Careful what you wish for, Mgr Scicluna

I don't know about you, but I have always been rather amused by the title, 'Auxiliary Bishop'.

It reminds me of those trump card games we used to play as schoolchildren: games like 'Monster Trucks' versus 'Drag Racers'. As I recall, 'Auxiliary Power' was one of the categories in which we used to do battle on the school playground... alongside cylinder capacity, maximum velocity, load capacity, and all the rest.

It doesn't surprise me, then, that the Catholic Church would suddenly produce Mgr Charles Scicluna as a trump card in a debate on gay adoption. Archbishop Cremona and Bishop Mario Grech had until this point limited their own contributions on this matter to a very cautiously-worded pastoral letter, in which they seemed to be almost too scared to voice anything that might be interpreted as an opinion at all.

So perhaps a little turbo boost of auxiliary power was indeed required, if the Church as a whole was not to be reduced to a largely irrelevant institution incapable of actually contributing to any given debate at all.

So out comes Mgr Scicluna - Auxiliary Power 10! - demanding a scientific study on the effects of child adoption by gay couples. And the game resumes once more.

OK, I'll leave the gay lobby fight their own battle on this one: they are after all a good deal better organised than most other special interest groups in this country; and they also have a few trump cards of their own. For one thing they know a heck of a lot more on the subject than either myself or Mgr Sciculna... which is unsurprising, given that gay adoption has been happening in Malta for years under the guise of 'single-parent adoption'... and I for one haven't noticed any detrimental societal effects so far.

But as a secular humanist, I shall have to also concede that Mgr Scicluna does, in principle, have a point. Scientific studies are indeed required if we are to pass legislation based on an informed opinion, rather than prejudice or ignorance.

In the case of gay adoption, such studies already exist and have been in circulation for years. Some have been reported quite extensively in the local press. In fact I am surprised that Mgr Sciculna, who talks with such authority on the subject, seems to be entirely unaware of their existence.

But I don't think the same approach should be limited only to gay adoption. One area that I firmly believe warrants closer scrutiny is Catholic education as a whole. How many scientific studies have been carried out on the effects of a strictly Catholic upbringing versus a secular one? Have there been any local attempts to compare the academic, social and other achievements of children who went through different school systems?

I don't think so. And if Scicluna can demand a study on the effects of gay adoption on children, I feel entitled to demand a scientific study into the effects of Catholic education on small children. I was a small child once myself, you know (some argue that I still am one today). Like so many others, I also went through my 10 years' worth of Catholic indoctrination: and this fact on its own qualifies me to assess the effects of this approach to education.

The results are very far from impressive. To this day I feel the education I was given was substandard and rife with very serious shortcomings. In fact there was so much wrong with the situation back in my schooldays that I scarce know where to begin.

Let's start with the quality of the educators themselves. I don't want to single anybody out, but some of my teachers were quite simply atrocious. Would you believe me if I say that our English teacher couldn't actually speak the language at all? I can assure you it is true. The language she spoke in class resembled English at moments... but these were few and far between, and at all other times she sounded (and looked) like Watta the Unintelligible Hutt from the Star Wars franchise.

How was this even possible, I hear you ask? Simple. Because teachers at Catholic schools are selected by a board representing the Church's interests... and not the school's, or still less the children's. Regardless of subject, teachers were chosen on the strength of their 'sound Catholic morals'... with actual pedagogical qualifications falling into a distant second place. And as far as the administration of the school was concerned (and, by inference, of the Church which owned and operated it), 'fluency in English' was not actually a mandatory requirement for an English teacher. Not compared to a strict daily diet of holy eucharists and quasi-pathological sanctimoniousness.

Conversely, if a very well-qualified teacher applied for a job at a local Church school, and it transpired he or she was separated (or, perish the thought, gay)... then forget it. The job would go to the Bible basher, and the children's education - like Jezebel from the same Bible - would go to the dogs.

It was the same, to varying degrees, with other subjects too. One experience that still stands out in my memory was a science teacher (and he happened to be one of the good ones) informing us during a lesson that... 'heavy metal music makes you gay'. And to illustrate this point - which I need hardly add instantly arrested the attention of a class of 13-year-old budding head bangers - he told us of 'scientific experiments' in which male lab rats were exposed to heavy metal at loud volume throughout the day.

According to our science teacher, they all started humping each other after the first two bars of 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'. I have to confess that the thought still amuses me to this day, especially when it floats back to me unexpectedly at places like Coconut Grove at around 2am on a Friday night.

In any case: the same example is particular apt for the issue of the moment, as it also illustrates the absurd preoccupation with homosexuality that has dogged the Catholic Church and arguably stunted its credibility for years.

