Source/Credit: The Times of Malta:  

Archbishop Paul Cremona is de­mon­strating a re­markable reluctance to recognise the enormity of his misjudgement in the way and manner he led his Church in a most divisive divorce referendum campaign. He appears to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.

Displaying all the brazen self-delusion of a politician who has been roundly defeated but is not prepared to admit it, he said when announcing the almost €200,000 spent by the Maltese Church in underwriting the doomed anti-divorce campaign: “We did our duty when we made a financial contribution to the campaign against divorce.” He added that he wished the Church had been in a position to make an even bigger financial contribution, failing to grasp, even now, that it was not a matter of how much advertising and funding could be poured into the campaign but whether justice, freedom and civil rights should prevail. They did.

That alone should raise questions in his mind on whether the money he has so gratuitously spent on running an essentially political campaign should instead have gone on the many desperate cases of human hardship supported by the Maltese Church. How can he look these poor people in the eye now as the person accountable for the Church’s financial expenditure and say that the €180,000 was a cost-effective use of scarce resources when compared with the €1,300 raised by the Yes campaign?

There is an urgent need for a clear re-calibration of Church-state relations in Malta. It is a lesson for the government as much as for the Maltese Church. It had been thought that the lesson had been learnt on Good Friday in 1969 when the then Archbishop signed a “concordat” with the Malta Labour Party that “In modern society it is necessary that distinction be made between the political community and the Church. The very nature of the Church demands she does not interfere in politics… The Church does not impose mortal sin as a censure…”

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