…before I was rudely interrupted by what turned out to be a mean-livered form of liver cancer with a many-syllabic name – it sounded that way at the time – and which required my immediate dispatch to the UK or else… but that may be for another time.
As for better, or for worse
The divorce debate, if such it can be called, goes on, nowhere more limply than in Martin Scicluna’s recent effort in The Times at the end of March. I had hoped not to get in a tangle with him again, but he made this impossible when he submitted a piece, Three presidents, hypocrisy and divorce.
The first of these was President Kennedy. He is of no interest in the context of divorce in Malta; else we would have to go into his lifestyle in some detail, and that of brother Edward, he of Chappaquiddick fame to work out just how representative of the American Catholic ethos their lives were. Enough red herrings have been trawled into discussions everybody said should be conducted fairly and honestly.
As for the second president, Scicluna’s references to former President Eddie Fenech Adami were indelicate. He acknowledged the “honour” of being the man’s defence policy adviser for two years and his “profound respect for (Fenech Adami’s) contribution to Malta’s development and well-being. He fought for democracy in the 1980s and Malta’s accession to the EU in the 1990s, probably the most pivotal step in Malta’s history after independence”.
Which sounds like quite an accolade; it certainly does not prepare one for the opinion expressed in the next sentence but one. “It is always a shock to discover that a leader one had admired has feet of clay.”
This is hysteria.
And for why? How can a man fight for democracy – and how he struggled for the victory Scicluna cannot begin to know because he was in the pleasant haven of the United Kingdom throughout that period – be responsible for the “most pivotal step in Malta’s history after independence” and suddenly sprout “feet of clay”? Well, it seems to be a clumsy feat of evolution – Fenech Adami believes in God, believes in the teaching of the Son of God on the matter of divorce, which is what countless millions of Catholics believe, and stands by that teaching. This, for reasons so obscure as to make them irrational, is anathema to Mr Scicluna.
The third of the three presidents, Guido de Marco – “Malta’s best-ever Minister for Foreign Affairs… its best-loved President… an international statesman” – “shortly before his untimely death crossed the room to congratulate (Scicluna) on the think-tank report”, of which, we are reminded, Scicluna was the lead-author. Apparently, de Marco told him quite simply: “We must do something about this problem. We cannot go on as we are.” Not the slightest glimpse of feet of clay there, eh?
From that declaration in a crowded room Scicluna concludes that as “a legislator, he would have worked hard to achieve an enlightened legal remedy… to deal with the resulting social instability with justice and humanity”. But, if I recall – and I do – de Marco was a legislator for decades and did nothing about “this problem”.
But was de Marco, for whom I had a great deal of time, Malta’s best loved President, the best ever Minister for Foreign Affairs? Many will disagree and point at Ċensu Tabone as the man who returned Malta to its place in the European sun, no mean task after Dom Mintoff’s declaration that the same Europe (the West) was Cain to East Europe’s Abel.
I went into that because it seems to me that anybody who agrees with Scicluna is, in his eyes at least, worthy of eulogy, anyone who disagrees with him, beyond the Pale; everybody who agrees with him is enlightened (a word so misused as to constitute a parody of itself), anybody who does not, fundamentalist (a description in some liberal minds that fits anybody with a religious belief that is different to theirs).
There is an agenda in his use of words and he revealed it when he claimed that Fenech Adami and those who think like him appear to have forgotten that “religious faith is a private matter and that the principle of the clear separation of civil and religious authority is among the most important characterisations (sic) of a liberal democracy”.
Poppycock.
Faith is not a private matter; it is personal, yes, but shared in a community. When necessary it is preached from the roof-tops. But our fundamentalist secularists keep insisting that it is something to keep mum about, a gift that is given to some, one that should not inform their public actions, one best kept locked away at home or in the sacristy. This muddled thinking is a travesty of reason.
Scicluna may not see this but, “the ‘principle of the clear separation of civil and religious authority” automatically concedes that there is a religious authority. What is that authority for? Ritual? Worship? Silence on matters that affect the body social?
Keeping religion from the public square which it is clearly entitled to occupy, and does, in all parts of the world except within the confines of totalitarian states and, it appears, secularist ones. The meaning of that ‘clear separation’ assumes a co-equal duty of one and the other to do their thing and, as best each can, to influence the other on a range of socio-moral-political matters that affect society.
To miss this is to miss a central point in the debate. Church and state have an interest in the kind of society each would like to see. If the state’s idea of a society differs radically and drastically from that of the Church, the latter has a duty to point out to its adherents the pitfalls in that idea. One such, and it is not yet the state’s, is the business of no-fault divorce preceded by a four-year period before this is granted. The problem here is that the four-year-period will, as sure as there is a secular god, evaporate into an overnight I divorce thee mentality.
Such an option is already being considered in Europe and as we are Europeans and must not allow ourselves to be regarded as barbarians, it will operate in Malta, too.
And so we will enter the area of frivolous divorce, about which Chesterton had something to say a hundred years ago. “The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason” (today’s no fault lark) “they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason”.
Desert storms
No matter, for since I left, the world has been in the process of undergoing what may yet turn out to be not the spring predicted for the Middle East and south, but a summer of seething discontent except, ironically and so far – have you noticed? – in Iraq.
Am I alone in thinking that the dithering US President’s decision to sound firm and to act weakly was imposed on him not only because he had no idea of how he should deploy the resources of the United States, but by a lamentable cynicism that turned his eyes inwards to next year’s presidential elections and to hell with the turmoil in the real world. Launching a one billion dollar fund-raising campaign in the hope of retaining the White House good, leading a coalition bad. Could not the launch have waited?
Either way, he seems to have lost Hilary Clinton and forgotten, horror of horrors, his election promise that within a year of his election Guantanamo Bay would be closed. Into his third year in office, it remains open and trials are scheduled to take place along the lines his predecessor laid down and for which he was excoriated by Obama. Plus ca change… He is going to need every one of that billion dollars...
Now we have the Libyan leader writing to Obama calling him “our son”, a paternity the President will not relish, and asking him to put the hounds of war on a leash. From Syria, leapfrogging over Israel, the only seriously democratic state in the entire region, in a crescent formation formed by Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, attaching Bahrain and Yemen as carbuncles to this riotous geographical space, all is in a state of flux and up for grabs – by whoever these upheavals place at the top of the heap. Nobody seems to be certain whether these new leaders will turn out to be truly reformist, or more of the same with an even more dangerous agenda. The latter may well be probable.
At a tangent, it was amusing and revealing that at one stage of the ebb and flow of the Libyan civil war, the BBC showed a hilarious clip of the intrepid John Simpson ducking and weaving as he informed viewers that Gaddafi’s forces were pounding the rebels, among whom he was – hence his ducking and weaving to show just how dangerous the situation was.
Cut To JS in the car apparently pursued by government forces and breathlessly asking whoever was there to hear him to keep their heads down. The cameraman seemed not to have heard as he calmly took the steadiest pictures of the reporter, head below the back windscreen. Of such is TV reporting!
From what I have read, comments critical of the way the prime minister has handled the situation as it affects Malta and its position as a member of the EU and the UN, are not borne out by the impeccable manner Lawrence Gonzi has in fact addressed the multi-faceted drama currently taking place.