It is symptomatic of John Micallef’s obsessional hang-up about the Church that he should interpret an article I wrote making a dispassionate assessment of the important legislative steps finally being taken by the government to assert the state’s overriding responsibility for dealing with cases of child abuse, including clerical child sex abuse, under secular, not canon, law as an attack on the Church. His letter of November 19, Disliking Church Hardly Helps Make The Point, refers.
An attack on the Church could not have been further from my mind. My article was not a criticism of the Church but the celebration of an advance for Maltese democracy. However, Mr Micallef – a modern Fidei Defensor – is so blindly wedded to the Church that he is unable to see that it is sometimes led by men, who are subject to all the human frailties of misjudgement, vanity, hypocrisy, intolerance, immorality, corruption, lack of charity and others, as we all are. For somebody who clearly believes in transubstantiation, papal infallibility and the virgin birth, it is strange that he cannot see this.
How otherwise can one explain his astonishing assertion that the government may not be competent to legislate on child abuse and, by clear inference, that the Church can therefore be forgiven clerical child sex abuse – the rape of children – because “parents, carers, policemen, nurses, doctors, judges, lawyers and thieves, who form a part of society, have abused children and the evidence is overwhelming that the incidence of child abuse by these groups...is significantly and proportionately greater”.
He clearly meant this as a defence of the Church because he then compounds the statement by saying: “When the world is manifestly and consistently guilty of worldliness” – presumably he balks at the word wickedness – “it [society] is not in a position to stand in judgement over anybody’s worldliness (sic)” and he prays in support of this broken-backed defence GK Chesterton’s equally self-serving argument that you can excuse the Church’s vices because “the world has these vices much more”. Oh dear, poor John.
Well, I don’t know about “proportionately greater”. What we do know for sure is that cases of clerical abuse straddle the world from Austria to Australia, from the United States to the United Kingdom, and countless Catholic countries in between. And in Malta, of the 45 cases investigated by the “Response Team” over the last 11 years, 26 have been proved well-founded – a guilty rate of almost 60 per cent.
But the crux of the issue, which seems to have escaped Mr Micallef’s abject apologia, is that, even if these numbers were not themselves so high, we simply do not expect priests, men of God, to rape and abuse children placed in their care, even if the overall numbers as a proportion of the population are small. His defence of such heinous behaviour is simply unacceptable and unworthy. There are no mitigating circumstances. Talk about defending the indefensible. As well as his descent into moral relativism!
Why is Mr Micallef unable to draw his own conclusions without constantly quoting somebody else’s words in support? Is it that he fears the answer to his own rational analysis of a problem, which might lead him logically to conclude – as I did – that if the Maltese Church teaches absolute moral standards, then we have a right to hold it to absolute moral standards?
The whole thrust of my article was to reinforce the need for the clearer separation of Church and state in Malta – for the end of what one good Monsignor called “the twinning” that currently occurs – and to expose the Savonarola-like statements of a bishop who has frequently pronounced himself in mediaeval terms on homosexuality, divorce and cohabitation and – given the clerical abuse background – has had the temerity recently to compare teaching about contraception to the abuse (sic) of students.
I suspect that people like Mr Micallef would like us to live in a theocracy. I am determined that we should continue to live in a liberal, secular democracy. Of course, there is a role for the Church as another lobbying voice in the public square, but religion cannot have exclusive rights over public policy, and certainly no rights of veto.