Some people have reacted badly to the election of a conservative pope. They’re tut-tutting and grumbling, and are busy waving goodbye to the possibility of change. But in all honesty, what did they expect? A pope who would wake up tomorrow and say: “All right, my dears – go right ahead and use condoms. Go on the pill. Have sex outside marriage. Divorce each other. Question the virgin birth and my infallibility. And if you’re homosexual, you can go further than holding hands.” When I ask people if this is the approach they expect a pope to take, and if this is why they’re complaining, they say that of course it isn’t, because when put in those stark terms, their desires are revealed for what they are: ridiculous and impossible.

Everybody is free to use contraception, have sex with somebody to whom he or she is not married, divorce (if they can live outside Malta long enough to do so), question the virgin birth and the pope’s infallibility. Everybody is free to do all this and more without the permission of the pope. The pope, however, is not free to change the rules to accommodate these people, particularly since they are free to behave as they please with or without changes to the rules. These are not laws of the State we are talking about, for the breaking of which we may get fined or thrown into prison. The practising of Catholicism is entirely voluntary. Nobody is forcing us to do it. Therefore, if we undertake to practise voluntarily, we should ask ourselves what in heaven’s name we think we’re doing, trying to change the rules so that we can have our cake and eat it too: call ourselves Catholic while using contraception, conceiving babies by artificial insemination, sleeping with whomsoever we please, cohabiting without the blessing of marriage, getting divorced or its Maltese equivalent, deciding to have a baby without giving it the benefit of a father, and having homosexual sex (to which the Church objects only because it qualifies as “sex outside marriage” – in other words, a technicality that can never be resolved, because the Church will never marry two homosexuals, again because of another technicality, which is that Catholic marriage is primarily for the procreation of children).

I am not saying that all or any of the above are wrong. That is not what this column is about. I am just pointing out that when you choose to join a religion, or to continue with membership of the religion in which you were raised, then you have to conform to every last rule and detail. If you don’t want to conform, then look for another religion, or just call yourself Christian, but of no particular denomination, which is pretty much what I do. The reason I don’t call myself a Catholic is because I have never suffered from self-delusion. I disagree with or doubt practically every tenet that distinguishes Catholicism from every other form of Christianity. I have done so since my school days; it is not a recent development. What, then, makes me a Catholic as opposed to a Christian? Nothing. Religion is not a fact of birth, like nationality (and even that can be changed). It is a matter of belief, of practising that belief, and of conformity to the rules.

Almost nobody of my generation believes in the virgin birth or the infallibility of the pope. We think of the first, if we think of it at all, as a rather pleasant myth, and the second – well, the results are there to be seen in the front-page survey of last week’s The Sunday Times. We don’t think of the pope as infallible. We evaluate what the popes say – in terms of contraception, sex or what-have-you – we decide whether it suits us, and if it doesn’t, then we go right ahead and do as we please, adjusting our conscience to accommodate our personal choices with our home-brewed brand of Catholicism. Yet belief in the virgin birth and the infallibility of the pope are two principle tenets of Catholicism. Ditch them, and you have effectively ditched the lot. The other rules to which Catholics must adhere derive from the infallibility of the pope. If he says that contraception is wrong, then he is infallible when he says it. Also, new popes cannot “undo” the teachings and rules laid down by their predecessors, for the very reason of this infallibility. If a new pope comes along tomorrow and says that it’s OK to use condoms, what he is really doing is wiping out a principle tenet of Catholicism – the pope’s infallibility – by saying that previous popes were all wrong about contraception.

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In a nutshell, if you don’t like the rules of Catholicism, don’t expect Catholicism to change to suit you. Just leave. Indeed, your failure to believe in these tenets and to uphold them effectively means that you have left already, regardless of whether you call yourself Catholic or not. There’s more to it than a name. If you think you must have some sort of crutch, then believe me, you don’t need one. If you wake up one morning and admit to yourself that you are not a Catholic, the sky is not going to fall on your ahead. You are not going to walk outside and get run over by a bus. God is not going to reach out his hand from the heavens and smite you dead. All habits can be broken, with or without difficulty. But please, please, please, don’t tell me you’re a Catholic and in the next breath tell me that you see nothing wrong in using contraception, having sex with people to whom you’re not married, and that the pope is “too conservative and not necessarily infallible”. That kind of reasoning exhausts me. I don’t even bother arguing with it any more. I just zip my mouth and move on to the next topic.

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Part of the reason we are so reluctant to relinquish our Catholicism, even if it is so very nominal – what Professor Mario Vassallo, in the analysis of his survey results last Sunday, called “a move towards private and personal religion” but which I would call bespoke religion, tailored to our own particular requirements – is that it is firmly entangled with our sense of identity. Having grown up as Maltese and Catholic, it is traumatic for us to have to drop the last qualifier. In Malta, Catholicism gives us more of a social identity than a religious one, because the rites and rituals are so much interwoven with the routine of existence. A Catholic living in Germany or England, say, would not have this problem, rather the opposite. By lapsing, he or she would be better able to integrate, rather than sticking out as an oddity whose views are offensive to the rest. We forget that Catholics are primarily Christians, rather than primarily Catholics, and that the sacrament of baptism makes us Christian before it makes us anything else (and after that, what makes us Christian is our behaviour and beliefs). We are trained and brainwashed from early childhood, though subliminally so, into thinking of Catholicism as having the monopoly on Christianity, rather than as being the mainstream Christian religion among many others. This sounds absurd, but listen to the way people speak, which betrays the way they think. On the day Pope John Paul II died, I was listening to a radio broadcast, in which two well-educated commentators spoke about his achievements. “He built so many bridges,” one of them said. “He even met the heads of churches that are not Christian – Queen Elizabeth, for example.“ I wanted to call in and put them straight, but knew I’d get the reaction

of “Ajma, kemm hi antipatika”. When you’re a woman, it’s always best not to put men straight. I learnt that a long, long time ago, through experience. You just shut up and pretend they’re right, or let some man do the correcting. Anyway, I realized eventually that it was not so much that this commentator believes the head of the Church of England to be a non-Christian. It was a mammoth Freudian slip. The common word for Christian in Maltese is Nisrani, though many now say Kristjan. The word for Catholic is Kattoliku/a, but because it is implied to us throughout a childhood’s worth of doctrine lessons (which is one reason why I kept my sons well away from them) that only Catholics are true Christians, many Maltese people use the word Nisrani when they mean “Catholic”, in other words ‘people like us’. Even Aquilina’s dictionary, which I checked just now, acknowledges this curious anomaly. What the commentator had actually said was: “..kapijiet ta’ religjonijiet li m’humiex Nsara, bhar-Regina tal-Ingilterra.” To which my reaction was: “Hekk ghidilha, hija!”

Later, in conversation, I overheard a woman in her 60s say: “L-Ingliz ma’ jafx Alla.” It was a very long time since I had heard that saying, but again, it derives from the belief that Catholics have the monopoly on God and more specifically, on Christianity. They don’t, and as soon as we acknowledge this basic fact, we will find ourselves free to say the words: “I am not a Catholic, because I believe in contraception, divorce, and sex outside marriage, and because in my opinion the pope is not infallible but a human being who can make mistakes and sometimes does, and because there is no way that was a virgin birth.” To be honest with yourself about what you really believe and don’t believe is, in the end, a great relief. It’s certainly a lot more honest than nagging at each successive pope to be “less conservative” and to give his blessing to condoms. Oh, another thing: pious people are just that – pious. Piety should never be confused with religiosity, and certainly not with Christianity. I often find that the more pious people are, then the less Christian are their thoughts and

behaviour.