But abortion up to 24 weeks and a human-animal embryo, ooh! Yes, please. We were all aware that the ill-fated Gordon Brown had his back to the wall. Last Thursday's Crewe by-election flattened him against it in the graphic manner employed by makers of the Tom and Jerry cartoon. Well, he will play God along with a majority of members of the British Parliament. They may soon discover that there is but one God.

God-Westminster has decreed that it is OK to murder a six-month-old child in the womb; OK to regress still further by amending Warnock's already ethically grotesque and inhuman Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) so that scientists can play about with human-animal (euphemism: admixed) embryos; and OK, too, for children to be born into a two-mothers family. We're British.

So here's the thing. The right to murder a child in the womb at 24 weeks has been confirmed; the right to drain unwanted embryos down the sink is but part of an unroyal flush; the right to finish off embryos extra to those needed for in vitro fertilisation is profanely sacrosanct; the creation of 'saviour-siblings' - what an oxymoron! - is fine; the right of a woman to have a child in a two-mother family is a further unfurling of the flag of unenlightened enlightenment; but the right of a child to be born, the right of a child to call the man "daddy", whose sperm was used like a cash withdrawal from a bank to bring him or her into this world, is strictly off-limits. Thus far has humanity sunk - in Britain.

The leader writer in last Thursday's Catholic Herald said: "We have become used to calling ourselves a post-Christian society. But we flatter ourselves. From this week onwards we have definitely chosen to be a post-human society." The last remark for now must be in the form of two questions: where is Malta going with its sacrilegiously unregulated activity in the IVF field - I understand there is a wild west operating out there - and where has the bioethics committee arrived in its discussions on the subject?

The children, the children

It is clear to most that Archbishop Paul Cremona and Gozo Bishop Mario Grech have settled down well in their pastoral outreach. Their charisma and commitment to bring about a prayerful ministry with the Eucharist at its centre are clear. And both men understand the need, some say the urgent need, for sound catechesis.

It must worry the bishops that the standard of catechesis in some schools and parishes gives an impression that it languishes in both. Used to be a time when it was well understood that the first nine years of a child were the essential layers on which to build the Church, that is, a community of believers directed towards a citizenship based on Christian values.

The time to which I refer, of course, is gone and the environment of those first nine years in a child's life has changed radically, for the worse. This means that the catechism taught today can no longer be a learning by rote process, but a truly pedagogical transmission of Christian truth and values. Both these set on edge the mental teeth of those who have concluded, wrongly, that this truth, these values, may have a place, but not in the public square, please. If you must profess your faith, kindly do so privately. As for the Church, can it please stick to the sacristy? We're Soviets.

It is fearsomely ironic that when this approach was adopted by Dom Mintoff in the 1950s and 60s and an attempt made to impose it during the 1970s and the first half of the 80s, it shocked and dismayed the nation. It was an easy and logical step for him to go further and, in some way or another, neither edifying, try to limit further the influence of the Church by a direct attack on its schools. Today a parallel egregious approach, of weakening of the Church and its institutions, is being adopted by people who were among Mintoff's harshest opponents on precisely this point.

The challenge this poses to the teaching of the teachings of the Church is thus enormous. It is made all the greater by what seems to be a lamentable lack of qualification on the part of some of those who 'teach religion' in state and independent schools and by a curriculum that does not have much time for the 'subject'.

The situation should alarm the bishops. This serious lacuna affects not only the future of the young, who grow up to be Malta's fathers and mothers. It affects the future of stable marriages and, indeed, the future of children in the womb, once the safest haven in the world, today threatened from all sides.

An ode of sorts to GKC

Rediscovering G.K. Chesterton has been one of my greatest delights. A while back in this column, I referred to his stay at the Osborne Hotel in Valletta sometime in the early 1930s, a fact I picked up from an eponymous biography of the man by Maisie Ward. I wondered at the time whether this was known and suggested that the hotel put up a plaque to commemorate that visit.

This totally innocent did-you-know-that GKC-had-been-here query elicited a few ungracious remarks. Did I not know that Dun Karm had had tea with the Great Man? What a bum, me that is, not Dun Karm or GKC, not to know what is general knowledge.

Next Wednesday is the 134th anniversary of the birth of that giant of a literary genius, metaphorically and literally - there were 300 pounds of him - Gilbert Keith Chesterton. His birthday will be celebrated in the United States for, ironically, it was there, and not in England, that a Chesterton Society was set up in his honour. What would the master of paradox have said about that?

It is not quite the case of a prophet not being known in his own country; even the most revisionist text on his life could not diminish the contribution he made to the English literary, social, political and spiritual scene; more, I imagine, that this colossus, this great apologist for the Catholic faith well before he became a Catholic in 1922 at the age of 48, was too large for Britain.

Dale Ahlquist, who provides an excellent half-hour programme on Chesterton (Apostle of Common Sense) on EWTN (Tuesday at 8.30 a.m. with a repeat on Saturday at 9.30 p.m.) tells us that when his atheist friend and philosophical opponent, George Bernard Shaw, heard the news, he sent him a letter in which he exclaimed, 'Gilbert! This is going too far!'

To make the statement that he was the most prolific writer of his time somehow misses out on the scale of his prodigious creativity. He wrote more than 100 books, among which two fine biographies on St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas - Etienne Gilson considered the latter 'as being without possible comparisons the best book ever written on St Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement', praise indeed from so renowned a scholar; 4,000 newspaper essays, 30 years of weekly contributions to the Illustrated London News, five plays, five novels, hundreds of poems (the Folio Society has published a volume), the Father Brown detective stories, and edited his own G.K.'s Weekly

One of his books, The Everlasting Man, converted C.S. Lewis from atheism. It was, the post-Chesterton apologist thus unleashed said a few months before he died in 1963, the book that most helped him to convert to Christianity. And since then, increasingly nowadays when Chesterton's works are undergoing a great revival - not least because he was not merely a prophet for his times but has become even more of one for our times - the depth of his thinking compared with the shallowness of so much else coming forth from trendy philosophers, secular and Christian, is alerting even these to a wake-up call.

For him, the Catholic faith and the Catholic church were one and the same thing, the only realities in the world of The Well and the Shallows. It is from the Well that he drew strength, because it was from it that he drew the truth and avoided the shallows His exuberant defence of his religion is best gleaned from this forthright assertion:

'So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition.

I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with such pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be antiquated.'

He died on June 14, 1936, and on the anniversary of his death I hope to return to the subject of the most extraordinary lay Catholic of the 20th century.