This really must be the silly season. With half the world at war, another quarter dying of hunger and the rest feeling as if they are sitting on a volcano, 41 local worthies have decided to make some sort of statement by considering taking legal action against the Curia as they wish to formally excommunicate themselves from the Church, in other words they wish to “unbaptise” themselves in a formal signed and witnessed document stating that the very first “outward sign of inward grace” that they were given, practically at birth and without their consent, will be considered to be null and void. This, apparently, requires an interview with the Chancellor at the Curia after which you will be handed a stencilled form along with a copy of your baptismal certificate.

Well blow me down. To start with I had never even thought of baptism in terms of bits of paper to be shoved around and signed. For those who truly believe, primarily the Church itself, the sole purpose of baptism is to eradicate what we Catholics call original sin, something that we are born with, something that we inherited from Adam and Eve. It sounds almost more absurd than anything Tolkien may have penned but there you are, that is what it is for. I frankly doubt whether the Church in all its might and power can doctrinally restore original sin to its former bearer once it has been washed off by a sacrament no matter how hard it tries and, therefore, while signed declarations will be no skin off its nose to issue to anyone who wants it, the Church knows that, according to its own teachings, there are simply Catholics and lapsed Catholics. May I humbly point out to those who think that excommunication means that you are no longer a Catholic that it means quite the opposite.

Excommunication, a tool used arbitrarily over the centuries with variegated effect, means that the excommunicates are denied the sacraments but not that they technically cease to become Catholics, far from it. Therefore, excommunicates are merely people who have been prohibited from participating actively in the seven sacraments of the Church: baptism, the holy Eucharist, confession, confirmation, holy orders, marriage and extreme unction, not necessarily in that order.

I say merely in view of what the 41 members of the Not In Our Name group are trying to achieve: total severance with the Church. Coming to think of it, if the Church really believes in the intrinsic divinity of the sacraments which, by all accounts it should, there is no way that it can reverse any of the processes that emanate from that same sacrament. They are divinely irreversible and should the Church itself issue any paper to this effect it would be reducing a sacrament to a bureaucratic club membership form turning the entre concept upside down into an inward sign of outward grace!

There are many who find the whole idea of Church and Catholicism an absurdly tremendous bore at best and a tyrannical imposition at worst and decide neither to participate in the Church activities nor to observe its rules. These people are lapsed Catholics.

However, they do not make a song and a dance about it like this intrepid Not In Our Name group for the simple reason that they feel they have decided to merely opt out of the whole shebang and do their own thing. The Church is fully aware of this and can take it in its stride. Not that it should or will ever give up its quest to recover more and more lost sheep, which is probably why it hands out these doctrinally meaningless bits of paper so glibly, knowing full well that they have less spiritual value than monopoly money and that they are just humouring people into thinking that they are divested of that elusive and mysterious substance called grace.

What the Not In Our Name group has to lobby for is the removal of the so-called Catholic overriding clauses in our Constitution that technically gives the Church as an institution the right to influence. By stating that “the Roman Catholic religion is the religion of Malta”, the Constitution implies that all Maltese citizens are by default subject to Catholic influenced rules. That is what the Not In Our Name group should object to for even should they be given a plethora of papers each signed and ratified by holy bulls and great seals, as long as the 41 remain Maltese citizens and not Hottentots, they will remain subject to a Codex in which the cross in courtrooms hangs above the cathedra of every judge and every magistrate...

One is not a member of a religion because of the bit of fragile paper that was signed by our happy parents and godparents at one’s birth, which is why New Age Catholics are advocating adult baptism, but by our individual attitude.

Since Limbo has long been declared obsolete, there is now no danger that an unbaptised baby may go to this gloomy place should it snuff it for any reason. I suppose that makes eminent sense. All the rest is a matter of conscience because, since time immemorial, the vortex of one’s faith, the real thing, has always been between the person concerned and his maker, provided that one believes that there is a Maker in the first place and believes in the symbolism of Genesis and reconciling it with Darwin’s theory that we are just overdeveloped simians! But then is it worth it?