If the Church in Malta attempts to contribute its opinion in any debate that touches moral issues, a firestorm of corrosive and outright abusive remarks are let loose in the media. This is particularly the case in the comments that accompany any article or report that questions the aggressive secular agenda.

Once again, the animosity towards the Church has been reignited over the contentious issue of embryo freezing despite the excellent report it has just published to defend the current legislation that safeguards life from conception.

Every attempt is being made to discredit the Church and exclude it from any meaningful participation in fashioning policies that impact on society and the common good. We have reached the ridiculous stage that many of us will hesitate to mention that their life choices are influenced by their faith and Christian beliefs.

In the political arena, those who have Christian credentials are mocked and their views are branded as medieval, dogmatic and worst of all, conservative. The popular trend today is styled as liberal, progressive, enlightened, and any questioning of what really lies behind such labelling is dismissed out of hand.

We are now confronted with a steep decline in the traditional Christian values that once underpinned our society.

An example of this sad unfolding situation is reflected in the spiralling increase in promiscuity in our youth that has led to such a high number of young single mothers. This is definitely not in our country’s interest. It has led to an underclass of underprivileged who will find it all the harder to cope with the challenges life inevitably brings. These realities stare us in the face.

Yet, we seem to overlook that Christianity has fashioned the culture of our country and is deep-rooted. Malta’s physical heritage is saturated with churches, chapels and roadside shrines while our legal system, grounded upon individual human dignity, is explicitly and obviously Christian. Our educational base, our university, health service, courts and charitable sector all owe their genesis to Christianity.

Therefore, one cannot but wonder why we are abandoning our Christian beliefs and culture that have contributed so much to our civilisation.

Moral and civic renewal is in all our interest, believers or not

Also, when one considers the numerous Catholic lay organisations on the island that command the adherence of so many people, one cannot help but wonder why their voice is so markedly absent from public debate.

Chris Whitehouse in The Catholic Universe of May 4, 2014, expressed this quite clearly when he wrote: “Our reticence to spread the faith or to allow our voices to be heard suggests a loss of confidence in the message and intellectual rigour of Christianity.”

In his recent eloquent homily to fresh graduates on November 12, Archbishop Charles Scicluna makes an impassioned appeal to our future professionals to strengthen and nurture their faith. He warned against retaining an immature concept of religion that reduces faith to being a puerile and irrelevant superstition. He cautioned against the error of portraying religion as being opposed to science.

The Archbishop’s concerns are well founded. For too long and for too many, our quality time in developing our spiritual dimension has been allowed to wither and die out. Religious devotion has remained at a superficial level and this explains the inability of many Catholics to present their views with competence in the public arena.

Catholics cannot afford the luxury of being indifferent to what happens around them. After all, our faith obliges us to promote the Good News and to be prepared to advocate what we believe in. Besides, we should all realise that moral and civic renewal is in all our interest, believers or not.

Thankfully, in Malta, we have encouraging signs of young people who are prepared to take a stand and defend life and human dignity. They did this with remarkable competence and clarity in the recent debate of the Youth Parliament. Their outstanding participation has already been acknowledged elsewhere in the press.

They lived up to Pope Benedict’s appeal made in January 2012 when he said: “Here once more we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well informed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture, and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism that would delegitimise the Church’s participation in public debate…”.

Their commendable example should galvanise Christians and people of good will to network together to face up to the negative developments that are being foisted on our people.

klausvb@gmail.com

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