On the face of it, the opening barrage in the Archbishop's Victory Day sermon seemed intended to stop dead in its tracks all forward movement on the divorce issue. It went much further. This was no chiding pastoral letter addressed to the faithful and somehow to be considered a private affair of a particular belief. It was power politics at a moment of symbolically charged Church - state interface. The government was put on notice: The Church is prepared to do battle.
It is also the first public showdown with a PN government at the helm. Everything is different and the tone was a little strident, the sensation of overkill hinting of panic veiled by fulminations. The PN has relinquished its tacit claim to monopoly over everything Catholic, thus releasing the MLP from the need to compete with it. Instead, the Prime Minister's gambit on divorce has led the MLP leader to threaten to move a Bill in Parliament if the PN does not walk the talk. In a matter of weeks, the situation has been reversed and the PN and the MLP are in competition on a trajectory tangential to Church doctrine.
The Church cannot fail to oppose divorce. This very fact weakened its efforts to participate in the civil debate on the basis of long experience and expertise in social matters. Everybody knew that the Church had a different agenda.
With the dramatic reversal of the situation brought about by the need of the other two parties to take over the Green manifesto lock, stock and barrel following the March election, the Church has decided that there is no time left for polite pretence. The issue is not divorce as far as the Church is concerned. It is a matter of putting up a last-ditch defence against modernity, secularism and pluralism. The Church will not succumb without a fight to a reality it views with apprehension.
Perhaps the Bishops are hoping for a miracle but they know what the future holds and, at the very best, they can hope to postpone it a little further. Still, the way this battle is fought, the means adopted, will also colour the Church's future.
A universal Church resorting to nationalism is a contradiction in terms.
Recalling the wars our ancestors fought for the faith is hardly ecumenical in this day and age. Demonising secularists and giving them the guise of invading Ottomans or bombing Fascists and Nazis does not score high in the free and frank exchange of ideas.
Concocting a troika of divorce, abortion and euthanasia is illogical, manipulative and unfair. If intended to convince the unconvinced, it was a miserable failure. Opinions will be variously divided on each of these issues. Divorce is on the cards today, the others are political bogeyman cards.
The vision of a future secular society in which young Catholics will have a harder time making the right choices because they are exposed to the wrong messages and influences was shocking. What we need is not to lock out a "future" which has already happened but to address it with authenticity for all people. Speaking of Catholic morality in contrast with a value-free society as though only Catholics can be decent, honest and true is offensive and contradicted by experience.
The Bishop of Gozo was reported saying that "In a pluralistic society such as ours, there are those who claim that it is arrogant to suggest that moral truth tied to a particular belief ought to lead a civil order that would bind everyone".
What is a pluralistic society for the Bishop of Gozo? One moral truth tied to a particular belief? The same leading a civil order that would bind everyone? It is not arrogance, it is detachment. His Grace is not merely being arrogant, I dread to say it, he is proposing a subversion of the existing civil order. He is not fighting to preserve the status quo but attempting to take us all back centuries, not generations. Our laws cannot be founded on belief but on communicable reason. They are already in clear dissonance with Catholic doctrine in the recognition of divorces obtained abroad and the decriminalisation of adultery and homosexuality.
The divorce issue has ballooned into a Church - state ideological and constitutional conflict. The Prime Minister and his government will have to stand their ground in defence of the state or forfeit their authority. The other political parties will back them up. It is a definition of lines of demarcation such as Alcide De Gasperi had with the Pope in Italy some 60 years ago. In Malta, it cannot be postponed further.
Dr Vassallo is a member of the Committee of the European Green Party.
hcvassallo@kemmunet.net.mt