Douglas Kmiec, the former US ambassador to Malta, who became a media figure before he came to Malta because he, a Catholic professor, publicly backed Barack Obama even considering Obama’s pro-choice stance, and came again to public notice when he summarily ended his term in Malta because of State Department objections to his management of the embassy, is in Malta again.

Actually, he told a ‘business brunch’ organised by the Church in Malta at the Hotel Excelsior for the World Social Communications Day, this is the third time he came back to Malta after the premature end of his term.

Professor Kmiec entertained the audience, from Malta’s media, with a longish excursus ranging from Isis and its Salafist incursion which has obliterated the frontier between Syria and Iraq, to Pope Francis’ predilection for Twitter as against Facebook.

His official theme – ‘If secularisation becomes secularism, what will happen to democracy? – was based more on the US constitutional history rather than on Malta’s.

In the US, the constitution treats all religions as equal, and the US is not a confessional state. Inputs from the audience pointed out that the Maltese constitution does not mention God whereas the US one does mention the Creator, while the Maltese constitution does mention that the Catholic religion is the religion of most Maltese but then this can be changed with a simple majority in Parliament. The Maltese constitution then has an ethical precept that says the church must teach what is good and evil, a concept that is strange to find in such a document.

There is a progression in Maltese thought, the professor said, showing pictures of old pre-1967 City Gate and Piano’s new one. But all this pales in contrast when one considers the case of Chris Stevens, the ambassador to Libya, who was many times his guest in Malta and who had to die in a Salafist attempt in Benghazi.

The constitutional disquisitions in the US, and also in Malta, are a far cry from Isis and Chris Stevens. It’s a very different world out there.

In their speeches, both Fr Charles Tabone and Archbishop Paul Cremona agreed that the church in Malta does not expect anything except the freedom that is accorded to everyone else, but they expressed resentment that whenever the church says something what may have been done by a minority in it is immediately thrown in its face almost as if the church had no right to speak.