What happens in Malta does not stay in Malta

Guze Stagno can say what he likes: and he may even be right with regard to Brussels, where (let's face it) a lot of stuff happens that we never get to hear about.

But here on our little rock in the centre of the universe, the events of the week have dramatically pointed in the opposite reaction. What happens in Malta certainly does not stay here for long. So when Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna let slip that Pope Francis was 'shocked' to discover Malta's plans to introduce same-sex adoption rights in the near future, the news took wing and dipped in and out of media houses worldwide within literally a few hours.

Even I, who could easily have warned Scicluna that such news would instantly attract the attention of the world press, was slightly surprised at the speed with which the story was picked up, and the prominence it was given. The editor of the Telegraph even questioned whether Time Magazine should revoke its choice of Francis for its 'Person of the Year' award: a choice, he reminded us, that had been fuelled in part by the same pope's earlier conciliatory remarks concerning homosexuality.

Time Magazine did not revoke its award in the end; but it did report the story concerning shock and horror at the Vatican. So did the Guardian, The Independent (UK), the New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and many more. Implicit in all such reporting was an apparent contradiction between Pope Francis's private comments to Bishop Scicluna, and his public statements on the same subject earlier this year. I for one sincerely doubt whether this contradiction even exists... certainly there has been no evidence of any actual softening of the Church's stand on homosexuality (or indeed anything else) since the resignation of Pope Benedict last March. But I'll leave you to judge for yourselves.

The important part is that, rightly or wrongly, it was actually Bishop Scicluna's revelations that 'shocked' some people out there in the wider world. Not everyone, I'll grant you... but the tone of the media reporting suggests that Pope Francis's statements to Scicluna did indeed raise a few eyebrows among people who had previously viewed him as a reformist who was about to embark on a spectacular transfiguration of the Catholic Church. And this impression can only have been greatly reinforced by graphic reminders coming from Argentina's LGBT community - also in response to the same story - that the same Jose Bergolio had similarly waged a fierce war on gay marriage when still Bishop of Buenos Aires (i.e., just a few years ago).

Many of Pope Francis' admirers in and out of the Church may have been entirely unaware that he had previously described gay marriage as "the devil's plot to disrupt God's plan". Well, thanks to Mgr Scicluna's comments, their attention may have now been drawn to this fact... and I have no doubt that while many of the more conservative Catholics would welcome the revelation, others would have received it with greater 'shock' than anything experienced by Pope Francis himself.

Something therefore tells me that Bishop Scicluna may have unwittingly dented the smiling pope's carefully cultivated image as the man who would finally dust out the remaining cobwebs from the Vatican's millennial corridors... and maybe that's not such a bad thing, as at least it dispels all such fanciful notions for the wishful thinking they really are.

But what I find truly interesting is not so much what all this tells us about the Vatican under Pope Francis; but what it tells us about our own country in the 21st century: in particular, how some of its citizens still believe that the rest of the world is actually quite irrelevant to our local goings-on. So irrelevant, in fact, that one of our Bishops felt he could safely reveal details of a private conversation with arguably one of the most famous men in existence today... under the evident assumption that nobody outside Malta would either notice or care.

I hate to be the one to break the news... but those days are over, Mgr Scicluna. As we all saw recently with Joseph Muscat's technicolour passport scheme, what happens in Malta can indeed be of great interest to the wider world. This is in part because - and the Church is not the only entity that sometimes forgets this - we are now attached to the wider world by means of an umbilical cord called 'EU membership'. What happens in Malta now has real and sometimes very emphatic reverberations in Brussels... where, if I'm not mistaken, Maltese citizenship (and, by extension, national identity) will soon be a topic of debate in the European Parliament.

For this reason alone I find it staggering that Bishop Charles Scicluna would so thoughtlessly let drop a nugget of information that could be used (and arguably already has) as ammunition against the Church he represents himself. But of course, I may be misreading the whole thing... and if so, it would only make the same situation much more interesting.

