Back in 1984, there emerged a new breed of hero in Malta we never imagined existed: the schoolteacher. Then Prime Minister Dom Mintoff had a plan, and he asked his anointed successor Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici to implement it. The briefing ran: Church schools must be for free, or they get closed down. They were the Golden Years of Labour and the result was mayhem.

Mintoff accused the Church schools of being elitist and in April of 1984, in true socialist fashion, his government passed a law that prohibited Church schools from charging fees. As the new scholastic year approached, the government withdrew the operating licences of the larger Church schools.

The Archbishop at the time, Joseph Mercieca, appeared initially inclined to open the schools nevertheless.

Parents were ready to stand up for their right to send their kids to whichever school they wanted, and were prepared to face the Labour rabble outside the schools if necessary: a normal day in the life of an oppressed people, in those Golden Years.

Then a curious thing happened. Hordes of dockyard workers thought they’d take some time off from work and attack the law courts and afterwards the Church Curia, situated across the street from the police headquarters. They broke the place up and calmly returned to work. It was, really, a normal day under Labour.

Two days later the Archbishop said Church schools would not reopen come October. That left the parents in quite a quandary. They had been receiving letters from the government telling them which alternative school they were to send their children to. Some 90 per cent kept their kids at home.

Meanwhile the Malta Union of Teachers (MUT) had entered the fray. They called for partial industrial action in government schools, with the result that its members ended up locked out from work. Labour had a habit of doing that, ask the doctors.

As the offices of the MUT in Valletta met very much the same fate as the Curia, a standard procedure under Labour, parent-teacher associations of Church schools scrambled all their resources to somehow make up for the school days being lost to Labour obstinacy to make what can never be free, for free.

Arrangements were made for classes to be held in private residences. The teachers came forward: they were a nation’s heroes in the face of socialist terror. Addresses of where lessons were being held were published in Labour-leaning newspapers. Some got paint daubed on their homes. Such fond memories of Labour, they must be.

Government eventually reached a deal with the Church, effectively paying the schools to provide the tuition ‘for free’, which was the logical thing to do. The MUT too settled its differences with the government, and its members got transferred all over the island, Labour style.

Today, 30 years later, the MUT has a president who does not appear to remember any of this. Kevin Bonello has caught the liberal bug, a bit like his predecessor John Bencini, who crossed over to Labour before the election and is now the not-so-welcome chairman for the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development.

Now it is true that when you work with a trade union, even if it is not the GWU, your thinking can get a bit muddled. Socialism does that to people. I once applied to work for the MUT and was thankfully rejected.

Hibernians FC is following the government’s own example, spotting an opportunity and going for it, whatever the ethical issues involved

So one can sympathise with Bonello’s irrational outburst some months ago when he said that it was scandalous that the Education Department did not have control over the religious classes syllabus and that is was instead controlled by the Church.

In Bonello’s opinion, there are details in the religion classes that are irrelevant.

One could have let that pass, except that the Church did not. It issued a polite and technical reply, when all it should have really said to Bonello is to mind his own business, that the syllabus is no concern of his and that his job, as a trade unionist, was the working conditions of teachers who must scrupulously follow that very syllabus.

The incident didn’t dampen Bonello’s enthusiasm. A few weeks later, extracts from a Church working document titled ‘The identity and mission of Catholic education’ were mysteriously released to the press. Bonello and his union came out with their guns blazing.

The MUT said that according to this policy, teachers working in Church schools and who made ‘life choices’ not in adherence to the teachings of the Catholic Church, would not be selected for top school posts. According to Bonello’s MUT, this policy would go against employment laws and infringes human rights.

This is the kind of conclusion that a trade union, whose leadership has been infected by latter-day liberalism, would come to.

No wonder the Malta Humanist Association came out in support of Bonello, which is strange, because what would this association have to say about Christian schools when the slogan on its website reads ‘Good without God’?

That’s liberalism for you: you have all the right to talk about keeping Christianity out, but not of keeping it in.

In an opinion piece in this newspaper, MUT president Bonello was unable to control himself. He accused the local diocese of pressing the self-destruct button through this policy and said the priests who were lobbying in favour of it were dumb. He did admit one thing, however, that “few people are agreeing with me at this time”.

If he was referring to MUT members, then someone should check this man before he suggests a merger with the GWU.

To use Bonello’s secular jargon, the Church ‘as an employer’ has every right to choose whom it employs and whom it promotes to senior positions. Staff members who live by Church teachings should be favoured because that is why parents send their children to Church schools, so they get a good, Catholic formation, led by example. Teachers who don’t like that should find a job elsewhere.

In coming to Bonello’s defence, the GWU said that professional ethics bound teachers to instruct students on subjects that, in their private life, they may disagree with. That doesn’t really work out in practice though.

Our Equalities Minister Helena Dalli, so busily redefining marriage and now, sexual identity, wants to promote social equality (for which read gay issues) in schools.

She told Malta Today, soon after becoming minister, that she was irked by outdated stereotypes in school textbooks that show an “ideal family as a working father and a mother who stays at home”.

Dalli said teachers should use those very textbooks to question the realities that the children knew back home: “Is it true of their own family at home? Do they know of other family models, including same sex couples?”

So much for sticking to the syllabus under Labour. This is a poisoning of children’s minds and Church schools are the one remaining antidote to maintain some sort of decency.

Given this onslaught on the Maltese family, it was therefore disappointing that the bishops met the MUT and let them walk away with a half-victory in a vague agreement that the Church schools would not be prying into the private lives of teachers they employ. Let’s hope they do pry, because teachers are role models for the children in their classroom.

After all, the self-proclaimed lord of liberalism, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, said only last week that footballers are role models and that a local club should think twice about offering a contract to a convicted rapist. How much more of a role model isa teacher?

Of course, Muscat is oblivious to the irony that Hibernians FC is following his government’s own example, spotting an opportunity and going for it, whatever the ethical issues involved. Selling EU passports readily comes to mind.

Church schools would be irresponsible to promote to a senior position a teacher whose beliefs and lifestyle are diametrically opposite to Catholic teachings. This is not an issue of discrimination but qualification.

The Church Schools Committee put it very aptly: “Parents choose to entrust their children to our care… Parents rightly expect much of the people leading the schools they have chosen.”

Teachers should be religiously tested, because they work for a religious institution. This happens in other countries around Europe. Bonello should cool down his zest for his misplaced liberalism. Either that, or someone at the MUT should put him in his place.