Yes, what Mgr Arthur Said Pullicino said about divorce and the judiciary is preposterous. And President Emeritus Eddie Fenech Adami has shown how Mgr Said Pullicino is confused about morality and the duty of Christian politicians. But none of that is reason enough for the rest of us to libel the Middle Ages.
It was the recently retired Mr Justice Philip Sciberras who started it by referring to a mediaeval imposition. Judge Sciberras has been widely praised for his performance on the Bench. But his report card for his performance on mediaeval history should show a big red F for recycling a myth.
The Middle Ages saw the invention of sophisticated institutions and devices we are still using today: from double-entry bookkeeping and bills of lading to the university and the use of optical instruments in science. Our own dismissive attitude to mediaeval scholastic arguments about how many angels fit on a pinhead misunderstands that those were arguments about the nature of space, whose closest analogue today would be astrophysicists’ speculations about quarks and black holes.
The standard of academic argument about disputed questions (and public disputation between philosophers and theologians was institutionalised) required a code of intellectual humility absent from Mgr Said Pullicino’s homily. Among the greatest scholars, there was an insistence on paying as much attention to the substance of argument as to the authority that spouts it. We owe the 15th century Renaissance to the one in the 12th, which rediscovered the classical Greek heritage through Arabic translations.
In terms of violence in the name of creed and ideology, the 20th century was far more excessive. As for the balance between clerical and secular power, the former could certainly take nothing for granted. In practice, the former was as liable to be imposed on by the latter as the reverse. As for principle, it was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who stated it would be tyranny if secular law simply reproduced divine law.
None of this means we should welcome a return to the Middle Ages. We would miss simple medical treatments, the cheap dissemination of books and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When certain writers point out that our age may indeed be making a certain kind of return to the Middle Ages – say, in the pervasive spread of private security guards and gated communities – the twinge we ought to feel is of anxiety not pleasure.
If the Judicial Vicar’s attitudes are to be linked to the past, it would be a much more recent one when a “muscular Christianity” was advocated. If he really spoke about the universality of natural law using terms like “pagans in the African bush” (as opposed to, say, “vegans in the Afghan Kush”, a plangent reference to Californian servicemen fighting the Taliban), then we are dealing with someone whose imagination is still fired by, and mired in, the world-view that gave us the tales of Tarzan.
That world-view – with its ideas of what constitutes society and nature, order and disorder – is far from any mediaeval world-view. Parts of it still find adherents, some of whom are merely racial and cultural bigots while others have put aside the bigotry but still subscribe to its other ideas of what constitutes proper social order.
To put it this way is to recognise that such views, far from being remote from us, can actually be located within certain areas of the legitimate political spectrum. I do not mean partisan politics but instincts about power and how the world is that spells itself out as attitudes towards authority, justice and duty.
Indeed, Mgr Said Pullicino’s homily is full of philosophical and social assumptions which are not binding on Catholics but which inform his judgment that the legalisation of divorce is wrong under any circumstances. For example, he refers to the “social disaster” wrought by divorce wherever it has long been introduced. Since this covers much of the world for much of history, he is effectively claiming that history is a record of social disaster. Marxists and some radical feminists would agree, if for somewhat different reasons. But are Catholics obliged to agree?
Of course not. We can see that the Marxist and radical feminist interpretations are political, in the sense of selecting what to value as salient according to prior assumptions about order and justice. Mgr Said Pullicino is doing the same thing although with different assumptions, which, while informed by his faith, are not stipulated by it.
Equally political is his statement, offered as common sense, that we ought not be “cut off from our roots”, that as a people “we need to remain bound to our history, values and identity...” Many Catholics would agree. But others might reasonably object that they find how the idea of identity is presented as too static, while others yet might think that, actually, a break from our past might help make us more not less Christian. It is not an argument about the faith but about historical sociology and political philosophy.
Hence, why to call Mgr Said Pullicino “mediaeval” is to miss just which politics most needs to be exposed in this debate. His arrogance is blatant and so counterproductive. His assumptions about the nature of society are more widely shared but, disguised perhaps even to those who hold them, peddle themselves as natural and uncontentious when they are ideological and controversial.
ranierfsadni@europe.com