There isn’t a person I would be less willing to receive religious instruction from than Tonio Fenech. I don’t know the man, but from the little bits I have picked up from the newspapers, he’s walking a tightrope with fundamentalist Christianity and increasingly risks coming across as a totally whitewashed sepulchre.

How Fenech, who has previously exercised poor discretion and judgment in that very sensitive area where public life overlaps the private, feels comfortable talking about ‘his’ Christian values (like he has exclusive patented rights to these), is, really, quite rich.

He’s the guy who engaged the services of a char who, like the majority of chars the world over, was undeclared and unregistered.

When the pitiful woman hurt her back and he no longer had any use for her, he threw her to the proverbial dogs and media with no apparent respect for her privacy and anonymity.

She became his little paradigm – the subject of the morality parable he threw around, while having us believe he was completely oblivious to what was going on.

The incident suddenly became ‘his wife’s domain’ and he made out that he happened to stumble upon the news completely by chance, when it was already too late. Fenech tells us he has trouble divorcing himself from his Christian faith, but he apparently has no problem divorcing himself from everyday life and domestics in his household.

Then there was the not so domestic affair, when a possible perverse value judgment told him that hitching a free ride to watch Arsenal on a private jet might actually be appropriate behaviour.

I’m not about to tell Fenech how or how not to fly because I actually don’t give a damn with whom he chooses to consort or accept invitations from, and where his ethical standards and values lie on that score.

But I certainly don’t think any of us want or feel the urgent need to subscribe to Fenech’s values and morals about the eligibility or otherwise of our attendance at Holy Week processions based on our divorce convictions.

You see, Fenech strikes me as being very selective about his moral dilemmas. He picks and chooses when to be holier than thou and when to fly (literally) in the face of convention.

To say that I am almost certain that Fenech would have no qualms attending the funeral service or the second or even third marriage ceremony of a divorcee, (especially if the deceased or the person remarrying was a reckonable entity) might be written off as pure supposition and speculation on my part. But I’ll hazard the guess.

And please don’t run away with the idea that I would ever begrudge anyone paying their respects or otherwise celebrating a divorcee, whether inside or outside a church. Oh, but you see I’m not the one who needs converting.

Yet, if Fenech is that intolerant, judgmental and so totally at odds with people whose consciences and lifestyles sit comfortably with divorce and remarriage, he may want to rethink a lot of his behaviour. Or he may just want to shut up and do the maths.

Yes, do the job he was elected to do and leave the preachy sanctimony to the monsignors.

If Fenech thinks he may be better suited to the Christian ministry rather than the finance ministry, and if he genuinely believes that his political mission and portfolio extends to the moral accountability of his electorate, perhaps it’s time he steps down.

I fear he’ll soon tell us that people who eat meat on Good Friday are sinful and unworthy. And when it comes to the Minister of Finance, it’s almost a case of the devil doing God’s work.

Remember Douglas Kmiec, the US Ambassador to Malta, who was criticised for being too Catholic an ambassador, even for Malta? Well, look what happened to him and his public office when his religious role impinged on his ambassadorial duties.

That didn’t turn out very well did it, because you can’t take a politician seriously when he rams religion down your throat, or even so much as waves it at you. There’s something intrinsically scary and lethal about that combination.

And this applies to all MPs or ex-MPs who seem hell-bent on imposing their morality onto the rest of us. While Eddie Fenech Adami has every right to reject divorce because it is out of sync with his conscience and religious beliefs, he can’t expect the rest of us to embrace his values and he certainly should play no part in bullying the PN into what stand they ought to take.

I have no idea where Fenech Adami stands on annulment. He’s never spoken about the absurd and potentially disastrous effects that annulment could wreak on the Maltese family.

That obliterating and rendering a perfectly ordinary marriage non-existent, just so that one or both parties can go ahead and start over, and still sit pretty with the church, is equally, if not more, life-shattering than divorce, especially to children born of the original union.

You can’t be dead against divorce and peacefully coexist with annulment because in real life terms, when it comes to family breakdown, the difference between the two is negligible. In fact, there’s probably more of a discrepancy between Pepsi and Coke.

The Nationalists have long been selling Malta as this fantastically progressive, democratic place, which strives to promote development, tolerance and modernity.

Apparently though, for the PN, being forward-looking and all-embracing begins and ends with the €6 million Renzo Piano design.

We should resume the divorce debate when PN divorces itself from the Church. Until then, we should really show them what we think of them.

Then they may have no choice but to listen.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com