Church separate from state? Forget it

In the year-long divovce legislation debate I argued that opposition to it was all about religion and had very little to do with the public good. And that is the way that the saga panned out till the very cringifying end, with the last crusaders voting against it in parliament before being finally engulfed by the flames of the referendum result.

This is by no means a one off phenomenon. Unfortunately, putting religion before the public good is still an acceptable way of doing politics in Malta. For all the sublime constitutional talk about the separation of church and state, their clandestine affair is still ongoing. Here is another example.

In 2007 parliament passed a law regulating voluntary organisations. Yet for the last four years, most of the those which fall under the church’s umbrella have refused to abide by it. The consequence? Rather than enforce a law which was passed by the state, the state went down on its knees and started talks with the church like a medieval mendicant.

First, after allowing the church to break the law for three whole years, church organisations were given a temporary 'exemption'. How government did not see this as a dangerous precedent is beyond me. Why, how and on what grounds was this brazen discrimination against the law-abiding organisations justified? None of the latter took the step to contest it in court. It would have been very interesting to see what the upshot would have been.

Secondly, the church's way of conducting its business was equally worrying, if not more. It has not even deigned to publicly state why it is breaking the law, opting to just deal with government behind closed doors. Shameful as it is for the church to be so dismissive of the state, to arrogantly pursue its interests while flouting the law, the government as the body of the state is doing much worse. By accepting the church's terms, it is guilty of, well, losing its institutional soul. Not to mention that political transparency and accountability were swept under the pulpit.

That Prof.Kenneth Wain, the commissioner responsible for enforcing the law, is being kept out of these church/state talks is already indicative of their incestuousness. That he is reduced to meekly report, as an embarrassed outsider, that "the whole thrust of the discussion is to try and amend the law in a way that the Church could be comfortable with it" should make anyone who treasures liberal democratic institutions to cringe with shame.

We might be in Europe but we are still not of it.