One giant step backwards

OK, perhaps it was naïve on my part to expect the Nationalist Party, under new leadership, to finally move on from the religious fundamentalist phase that had characterised the Gonzi administration.

But even if it was unrealistic to expect Simon Busuttil to control all the antidisestablishmentarians within his party – the ones who cannot and never will understand that Church and State are not one and the same thing, nor were ever meant to be – I for one did not expect him to take a massive step backwards, either.

Yet sure enough, 13 months after his party was eviscerated at the polls, the PN is back to its old business of enlisting the Church as an increasingly reluctant ally in its endless political warmongering.

Joseph Muscat – its leader now tells us in an interview – has ‘silenced the Church’.

“The Church did not say much, despite having a clear position which is known by all,” he said. “There’s something missing in our democracy. Something is undermining democracy and I attribute this to government’s attitude and way of doing politics, especially the Prime Minister, who neutralises whoever does not agree with him.”

Hm. OK, let’s take things one step at a time. Did Joseph Muscat really ‘silence the Church’? Is it true, as Busuttil so dramatically put it in that interview, that the Church ‘lives in fear’ under a Labour administration? And if so… why is it suddenly of such concern to the Nationalist Party?

Paradoxically, part of the answer comes from Busuttil itself. The Church’s position, he said in that interview, is “known by all”. How is that even possible, if the same Church was allegedly ‘silent’ on this issue?

Yet it is possible, for the simple reason that Busuttil is mistaken. The Church was not ‘silent’ on the issue of same-sex adoptions. Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna practically shouted himself hoarse about it for months beforehand: warning, among other things, that MPs who voted in favour of this law would be committing a ‘gravely immoral act’. Oddly enough, Scicluna even said at the time that he ‘would not be silenced’. And in fact he wasn’t. He gave several interviews on the topic, including to this newspaper, and in all such statements he was nothing if not absolutely categorical.

And that’s not all. In October 2013 – six months before the vote was taken – the three bishops issued a joint pastoral letter in which they likewise made their position abundantly clear. This is what it said: “Since there are contrasting views on the issue, it seems to us that it will be wise if the legislator takes the necessary time to make the right decisions on this matter. Children should preferably be brought up by their parents, a man and a woman.

“Moreover, we ask the Members of Parliament to continue taking measures that strengthen the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman. Considering that the family constituted by the unity in the difference between a man and a woman ‘remains the first and principle builder of society’…”

In case there was no doubt as to what the Bishops considered to be ‘the right decision’ in this scenario: they repeated the words ‘a man and a woman’ no fewer than three times in as many sentences.

Yet for Simon Busuttil, all this was not enough. So what more, exactly, did he expect the Church to say? Did he expect it to threaten MPs with mortal sin? Would he have preferred a good old-fashioned excommunication edict instead? Or was he hoping, until the last minute, that the Church would give his party a sound-bite – ideally in the form of an episcopal, or even pontifical, decree – to desperately latch onto in order to justify the PN’s failure to take up any position at all on the issue?

Ultimately, what Busuttil tells us in that interview is that – like Gonzi before him – he evidently expected the Church to simply rally beneath the banner of the Nationalist Party in all things, and to continue acting as an accomplice in a bid to destabilise the Labour government… as was its wont in years gone by.

More specifically, Busuttil expected the Church to furnish the Opposition with an excuse to weasel its way out of taking a stand on the civil unions issue… presumably, by condemning the law from the pulpit, as it would certainly have done back in the 1960s. Only trouble is that… we are no longer in the 60s. Yet Busuttil, who was not yet even born in the days of the Interdett, seems to want to take us all back there.

All this points towards a crushing irony which has already proved devastating to the PN in the recent past. Far from being ‘silenced’ on civil unions or same-sex adoptions, the Church simply chose a different way to express its views. It chose not to sing from the Nationalist Party hymn-book, much to the evident chagrin of that party’s current leader.

Hence the irony: the Church – a millennial institution that has a reputation for changing ve-e-e-ery gradually and ve-e-e-ry reluctantly – seems to have understood a reality that has so far escaped the attention of the young and supposedly forward-looking Simon Busuttil. It has understood that its role is not to dictate the law from the pulpit, but to help guide Catholic conscience as best it can. So it limited its input to this debate by merely expressing its own views on the matter… as in fact I and so many others have also done, in our own little way, in this democracy that is supposedly under threat.

To do any more than that, under the circumstances, would have been to directly interfere in temporal matters that even the Church’s original founder argued should be left in the hands of Caesar. And that, incidentally, is what would have constituted a clear and direct threat to democracy.

Besides, there are a number of good, solid practical reasons for the Church to abandon its earlier role as a purely political force in this country; and seeing as some of these reasons directly concern the PN, it may be worth reminding that party’s present leader where all this is coming from. 

The overwhelming irony is that it wasn’t actually Joseph Muscat or the Labour government who ‘silenced’ the Church… or at least, made it impossible for that institution to carry on in its previous self-appointed role as kingmaker in this country. It was actually Lawrence Gonzi who did that, by trying to make a crusade out of divorce in 2010.

On that occasion the Church behaved exactly as Busuttil evidently expected it to behave today. It actively campaigned for a ‘no’ vote in the 2011 referendum… which, as we all know, went on to be won by the pro-divorce lobby. As such the Church was forced to confront the actual limit of its political influence in a country that has clearly moved on since 1961. This might explain its reluctance to make the same mistake again just three years later. Having burnt its fingers once, it is evidently unwilling to associate itself too closely with the party that engineered the colossal debacle that was the divorce referendum in the first place.

But the PN – which was arguably even more bruised by that referendum that its former ally – seems to have taken none of this on board. It burnt its finger too… but that hasn’t stopped it from trying (once again) to assume the mantle of a moral authority. The Church, in brief, may have stopped behaving like a political party; but the PN is still trying to behave like a Church.

This is a textbook case of regression, on at least two fronts. One, Simon Busuttil wants to turn the clock back to the days when his party could always rely on the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church to fight its battles on its behalf… even though recent history illustrates exactly why this is a highly undesirable arrangement for all concerned.

Two – and more importantly – Busuttil appears to have overlooked a growing segment of his own party supporters who actually welcome the Church’s retreat from overtly political affairs. Unlike Busuttil, most Nationalists/practising Catholics I know – and most of the people I know are, in fact, both Nationalist and practising Catholics – heaved a sigh of relief when the Church desisted from involving itself too deeply in this issue. Not without good reason: as these people support both those institutions, they were concerned at the possibility that both would damage themselves irreparably in the process… thereby strengthening an already strong Labour administration.

Yet here we have the leader of that party expressing disappointment at something that many of his own supporters welcomed. And this can only mean that Busuttil intends to keep up his predecessor’s habit of always pandering to one particular lobby-group within his own party – the ‘religio et patria’ brigade – to the exclusion of another.

In so doing, he is simply ignoring the lessons of recent history. Hiding in the folds of the Archbishop’s cassock didn’t help the PN during the divorce debate… and it won’t help now, either. All it is likely to do is further underscore the gaping divisions that already exist within the same PN, and which contributed directly to its landslide defeat last year.

How is any of this expected to help boost that party’s electoral chances in the long term? That, I suppose, is one of the great mysteries of faith.