Is Malta a secular state?

Lino Spiteri has bemoaned the unfunny divorce circus which has pitched its tent in town. The Sunday Times has complained that all we’re getting is more loose talk and lots of confusion. Joe Ellis writing in Illum referred to it as the divorce telenovela while my colleague up at University, Mark-Anthony Falzon, described the Big Unfolding Divorce Debate as ‘boring, pointless, anachronistic, mind-numbing, and worse’. I was left wondering what he had in mind when he wrote ‘and worse’. One of these days I’ll ask him over a coffee.

Now the divorce debate as it has played out so far may indeed be all those things (and worse?) but I guess that we have to ask ourselves why the dynamics are as pitiful as these commentators make them out to be. After all, several other prominent politicians-cum-columnists, some of whom appear to have an opinion on almost anything under the sun, have decided to remain completely schtum on the issue. One on-line phrase-finder describes keeping schtum as ‘saying nothing – especially in circumstances where saying the wrong thing may get you into trouble’.

So what’s at play here? Why all the unnecessary confusion, contradictory statements, clarifications and counter-clarifications? Why are some top communicators suddenly so tight-lipped? Why are we having this anachronistic debate in the first place? And if it really is so obviously pointless, why doesn’t Parliament just agree on the basics, press fast-forward, red-card the trapeze artists and performing monkeys and wrap the whole thing up neatly?

My answer is that we haven’t come to terms with the very large elephant in the room and that our failure to do so necessarily clouds debate in this country.  If we agree that in a democracy process is as important as substance and that the way a country discusses issues is as crucial as the decisions it eventually makes, we can leave aside the ‘naqbel – ma naqbilx’ scenario and focus on the problematic manner in which the debate is unfolding.  

Below are a few points, based on my research on the subject, which need to be taken into account.

1)    The establishment of a state religion is good evidence of the affirmation of a non-secular conception of the relationship between politics and religion. Constitutions like the Irish, Greek and Maltese constitutions are considered to define constitutional ethics in confessional terms. The French and Italian constitutions, on the other hand, establish a clear-cut separation between church and state.

2)    We should not conflate the terms democracy and secular state. A state can espouse democracy without necessarily being secular. In Europe itself, a number of states which are undoubtedly democracies are not, in fact, strictly secular. This is the central plank of the argument which 10 intervening states, including Malta, are making in their submission to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the notorious Italian ‘crucifix case’.

3)    For interest’s sake, the remaining nine countries in this key case are Armenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Monaco, Romania, the Russian Federation and San Marino. We would do well to start comparing ourselves to these countries when it comes to Church-State relations.  

4)    Two European models of relations between states and religious denominations exist: laicization on the one hand and secularization on the other. Laicization is typical of countries with a strong Roman Catholic presence and has entailed states affirming their own independence from the Church (whose ultimate authority is the Vatican), often expressly expelling the religious from the public sphere. Secularization has occurred in countries with a Protestant majority where the churches became public bodies – the national Churches - which are largely regulated by the law of the State.

5)    Spain, for instance, went from a constitutional set-up quite similar to the Maltese one - in which Roman Catholicism was the state religion, Catholic religious instruction was a mandatory subject in public schools and so on – to an express disestablishment of Catholicism as state religion by means of Article 16 of the 1978 constitution which states that ‘There shall be no State religion’. It’s worth mentioning that divorce had been abolished under the previous constitution and reinstated shortly after the 1978 constitution came into force.

6)    This separatist dynamic has taken on several forms depending on the countries involved – from the ‘separation-pluralism’ of Belgium and Holland to the ‘separation- concordat’ model employed by Italy, Spain and Portugal. Malta is one of the only predominantly Roman Catholic states which has not gone through this process of separation.

7)     When we debate the role of a particular Church within a state’s constitutional framework we should avoid confusing two key issues: on the one hand, the rights which individuals and organizations have to ‘worship, teach, practice and observe’ which are protected by human rights conventions and on the other, the set of privileges which a particular Church is given within a state. The first should never be placed in doubt whereas one is fully justified in questioning the latter.

Politics, of course, has played a crucial role in all the key developments which several European societies have gone through. One can just imagine the heated ideological debates in Spain which led to the massive shifts I described above. Ideas were pitted against each other and politicians had the courage to take clear-cut stances on fundamental issues such as church-state relations and civil rights.

In predominantly Roman Catholic countries, conservative, confessional parties battled it out with progressive parties in debates which might have been noisy (and what’s wrong with a bit of passion anyway?) but which often made clear-cut sense. That’s simply the way things go if you’re serious about bringing about real change.

What we have in Malta is a political class in deep crisis: paralyzed, fearful and increasingly incoherent.