Church-State relations have a very long history. Originally, the Roman Universal State into which the Church was born found this obscure Jewish dissident sect, organised with a hierarchy, difficult to manage. Christianity challenged the complete (we would, today, describe as totalitarian) supremacy of the Roman Emperor. While Christ formally excluded serving both God and Mammon (Matthew, 6:24), he expressly gave the injunction that one should give to God what is due to God, and also to Caesar what was due to Caesar, a not equipollent entity, but given a status and a recognition.
The Caesars, however, were not satisfied with mere temporal power. Julius Caesar, in the year 63BC, captured the title of Pontifex Maximus, the Highest of Priests. On his death, the Senate decreed Caesar to be Divus Julius. Horace went further with Augustus (Odes III, V): he made him "præsens divus".
However, when the seemingly omnipotent and eternal Pax Romana broke down under the repeated assaults of the barbarians from outside the limes, the Church remained within the late empire's husk, and for a time provided a substitute as a sort of "successor state". So, the Curia of the Bishop began to hear cases and settle disputes, until the Chieftains established their "Castellanie". The monasteries were left as the only extant seats of schooling, the only libraries and the only hospitals, pharmacies and agricultural laboratories. The Christian Church provided a common faith, a common culture and a solidarity. Those who came to exercise some "secular" power turned towards the Church to sustain their legitimacy. So, Charlemagne, already King of the Franks and of the Lombards, but aspiring for more, found it useful to be crowned on Christmas Day 800AD by Pope Leo III in St Peter's Basilica in Rome and be given the title of "Imperator Romanorum" or "Emperor of the Romans".
In the early Middle ages, Charlemagne, his successors and all the other "national" states in formation, through the assertion of might by chieftains turned counts, dukes and kings, had to resort to ecclesiastics to perform the tasks that required some skill in registering facts and communicating in writing. The Chancellors, as well as the scribes had to be clerics, and most became counsellors. Occasionally, clashes of personality occurred when the priest who had formerly served subserviently the King, when assuming higher ecclesiastical roles, tried to restrain excesses or transgressions. Typical was the case of Henry II of England and Thomas a'Becket.
Inevitably, as the Churchmen were mostly intellectually superior to the uncouth warriors who wielded state power, this superiority gave them an advantage as they held moral sway over the population, to the envy and anger of their secular rulers. This resulted in numerous incidents on the local level. The high tension was displayed spectacularly between the universal Church power of the Papacy and the Europe-wide institution of the Holy Roman Empire. Both poles of power, one very evidently by force of arms and the other by moral force and intellectual prowess, came into collision on various matters. In Italy, as elsewhere, the powers had their adherent parties: the Guelphs supporting the Popes, the Ghibellines the Emperor. Dante Alighieri, originally a "Guelph" of the White faction, was latter dubbed, when he fled into exile, as "il ghibellin fuggiasco", ostensibly because in his Divine Comedy he had chided the intrusion of Popes like Boniface VIII into very temporal affairs and had famously wrote that Christ had given Peter the keys, not the sword. Moreover, he had seen the supposed donation of Constantine I's constituting the base for the Pope's temporal power as the fount of mischief and corruption. (Cfr. Inferno XIX, verses 115-117; Purgatorio XXXII, verse 124; and Paradiso VI verses 1-3 and XX verses 55-60).
In the Middle ages, the Papacy was shown as triumphant over the Empire by the emblematic scene at Canossa where the Emperor Henry IV, in January 1077, had to wait for three days in the snow until Pope Gregory VII, staying in the Castle of the Margravine Matilda of Tuscany, deigned to admit him in, to receive absolution from his excommunication. Ambitious men of the Church were tempted, and many succumbed, to turn the moral superiority of the institution to their own private advantage. Under the spell of the dominance of the spiritual over the temporal, personal alliances between bishops and princes made for some very dubious arrangements. Reformers tried to admonish their ecclesiastical superiors into abandoning their mundane interests, but were, at times, branded as heretics. Savonarola, towards the end of this period, was burnt alive for his own audacious entry into the politics of Florence.
The spell was broken at the Reformation when the kings and princes, called upon by Luther, affirmed their independence from Rome and gained absolute supremacy over their "local" church. Marte proprio, Henry VIII of England made himself head of the Anglican Church. The State, in Calvinist, as in Lutheran Europe, subsumed the Church and with some puritan fervour imposed the faith through the instruments of State. When in England and Scotland, the Puritans prevailed, even the Head of the Anglican Church, Charles I, lost his personal caput.
