Looking back at 2017 | I, Paul, take you, Peter...

The pace of social change continued unabated in 2017 as same-sex marriage became a reality just three years after Malta introduced civil unions for gay partners.

The development came on the back of trail-blazing legislation that banned gay conversion therapy and made it easier for transgender people to have their gender status recognised.

Malta again topped the chart for LGBTIQ rights across Europe, a mere four years since it languished on the bottom rungs of the Rainbow Index.

The Labour government adopted a progressive agenda since coming to power for the first time in 2013 and this has created historic political and social milestones.

The pace of change continued throughout 2017 but for some the momentum has been unsettling.

The new laws of recent years ensured gender equality in all its aspects, granting rights to the LGBTIQ community that were undreamt of up to a few years ago.

The developments challenged the conservative view of family grounded in Christian belief. For some, the gender-neutral language used in the marriage equality law, which was enacted soon after the June election, was an affront to the traditional family model.

In Parliament, Nationalist Party MP David Agius – he subsequently became PN deputy leader - decried the end of the world, insisting with fervour that he would still call his mother, ‘mother’.

Eventually, despite misgivings by some Opposition MPs with the new law, all, bar Edwin Vassallo, voted in favour of marriage equality. Peter and Paul could now get married like any other heterosexual couple.

But the rapid pace of change appears to have also infected the Church.

In January, Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Gozo Bishop Mario Grech came in for serious criticism by some members of the clergy for their guidelines on how divorced and re-married Catholics should be treated.

Based on Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, the bishops said Catholics, who according to Church doctrine were in irregular situations, could be allowed to receive communion after passing through a discernment process.

The guidelines did not go down too well with the more conservative elements within the Church but the dissent was not voiced in public, apart from the odd priest here and there.

The bishops were accused of surrendering to secularism by William Oddie, an English Catholic writer and broadcaster, writing in the Catholic Herald last February.

“The Maltese Church was tooth and nail opposed to it [secularisation]. Now, its two bishops have not only surrendered to it, but have declared themselves its willing collaborators,” Oddie wrote.

They were harsh words that were repeated by some Maltese priests in private.

The guidelines came as a surprise. Only a few years earlier, Bishop Grech had been a pitchfork advocate against the introduction of divorce. He has gradually moderated his views, espousing a more compassionate church.

It is not as if the Maltese church has suddenly ditched age-old Christian doctrine on the family but the opening to divorced Catholics has departed from the judgemental attitude of the past.

But the wind of change also came from society’s grass roots in 2017. A short but vocal campaign by a group of women for the introduction of the morning after pill found a listening ear in the political establishment.

The morning after pill became a reality for Maltese women in 2017 as the medical authorities adopted a scientific approach amid cries from the conservative elements in society that it was abortive.

But change is unlikely to stop blowing in the new year. In 2017, the Labour Party was re-elected with a mandate to initiate a discussion on the legalisation of marijuana for recreational use and an overhaul of the law regulating in-vitro fertilisation.

While on the marijuana issue the government has been very cautious in not laying out the specific details of what it intends to do, on the IVF law the expected developments are clearer.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has gone on record in Parliament saying the government had a mandate to introduce gamete donation and embryo freezing.

That alone will ensure another heated debate that will pitch progressives against conservatives as the country plods down the road of increased secularisation.