Last week I wrote a reaction article to the INDEPTH interview with Michael Briguglio and the point it raised about the teaching of religion in schools. In particular, I was reacting to Dr Briguglio’s idea – surely shared by many others – that Ethics should be compulsory for all students, and perhaps Religion relegated to the “private sphere”. I argued that this should not be the case because, one, Ethics does not teach the same transcendental values as Religion, and, two, since religion is a community-based experience, youngsters should learn it as a community (with their classmates) in their common space (the classroom).

The problem, if a problem it is, stems from the Constitution. Article 2(3), to be more precise.

Article 2 is divided into three paragraphs, the first two of which were present in the 1964 text and state that “the religion of Malta is the Roman Catholic Apostolic Religion” and that “the authorities of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church have the duty and the right to teach which principles are right and which are wrong”. The third paragraph, inserted in 1974, lays down that “religious teaching of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Faith shall be provided in all State schools as part of compulsory education”.

There are two ways of dealing with a Constitution: either one tries to adhere to the intents of the original drafters, or one sees the constitutional document as a “living tree” which grows according to changes in its socio-political environment. Or a mixture of both, depending on the principle involved.

Even though it is interesting to discuss British State-Church constitutional history and its impact on our own Constitution, and equally interesting to discuss Archbishop Gonzi’s intents and Mintoff’s politics, and so on, I think that in this case, the “living tree” approach is more consonant with reality.

To do so, one has to step back and consider the reason behind a Constitution. Essentially, it is a set of rules to define and regulate the make-up of a State. As such, it lies somewhere between philosophy and politics. Indeed, if one were to view the constitution of a State as a triangle, the three points would be philosophy, politics, and law. The US one-dollar bill even places an all-seeing eye in that triangle.

The rules are inspired by philosophy, dictated by politics, and embodied in law.

In the case of the third paragraph of article 2 (the teaching of religion in schools), one might ask, what is the underlying philosophy?

There can be no doubt that our Constitution is written in the liberal tradition – it not only sets up the mechanisms of the State, but also endows the citizen with freedoms and rights. In other words, according to our Constitution, the Maltese State is bound to allow its citizens to enjoy the freedom of moral autonomy.

Possibly the reason is that by allowing the freedom of moral autonomy, the State is also allowing its citizens to achieve their full individual potential. In fact, Chapter II of our Constitution lists the principles which should guide the State in its endeavours to allow all citizens to attain their full individual potential. It emphasises education and culture, and equal opportunities for all (irrespective of gender, different abilities, and so on), the right to work and to be assisted, the need to protect the landscape, the obligation to promote private enterprise... All of these seem to share the same common objective: giving all the opportunities to citizens to exercise their moral autonomy.

If it sounds a little bit like a wish-list, it is because it is a wish-list. So much so that no legal action is allowed against the State if it fails to live up to its own wishes. But this wish-list serves to understand the philosophy behind the Constitution. Essentially, the liberal philosophy purports to give space to individuals to achieve self-consciousness and self-fulfilment by exercising moral autonomy.

That said, the State does not want citizens to abuse their moral autonomy. I can freely exercise my moral autonomy only when the other citizens allow me to; therefore I cannot exercise my moral autonomy in such a way as to prevent others from freely exercising theirs. In other words, my free exercise of moral autonomy depends on the presence of an overseer who makes sure that all citizens can freely exercise their individual moral autonomy. That overseer is the State (the all-seeing eye in the one-dollar bill’s triangle, if you wish).

So the State wants citizens who behave morally.

The next question is: what morals are they to follow? Are they to study Kantian ethics? Is citizens’ understanding of morals to come from within themselves? There have been a number of cases in which our courts stated that “public morals” had not been defined.

Who will teach morals to youngsters? “Who” not in the sense of teachers, but in the sense of authority. Who will be the authority? Kant? Fichte? Albert Pike? Peter Singer? And why Singer and not Mary Midgley, say? (God forbid our schools ever teach Singer!) And then, in the absence of the transcendental element provided by religion, who or what offers (even a flimsy) guarantee that morals without religion won’t serve only to shackle the weak and the honest, while imposing no extralegal restraint on the strong and the wicked?

My concern is that exposing young people to certain questions only paves the way for changes. It has been empirically proven (see, for instance, What is a Human? by John H Evans, Oxford University Press, 2016) that whereas the population at large is mostly unaware of academic philosophising (except some aspects of it which worm themselves into the mass media), these same musings convince the younger generations who are exposed to diluted versions of them at school.

The 1974 insertion seems to have found a constitutional solution to this conundrum. In its desire to find a balance between on one hand the moral autonomy of the individual and on the other the need to have morally upright citizens, the State has delegated, in article 2(2), the Church to teach what is right and what is wrong. In 2(3) – and this is the solution – the State has undertaken to convey that teaching as part of the compulsory curriculum in State schools.

In this way, I think our Constitution has found an excellent equilibrium. It allows its citizens moral autonomy but delegated the Church to teach what is right and what is wrong in State schools.

With the added benefit of achieving legal certainty, the alternative is to have no legal certainty at all because of competing “authorities”, and thus adopt an everything-goes mentality. But, as recent events have taught us – particularly in the Scandinavian countries – the everything-goes mentality is not conducive to good governance. (See Iceland on pornography and Sweden on prostitution, to name but two attention-grabbing examples.)

Because, when all is said and done, the Constitution does not refer to the symbolically-important pageantry of Catholicism which serves to impress on people’s minds the Christian meaning of life: there is Life only in Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

The Constitution is referring to one of the fundamental concerns of the State: having morally upright citizens who not only make the State work smoothly but also do not drain its resources having to correct their behaviour.

Essentially, the State, as envisaged in our British-inspired Constitution, understands the role of the Church in the attainment of its goals. In Britain, the role of the monarch as both permanent president of the State and Head of the Church eases the tensions inherent in the State-Church symbiotic relationship.

In Malta, where the Head of State is always a temporary office-holder and the Church is extraneous to the State organism, the tensions are unresolved, unless the delegation mechanism is accepted... which necessarily means stepping on the toes of the humanists, who are usually a stridently vociferous minority with a deleterious 1968 agenda.

 

Dr Sammut is the author of the best-selling L-Aqwa fl-Ewropa. Il-Panama Papers u l-Poter.