In the century that followed, the supremacy of the "National" State and its rulers was affirmed by jurists, such as Jean Bodin. Kings claimed they ruled by Divine Right, as Charles' father, James VI of Scotland (1567-1625) and James I of England (1603-1625) in his Trve Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599) had declared. Even prominent churchmen, such as Bossuet (1627-1704), in his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Écriture sainte (Statecraft Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture) described Kings as anointed by God, and as such, sovereign and supreme. Even the French Catholic Monarchs saw safety in the Gallican Church while maintaining alliance with Rome.
The bonds between throne and altar, in which the native monarch usually prevailed, were severed in the revolutions against both. The French Revolution was both cultural (the enlightenment with its humanist philosophy) and violent (killing the king, the recalcitrant aristocrats, and a good number of priests and nuns). The statue of Reason was installed in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The new revolutionary regime tried to remove the Church from national life. The "Son of the Revolution", as Napoleon dubbed himself, wisely concluded a concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801. With some craft at image-making, for his crowning as Emperor of France in the Notre Dame Cathedral in 1804, he required the Pope to be present, but then took the crown into his hands and crowned himself.
In Malta, the throne and altar were long intertwined, as after 1530, when the Islands were given on fief to the Order of St John, on the secular throne sat the Grandmaster, the head of a religious order bound by obedience to the Pope, while the Church was led by the Bishop, at first suffragan to the See of Palermo, later directly responsible to the Pope. A part of the State apparatus was still Maltese with the Law Courts at Mdina, while another important ecclesiastical institution, the Inquisition, was later added, very directly responsible to the Pope. All this Papal supervision did not ensure harmony between the secular and religious powers. While orthodoxy of faith was maintained strenuously by all authorities, and substantially by all the population, personal and jurisdictional contestations occurred between the men at the head of the three authorities. Some contrasts were referred to Rome for mediation or adjudication. A too-strict Grandmaster, Jean l'Evesque de la Cassière was removed by internal factions and reinstated by the Pope. Not all were resigned to this state of affairs in which Church and State were almost indistinguishable, and in fact, the most notable Maltese rebellion was that of 1775, known as the Revolt of the Priests, led by Don Gaetano Mannarino.
In the age of Monarchical Absolutism, the Grandmaster and his Maltese counsellors, the uditori, found it intolerable that the Maltese State's authority was undermined by the limitations suffered through the privileges of the Church (le immunità ecclesiastiche) over persons and property and through the particularly extraordinary exceptions granted to the Inquisitors and their "patentees".
Already chafing under what the uditori felt demeaning for the Maltese State, the small, but influential lawyer class found it intolerable that a foreign jurist, Giandonato Rogadeo, posing as an expert lawmaker when, in fact, he was not only patently ignorant of our customs and laws, but also bound to obsolete ideas, should propose retrograde reforms to our laws.
Professor Frans Ciappara's latest book, Church-State Relations in late-eighteenth-century Malta: Gio. Nicolò Muscat (1735-1803) enters into, precisely, this moment of Maltese history: when we had an enlightened French Grandmaster, possibly the only one who spoke our language, and one who was, in some ways, even "popular". One fawning painter depicted him being received with enthusiasm by a representative crowd of our countrymen. He had succeeded an unlucky and incompetent Ximenes, who, in turn, had inherited from Pinto a bankrupt treasury. Coming from one of the great aristocratic families of Europe with Palaces in Strasbourg and Prague, among other places, De Rohan showed a patrician democratic, if condescending, trait. Muscat was a well-read and trained lawyer, proud of his profession and of his country, who would have wished his Grandmaster wider and freer powers.
The book was built on painstaking and patient research and cemented by a thorough understanding of the era's prevalent ideas. Church-State relations are not only conditioned by the personalities of the ecclesiastical and political leaders involved - they are compounded within the cultural milieu of the age. Thus, to take a leaf from the chronicles of two episodes of our more recent history: Monsignor Robinson, a visitor sent by the Vatican during the contrast between Archbishop Caruana and Bishop Gonzi for the Church and Prime Minister Gerald Strickland for the State, correctly recognised the Erastian ideas behind Strickland's interference with Church discipline in the Father Carta affair. In the much more recent case of Archbishop Gonzi and Dom Mintoff, the underlying ideological divide was provided by the socialist and laicist trends attributed to my Cospicuan compatriot. Without discounting the importance of the forceful personalities on both sides, one cannot understand, from the vantage point of today, what happened and why, in 1928-30 and 1958-62, without visiting the climate of socio-political ideas into which the Church/State drama was played. Professor Ciappara explains Giannikol Muscat's Apologia, by reference to the then contemporary debate going on in all of Europe concerning philosophy of Law. Muscat knew his Grotius and Puffendorf, and then wholeheartedly embraced Beccaria's Dei Delitti e delle Pene. While revealing an admiration for Muscat's courage and open views, Professor Ciappara, a historian and not an apologist, points out the inconsistencies in Muscat's legal/philosophical views. Muscat even justified, indeed championed, the Prince's intrusion in the realm of the administration of justice, in breach of the fundamental principles of the separation of powers.