It is perfectly possible that Mgr Scicluna was fully aware that his comments would be picked up by the international press, and also that they would damage the pope's 'liberal' reputation in the process. It could even have been his intention all along - let's face it, not everyone in the Church is particularly thrilled about the direction in which Pope Francis seems to herding his flock. Nor will it have escaped notice that Bishop Scicluna himself had been appointed by Pope Benedict, whose take on such matters (in public, at any rate) was markedly different from his successor's.

There have already been several voices within the Church openly questioning Pope Francis on a wide variety of issues: not least gay rights. Some of these people may even think Pope Francis needs reminding who really calls the shots in the Vatican... in which case, Scicluna's comments may also be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to trip up Pope Francis' credentials as the world's first openly gay-friendly Pontifex Maximus.

But we have now drifted into Dan Brown territory, and I wouldn't want to ruin his next bestseller.

Back to the real world: what this little incident also illustrates is how very old-fashioned and unappealing our national habit of simply trotting out the Pope as a secret weapon in any local political debate really is. Mgr Scicluna is certainly not the first to act on the assumption that a statement by the Pope (even a private comment, as was the case here) would suffice to radically alter the dynamics of any given argument. The current President of the Republic, George Abela, had kicked off his career by inviting Pope Benedict to Malta... and greeting him at the airport with a speech replete with reminders that our 'Catholic identity' was under siege by a panoply of demonic secularists.

This was in 2010, when the divorce referendum movement was already in full swing. Sure enough, Pope Benedict reciprocated with a speech about the sanctity of the holy family... and of course we all know what happened after that.

Even Benedict's predecessor had been invoked to settle a local dispute in his day, when Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami flew to the Vatican for urgent talks during the Church Schools crisis the mid-1980s. I myself had attended (in school uniform) the mass meeting when he returned; and I clearly remember Eddie telling us all how 'shocked' Pope John Paul I had been to learn of the situation. But things didn't quite go according to the Divine Plan of Salvation, did they?

In fact, given the spectacular failure of all such stratagems in the past, you'd honestly think people would have realised by now that Popes do not actually make very effective political trump cards. The Vatican in the 1980s proved reluctant to embark on another head-on collision with the Maltese government, so soon after being bruised in a similar encounter 20 years earlier. As I recall, the crisis resolved itself largely thanks to a compromise between local Church and government, whereby Church schools did indeed become theoretically 'free'... thus conceding to Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici's demands of 'Jew B'Xejn Jew Xejn'.

Fast forward 20 years, and we can all see from the divorce referendum result what effect the sudden appearance of Pope Benedict had had some 18 months earlier. As for civil unions, we shall have to wait and see... but initial indications are that the bill is going ahead as planned, whether it shocks Pope Francis or no.

And this only brings us to the truly curious aspect to this little incident. Did it shock Pope Francis, or didn't it? The reason I ask is that there are plenty of indications that he already knew all about the civil unions bill long before Scicluna brought it his attention a few weeks ago.

I can actually attest to this myself, having formed part (in my capacity as journalist and nosey parker) of a small delegation to the Vatican last June. The official purpose of that visit was to kick-start discussions on the fate of the Church State agreement of 1993. But it was not the only thing discussed by Joseph Muscat and Jose Brergoglio on 24 June, 2013... six months before Scicluna's private chat.

This was how one newspaper reported it at the time: "The Vatican is prepared for and willing to change. We asked for a revision of the treaty, and we found an abundance of understanding on their part," Dr Muscat explained... He [Muscat] said that in the spirit of openness, he informed the Vatican of the government's intentions to introduce civil unions in Malta."

Muscat did not tell us whether Pope Francis was 'shocked' to learn of a proposed bill which had from the outset - yes, long before the March election - always purported to give gay couples the 'same rights and privileges as marriage'.

On the contrary, he told us only about the Pope's spirit of understanding and co-operation.

So why, exactly, would the same Pope be 'shocked' to 'discover' that which he already knew beforehand, and had already discussed in a private colloquy with the Maltese prime minister? More to the point, why would he now encourage Bishop Charles Scicluna to speak out against a proposed legislation which he himself was reportedly prepared to accept last June?

So many questions, so little space on the page...