A joke that did the jolly rounds in pre-Revolutionary France but survives comfortably and intact to this day tells of a Marquis in the court of Louis XV who unexpectedly returned from a journey and, on entering his wife’s boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop. After a moment’s hesitation, the Marquis walked calmly to the window, leaned out and began going through the motions of blessing the people in the street.
“What are you doing?” cried the anguished wife.
“Monseigneur is performing my functions, so I am performing his.”
It came to mind as I pondered the current yes-he-is-no-I’m-not controversy over the long-nurtured role of the Reverend Peter Serracino Inglott within or out of the Nationalist Party at a time when the topic of politics and priests comes up uninterruptedly every five years when a general election is fast approaching. Malta has such a horrendously blemished and confused Church-State history that the issue continues to haunt us. Admittedly, it sometimes borders on the surreal, but there remain a lot of hurt and endless areas of distrust, particularly with people who have either been through it all before, or else are still smarting from its long-term effect.
Only last Sunday, the good Reverend publicly stated that he is not a member of the Nationalist Party’s current (my addition) electoral campaign strategy team, no doubt irked by recent media reports that he is. But then, he has long been known to have been a political insider with hardly ever a kind word for Labour and, over many years, with certainly a lot of goodwill for the party in power, now even admitting that he has been an adviser to the Prime Minister on a variety of subjects. “That is very different from being a formal member of a political group or cog in a party machine,” he remarked. Did he expect anyone to try and catch him with a PN lapel badge on his cassock?
In 1993, Pope John Paul II vigorously reaffirmed his original ban on priestly involvement – direct or indirect – in politics, presumably because, among other considerations, “it could lead to new dissent as well as to the questioning of absolute papal authority in the political realm”. That is certainly not my proposed humble reason for the need of a permanent ban on priestly interference in politics. Mine focuses on the necessity for the clergy to maintain a safe distance away from the political arena unless someone somewhere is threatening religious freedom and expression. Happily, such occurrences never took place on these islands, even at a time when the best of social reforms had been crudely warped into political fodder to suit ecclesiastical ambitions for the retention of obsolete privileges.
Camouflaged political advice can only add fuel to the debate on politics and priests, something one would have thought died with the peace agreement reached between the Maltese Church and the Malta Labour Party way back in 1969. The Reverend Serracino Inglott’s input into the Nationalist ever-changing credo provokes a lot of unnecessary doubting on the part of those who honestly believe that priests do indeed have a role to play in modern society, but certainly not for the benefit of one party and not the other.
This of course does not apply to the Reverend Serracino Inglott only. There are other priests and members of religious orders whose godly toes itch at the mere mention of the word politics. Some still do a bit of sly canvassing on the side, even from the altar, while others prefer to play “pretenders” and simply push for one party on some academic or intellectual pretext. The case of a certain Jesuit priest celebrating Mass in a Sliema chapel and the recent farce involving a government MP inside the Mosta Dome only go to show that the temptation is ever-present, alas.
No one would even dare dream of pushing back the clock’s hands. Both the Church and the political parties themselves have evolved since the last debacle of the Sixties, and these sporadic solo efforts on the part of some members of the local clergy can be easily contained. The Reverend Serracino Inglott’s higher profile, however, creates a bigger stir and his political rumblings rub most of us, who truly believe in a secular world, the wrong way.
It is not just Labour-inclined persons who find that the Reverend Serracino Inglott’s involvement with the Nationalist Party somewhat unsavoury. In a recent edition of Brian Hamsworth’s Smash TV programme, a representative of Alternattiva Demokratika, Edward Fenech, claimed that Peter Serracino Inglott had written all the speeches former Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami gave on the Floriana Granaries. True or not, voluntary or not, direct or indirect, solicited or not, such claims only put the local Church at a disadvantage.
The obvious question is always: why is the Archbishop, who’s been given the warmest welcome ever by all the people of all political colours in Malta and Gozo, allowing Peter Serracino Inglott’s hot political involvement with one party?
Unconvincing denials can be equated with the crackling of the proverbial bamboo stick in Maltese jargon: Il-qasba ma ccaqcaqx ghalxejn. Like the jovial marquis, the rest of us are entitled to simply switching functions and insist, philosophically of course, that a priest’s role within or out of a particular party is unwelcome and unbecoming.