History never really repeats itself, but it has lessons to be learnt, and the lessons provided by State/Church clashes are precious if certain mistakes are to be avoided. During my years of public service between 1966-99, I came to realise the difference in point of view and outlook between the Man of State and the Man of the Church, and the inherent difficulties in collaboration, which are not, however, unsurmountable. I recall two instances, in which I was involved directly. The first instance was that of the elaboration, in 1974, of the constitutional clauses concerning religious freedom and the position of the Catholic Church in our country. I remember the contributions made by Mr Mintoff and his then uditore, Dr Edgar Mizzi, and by Dr Ġużè Cassar on the Government side, and by Dr Edward Fenech Adami, Dr Guido de Marco and myself on the part of the Opposition, and then, again, by Cardinal Silvestrini and various other Churchmen in Rome and Malta. The finally wrought out solution found wide acceptance. The second instance, in which I was very directly involved, was that of the resolution of the question of Church property then not in use for pastoral, educational or social purposes by the Church. It took years of negotiation with Monsignor Pierluigi Celata, and frequent meetings with Monsignor Joseph Mercieca and Bishop Nikol Cauchi, to arrive at the agreed accordo. The discussions revealed also the spectrum of opinions within the Church, as within my colleagues in government and within the members of the then Opposition.
Professor Ciappara's book makes very interesting and illuminating reading. It takes a great deal of reflection to understand fully what moves Men of State and Men of the Church. Most of the time they, very reciprocally, misunderstand each other. Every historical era in the last two thousand years illustrates some kind of interaction between Church and State. Though times change, Professor Ciappara's book is very instructive because it describes events and opinions in a particular period of this, our own, very Maltese history. The book also reviews, very thoroughly, the development of ideas concerning government that were current all over Europe at that time. Gio. Nicolò Muscat, though an orthodox Catholic, was also a man of the European illuminismo. Contemporary Men of State in the Mediterranean, such as Pombal in Portugal or Tanucci in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, fought their battles with the Catholic Hierarchy for the turf in jurisdiction and privilege, without becoming engulfed into questions of dogma or ritual. The Mediterranean Illuminismo was not precisely equivalent to the Northern Aufklärung, or the more general description, Enlightenment. Locke (perhaps in French translation), Rousseau and Montesquieu might have influenced Muscat, but in his writings, one finds more distinct echoes of Gian Battista Vico, Gaetano Filangieri, and markedly, of Pietro Giannone. Also, though Pombal and Tanucci might sound progressive in easing the hold of the Church in temporal affairs, in sustaining "regal absolutism" they were far from advancing the cause of democratisation and freedom. The common man was none the freer, when State absolutism no longer found fewer and more feeble obstacles in the Church's ethical admonishments.
This important book by Professor Ciappara was launched in the Auberge de Castille, in the presence of the Prime Minister, but it is useful reading not only for Men of State, in office or in Opposition. Moreover, it is not only informative and indispensable reading for the Men of the Church who have to deal with Men of State, and vice-versa; it is also very interesting for all Maltese interested in their history.
Church/State relations are a constant of Maltese public life. Although with the Agreement of 1991 implemented by the Ecclesiastical Entities (Properties) Act of 1992 (Chapter 358 of the Laws of Malta), which I piloted through Parliament, and the agreement on Marriage dealt with by my colleague, Guido de Marco, many of the causes of contrast on "turf and jurisdiction" were, hopefully, removed. It is salutary that the antecedents in the contentieux of former times be better known.
Professor Ciappara has done a service to the country in "resurrecting" Gio. Nicolò Muscat, a man of the Maltese illuminismo and a stalwart champion of the State, albeit too sectarian in his ways. He had been obscured from view by the later events of the French occupation and the Maltese insurrection. The waters of Church-State relations run smoother when Men of State and Men of the Church have a better understanding of our history, and of the dramatis personæ which had been involved therein.
Someday, a scholar of Professor Ciappara's calibre may find it useful to study the careers of other recent, renowned lawyers/uditori: Sir Hadrian Dingli, Sir Philip Pullicino, Dr Louis Galea, Sir Anthony Mamo, Dr Edgar Mizzi. All had to counsel their political Men of State in their dealings with the Church authorities.