Malta’s Head of State travelled to the State of Vatican City yesterday, where she met its own Head of State. But the pro-government media and the Labour Party, which makes a point of being anti-clerical by default while calling itself liberal, treated this purely state matter as Mrs Edgar Preca, Maltese Labour politician, meeting Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church of which she is a devout member, having been selected for her good works and charitable endeavours.

I’ll leave aside the fact that she wore a black veil, because the jury’s still out on whether a visiting Head of state or government should dress like a Roman Catholic – or more, to the point, like a Roman Catholic woman – or like the emissary and representative of her country, leaving her religion and gender out of it. No real feminist, as Marie Louise Coleiro Preca has claimed to be since her days as the Labour Party’s secretary-general in the Golden Years of Mintoff, would ever wear a veil, whether it’s a black lace Catholic veil or a Muslim veil. The veil is symbolic of oppression, whatever the religion. If you must cover your head, wear a secular hat.

Mrs Preca herself was fully aware that she was there as a Head of State and not as a worshipper, because she invited Pope Francis to visit Malta, as only one Head of State can do to another. She would like him to visit during the next six months, she said, when Malta holds the EU presidency – which tells me that she is still working for Joseph and the Technicolour Dream Party, and would like to help out with some public relations opportunities. If Pope Francis does take time out of his schedule to pop down to Valletta, the government had best be prepared for the problems it is going to have with Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s hysteria, because once again, he is living with a woman who is not his wife.

When this pope’s predecessor, Pope Benedict, visited Malta in 2010, Pullicino Orlando was on the list of guests for special front-row seating at an open-air Mass which he celebrated, along with all chairmen of state corporations. The invitations were not issued by the government, but by the Roman Catholic Church, which does not invite married men with their girlfriends or married women with their boyfriends, in line with its views on marriage. At the time, Pullicino Orlando was still officially married to Marlene Farrugia, even though he had been living with Carmen Camilleri Ciantar for several years (this was before the divorce law). He went completely berserk, behaving as though it was Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi who had personally disinvited his girlfriend and he began his divorce campaign, saying that the only reason he couldn’t marry Mrs Camilleri Ciantar was because neither of them could divorce their spouses. The divorce law referendum was held a year later.

So that’s the context: Malta has divorce legislation because the Pope’s people didn’t invite Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s girlfriend to the big event. Not that divorce and remarriage would have made any difference: the Roman Catholic Church does not recognise the divorces and remarriages of Roman Catholics, but considers them to be still married to their original spouse.

Six years down the line, and Pullicino Orlando is going to have the same problem. Though he has, in the interim, married the former Mrs Camilleri Ciantar, the marriage lasted only 11 months, and for the last three years he has spent his time in the company of one of his employees at the Malta Council for Science and Technology, Lara Boffa. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church considers him to be married not even to Ms Ciantar, as she is now known, but to Marlene Farrugia, leader of the Democratic Party, who for the last 15 years or so has lived with Godfrey Farrugia (that they share a surname is just a coincidence), the Labour Party whip. To makes matters more annoying for Pullicino Orlando, both his ex wife and her companion will be invited to a papal celebration, not as life partners but in their own right, she as leader of the Democratic Party and he as party whip.

It's almost worth another papal visit just to watch the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology go ballistic without being able to go public about it. Because this time he won’t want to blame the Prime Minister and also because even he must be aware of how ridiculous that would look: another papal visit, another marriage down the drain, and another girlfriend in tow.

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