I really wish the Catholic Church in Malta would stop fussing, once and for all, about shops opening on a Sunday if their owners and their customers think it a good idea. That fuss has started up again because the shopkeepers’ union has lobbied the government, successfully, to allow shops to open on public holidays without having to get specific permission to do so against payment of €700. If a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the public-holiday status wins out over Sunday status and shops may open, which they are not permitted to do on ordinary Sundays.

The arguments the Catholic Church has put forward once more are irritating because they are inconsistent and full of holes, and they are based on reasoning which does not reflect contemporary mores. It is right, of course, to insist that everyone who works needs at least one day off each week to recuperate, spend time with friends and family, and do his own thing. But this is written into our labour laws, which in fact make mandatory not just one but two days off each week. The Catholic Church no longer needs to defend the workers’ right to a day off, at least in the European Union, because the state has long since seen to that. The difference is that the Catholic Church specifically requires that day to be Sunday, for reasons that are unclear, given that the archaic ban on Sunday work has, out of necessity, fallen into abeyance.

The reality is that many people who routinely get their day off on Monday rather than Sunday – like everyone who works on Sunday newspapers including this one, for instance – actually prefer it that way. Having a day off when most of the country is stuck in an office or factory actually makes it feel like more of a holiday. You feel luckier – and, besides, you get to do something people who have Sundays off can’t do on their Sundays off: go to the shops at leisure. It’s the same feeling we all knew back in our schooldays when for some reason we got to stay home without being too ill to be confined to barracks. It’s that wonderful feeling of being free when all your schoolmates are at their desks struggling with logarithms.

Also, ruling out work on a Sunday is quite impossible, so what exactly is the Catholic Church – the Maltese outpost, at least – saying here? Surely it is not suggesting that what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander, that it is perfectly all right for thousands of people who work in sectors x, y and z to toil away on a Sunday, but not all right for those who works in shops. This is illogical and inconsistent. It is not enough to qualify the statement by saying that it is all right to work on Sunday if your labour is essential to the proper functioning of the country – if you are an air traffic controller or a hotel chambermaid – but not if you are a shop assistant in a boutique because people don’t actually need to buy clothes on Sunday. Sunday work is either wrong or it isn’t wrong. Qualifying its wrongness by saying it is acceptable in some cases opens up a Pandora’s box of problems for other Catholic prohibitions.

The fact is that the Catholic Church can no longer proscribe Sunday work because contemporary life has made that impossible. Actually, post-World War II life has made that impossible, only now it’s even more complicated. And if you can’t proscribe it for all, then you certainly can’t proscribe it for some. Given that 90 per cent of Maltese are nominally Catholic, though largely of the pick-and-choose variety, the country would grind to a halt if they all suddenly discovered a conscience about Sunday work.

Why, all those people busy relaxing and spending time with the family instead of going shopping wouldn’t even be able to eat Sunday lunch in a restaurant because somebody else would have to be paid to serve and cook it. And so what would happen instead is that at least one adult in most households would end up working on Sunday anyway, chopping, cooking, serving and clearing up the mess afterwards.

And God help you if you happen to fall over and break a leg on Sunday, because the doctors and nurses, in their eagerness to obey God, will not be there to help you. Your consolation is that you won’t end up in hospital after being run over by the proverbial bus, because this being Sunday, bus drivers won’t be working. As for, say, gardeners, they can stay home and spend the whole of Sunday labouring hard in their own gardens, but should they decide to earn a bit of extra money by fitting in a day at a client instead, that’s work because you get money for it, so no-no-no. None of it makes any sense at all.

But the bit that the Catholic Church really doesn’t understand, as far as I can make out from its statement a couple of days ago, is that people now view shopping as a social experience and a form of entertainment. For many, Sunday is about the only day of the week they might have to trawl about the shops at leisure. They’re working Monday to Friday, Saturdays are packed with errands that involve businesses which they can’t reach on Monday to Friday (because they’re working) or on Sunday (because they’re closed) and with taking the children from one lesson to another. Also, Sundays when it’s too cool for the beach leave many people with nowhere to go. Quite frankly, it’s not everyone who loves to sit with another 500 people in a field with an hour spent locked in traffic at either end.

The statement said that Sunday should be a day of the Lord, a day of rest, a day to spend with the family, and a social day. If families go to Mass, then have lunch in a restaurant and do a spot of shopping together, all those boxes are ticked. True, not for the shop assistants, but then neither for the restaurant workers, and that’s happening already.

The statement, which was released through the Curia’s Pastoral Commission on Work, said that not having to work on Sunday is a right and not a privilege. How did it reach this conclusion and more particularly, why is it a right for some and not for others? Today, while you read this newspaper, journalists and production staff will be hard at work at the office, producing tomorrow’s edition and printers will be standing by ready to print it. Early this morning, a network of deliverymen criss-crossed Malta, while you were still sleeping, to make sure you got this edition. Newsagents opened their doors at 6am and 7am so that you could buy it. Imagine if we all said we have a right to do nothing on Sunday and then didn’t.

The Curia’s Pastoral Commission asked – rather irresponsibly, I thought – whether people would be permitted to refuse to work on Sunday because of their beliefs, or if they were “going to be made to work”. But tens of thousands of Maltese people now work on Sundays already and have done so for years. What makes shop assistants a special case, or is the Church now suggesting, out of the blue, that Catholics are perfectly entitled to refuse to work on Sunday?

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