'Being gay', we were all taught at school, was deeply immoral. Never mind the scientific definitions regarding 'a non-pathological variation' that affects roughly 10% of the world's population. Never mind also the undeniable fact that people have no control over their sexuality even as adults... let alone as young teenagers. The same Catholic Church that lords over our country's entire education system decreed - without ever supplying any form of 'proof' - that homosexuality is an 'aberration', and then turned its back on an indefinite number of young male and female teenagers who must have been caught up in a terrifying moral and psychological quandary as a result.

And at Catholic schools, we were taught and encouraged to hate homosexuality, too. According to some of our teachers, 'Hell' must be simply teeming with writhing pouffs and raging faggots, all screaming in agony while sodomised incessantly by an army of well-hung demons in spandex. With hindsight I suppose I should have noticed the bulges protruding from the (male) teachers' trousers as they delighted in describing those tortures for our edification. But I was too young and innocent for any of that at the time. 

In any case, the effects of all this literal demonisation of homosexuality by Catholic educators were not pretty. Being called a 'pufta' was the ultimate insult on the school playground in my day. And children can be nasty little creatures too; so when it was decided to 'pick on someone' for whatever reason, they would spread rumours about how they were seen with an erection in the PE changing room... and that was it. Branded for life at age 13. All in the name of Jesus Christ.

I know for a fact that some children who went through the same education system grew up to become severely homophobic as a result. Others were visibly traumatised even at the time. But of course with some of us it had the opposite effect, or no effect whatsoever.

But no serious scientific study I know of has ever attempted to determine the actual effects of such early exposure to Catholic 'values', of the kind we all had shovelled down our throats throughout our most formative years. I would be interested to know, for instance, how our national incidence of domestic violence may have been affected (because it wasn't just gays. Misogyny was also shovelled down our throats as children... with openly chauvinistic male teachers encouraging little children to view women as mere accessories to their every demand.)

I would question the efficacy of this education system in obtaining academic results, too. For much the same reason that some of our teachers were manifestly unqualified, at school we learnt very little that was of any help in passing our O Levels. Instead our parents had to rely on expensive private tuition (in my case exceedingly necessary when it came to Maths and Physics). I call that a total dereliction of duty on the part of the school, and by extension of the Church that administered and in a sense derailed its education efforts.

But all this simply pales into insignificance compared to what is by far the most serious side-effect of Catholic upbringing: the mass traumatisation of little children with truly unspeakable images of torture, mutilation and death... a festering cauldron of blood and gore in which we were all dipped by the ankles as babies.

I for one remember being profoundly affected by the constant sight of a quasi-naked man being slowly tortured to death. And you couldn't get away from it, either. It was in every classroom, in every open space. The crucifixion at my school chapel was particularly bloody, as I recall. I distinctly remember how both Christ's knees looked like erupting volcanoes, with streaks of lava (blood and pus, actually) snaking down both legs... culminating in that grisly sight of a single nail affixing both his feet to the pedestal.

But it was the nails through the palms of his hands that really did it for me. That mental image gave me recurring nightmares, and a result I spent much of my childhood with my fists tightly clenched.

And of course, the worst part of all this is... it was all my fault. It was MY SINS (as countless teachers delighting in reminding me) that drove those nails through Christ's hands. Jesus was crucified, not because of the Pharisees, or Pontius Pilate, or anything like that... but simply because I had skived a Maltese lesson, or hadn't done my homework the evening before.

Has there ever been a scientific study into the long-term psychological effects of infusing entire generations of childen with such unreasonable levels of guilt? Or exposing them to graphic depictions of horror that would be deemed patently unsuitable for the same children in a movie or video game?

On the international level, the answer is 'yes'... and the results point towards sexual problems manifesting later in life, as well as a relative inability to empathise as much with problems affecting lesser mortals who are not Jesus Christ (eg: 'You think you're suffering? Jesus suffered, not you,' etc.) But I am unaware of any study in the local context. And if Mgr Scicluna thinks that such studies are necessary in the case of gay adoptions - a phenomenon that might affect maybe a handful of children, no more - how much more necessary are such studies in the case of a phenomenon which almost literally affects everyone in the entire country?

Oh, and please note that so far I haven't even alluded to the small matter of institutionalised sexual abuse of thousands of little children entrusted to Catholic institutions the world over.

Would these children have been worse off being raised by parents of the same sex? Perhaps Mgr Scicluna, who investigated a few of those cases for the Vatican, would be kind enough to give us his views.

Meanwhile: to all readers, great or small, traumatised or otherwise: Happy Harley Days!