Unfortunately, Martin Scicluna’s self-styled defence of liberalism (August 23) was not only misinformed, but smacked of propaganda. The only redeeming factor was the author’s good level of English. Otherwise, the contents were one big egregious mess. In reality, Scicluna’s was not a defence of (neo-)liberalism. It was a defence of secular fundamentalism.

Let us deal with a few points Scicluna’s piece raised.

It is absolutely not true that liberalism is opposed only by right-wing religious fundamentalism. Whereas there really is a lot of political tension between Protestant Christianity and much of the Darwinism found in liberalism, that is not the whole story.

Continental Europe teems with thinkers who are neither right-wing nor Christian, and yet oppose (neo-)liberalism with vehemence.

Slavoj Žižek, an atheist, left-wing philosopher and trained Lacanian psychoanalyst, is one such critic.

The Italian journalist and politician, Giuliano Ferrara, opposes abortion and other liberal stances – and he is an atheist.

Alain Supiot, possibly the most important French legal thinker of the last two decades, whose book Homo Juridicus was published in English by the left-wing Verso, is decidedly anti-(neo-)liberal.

It is absolutely not true that liberalism is opposed only by right-wing religious fundamentalism

How could Scicluna claim, with the authority one feels oozing out of his piece, that (neo-)liberalism is the target only of the religious right?

Not to mention that Scicluna’s view is that religion is simply “superstition”, but at the same time he seemed to ignore that the Enlightenment (which he quoted with approbation) was a movement of deist thinkers. Deism is also a belief in a deity, a god.

Scicluna claimed that the oppression of women was overcome through the struggle in the name of liberalism. This is unadulterated balderdash – unless by ‘oppression of women’ he meant the illegality of abortion. If that is the case, then yes, liberalism (and feminism) can be blamed for the legalisation of abortion.

But if by oppression he meant something else, then his piece was completely misinformed, particularly in its attacks on the Catholic Church.

It was the Catholic Church which, over the centuries, fought against polygamy and in favour of the woman’s right to give her consent to marry, just to mention but two examples.

If Scicluna was referring to the Enlightenment, again he was wrong. During the Enlightenment, women did man (apologies for the pun) French salons where women and men could meet for intellectual discourse. But when it came to the moment of truth, women were betrayed by the Revolution.

There was a women’s movement, with personalities like Olympe de Gouges and others, that fought for women’s rights during the post-Bastille years because the 1789 declaration and its aftermath had left them out.

It is Christianity which always insisted, after Paul, that for God “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.

On the other hand, as the Italian left-wing intellectual Domenico Losurdo argues in his counter-history of liberalism, from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

In case Scicluna knows not of Losurdo’s book, this is what the Financial Times had to say about it: “A brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions”  – by another thinker who does not hail from the religious right, I would add.

Scicluna declaimed that liberalism aims at “robust [State] intervention... to correct injustices caused by unfettered capitalism”. Even here, Mr Scicluna’s piece was misguided.

Liberalism in its late-capitalist form, known also as neo-liberalism, is all in favour of the deregulation of capital, the removal of trade barriers even for vulnerable countries and other trade practices which merely serve to strengthen the position of the north at the expense ofthe south.

If liberalism were so great, why is resources-rich Africa still plagued with poverty? Isn’t Scicluna aware that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund perpetuate poverty through their neo-liberal (Hayek-inspired) policies?

Scicluna’s piece was so full of myths, it’s difficult to dispel them all. We shall have to continue next time.