that will institutionally undermine the family, as we know it.
The Church should have learnt from recent history that pussyfooting around issues of principle gets it nowhere. This bully government is bulldozing through Parliament gay adoption and it does not have a mandate for it.
The only way to handle a bully, most especially one who attacks your values head-on, is to stand up to him as Mgr Scicluna did on his own. If you don’t stand up, the bully would come back for more.
Now our Civil Rights Minister is asking for more. So, is it the orphans next?