When Lawrence Gonzi spoke at the Nationalist Party’s general conference last Sunday, he demonstrated that he has failed to grasp the most fundamental issue which his party faces right now: Not so much separation of church and state as separation of party and churchy thinking.
His failure to understand that the Nationalist Party is no longer a party for Catholics and so cannot be a Catholic party if it wishes to be a catholic party, with a small ‘c’, was encapsulated in these of his words: “We are a party that loved and loves our religion. It is not a coincidence that our emblem carries the Latin phrase: Religio et Patria (religion and country), which we did not remove...We should never be ashamed of saying we are a democratic and Christian party, democratic and Christian.”
The first mistake he makes is the very one made by many Maltese who are raised in the dutrina style of thinking that only Roman Catholics are true Christians. They use the words ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Christian’ as synonyms when they are not. All Roman Catholics are Christians, but not all Christians are Roman Catholics. Besides, he is right that the motto is not a coincidence, but he is wrong in thinking that it is about religious belief. It is not. It is about cultural identity, and the motto was put there when Malta was at the height of its battles on socio-cultural identity.
The ‘religio’ on the party emblem is not Christianity but Roman Catholicism, and that is precisely why it is no longer appropriate in the 21st century. Christianity might, at a stretch, pass muster for a little while longer, but narrowing it down to the specifics of Roman Catholicism does not. The essential point, however, remains that there is absolutely no need at all for a political party to have, espouse or proclaim a religion. Rather, it is undesirable.
To understand why, because it seems he is not clear on the issues and reasons, all Dr Gonzi has to do is substitute the word ‘Muslim’ for ‘Roman Catholic’ or ‘Christian’ when he is working on his speeches and rationalising his thoughts. Then he will understand how he comes across and why his arguments are badly received. I recommend this exercise to other politicians who think as he does. Politicians who are motivated by religion – any religion, it doesn’t matter which – are disturbing. Islam does not bother people but Islamic parties do. Roman Catholicism does not bother people, but Roman Catholic parties do. Religion is no longer a matter of cultural identity, but is something private and personal, except to a minority of the population who have not yet evolved.
The second mistake that Dr Gonzi makes is in implying that only Roman Catholics, people of the ‘religio’, are good, decent, fine and upstanding citizens who have a sound moral code which lazy thinkers describe as ‘values’. He may be surprised to discover that some of the finest and most upstanding citizens have a moral code that exists independently of any religion, while some of the most overtly religious people have a moral code that is best described as flexible, the result of its being rooted in a Roman Catholic culture of sin, temptation by the devil, confession and forgiveness. This linkage of a sound moral code to ‘religio’ is offensive to others who do not subscribe to the same ‘religio’ or to any ‘religio’ at all.
The third mistake he makes is not to understand that the vote for divorce was not so much a vote for divorce as a vote for the final separation of church and state. This was a clear message. When people want the government to act to separate church and state, they will not trust to do it somebody who will not separate church and party - and who, on the contrary, thinks that the refusal to do so is something of which to be proud.
The fourth mistake Lawrence Gonzi makes is in failing to understand that large numbers of practising, non-lapsed Catholics, church-goers like he, do not demand Catholicism of their political parties. They expect only that the political parties should leave the Catholic Church (and indeed, all other churches and religions) unmolested in line with the right to freedom of worship. Growing numbers of such people are in fact suspicious of any attempt by a political party to confuse religious talk with political talk. They want politics from politicians and religion from priests.
The fifth mistake he makes is in not being aware of the signals conveyed by the party motto ‘Religio et Patria’. This does not translate as ‘Religion and Country’, as it generally and erroneously is, but as ‘Religion and Fatherland’. This more accurate translation renders absolutely unnecessary any explanation of why it should have been ditched a long time ago, and more to the point, why the motto was adopted in the first place. Put simply, fascism was fashionable in Europe back then. It no longer is and hasn’t been for some time.
The sixth and most crucial mistake Lawrence Gonzi makes is not to understand exactly who votes for his party. The Nationalist Party’s voter-base is not just the much-touted ‘coalition of liberals and conservatives’ but more accurately, it is a coalition of actual Nationalists with former supporters of the Strickland Party and their now numerous descendants. The Strickland Party and the Nationalist Party were ideologically opposed and each regarded the other as the arch enemy. Supporters of the Strickland Party considered the Nationalist Party to be so alien to their way of thinking and to their political beliefs and socio-cultural identity that, when their party was dissolved, they were left floundering.
Those who were working-class – and the Strickland Party had strong working-class support – switched almost immediately to Labour, the party’s one-time ally in government or, at least, not its perceived enemy. Those who were not working-class, after a great deal of soul-searching and mainly because they couldn’t stand Dom Mintoff and were horrified by developments post-1971, began to vote for the Nationalist Party – first by default as the means of getting rid of Mintoff, then out of conviction as the PN moved out of its Religio et Patria rut and began to embrace a more liberal outlook on the economy, education, society, and of course, the European Union.
Starkly put, and there is really no other way to put it, the Nationalist Party only became a serial election winner when it secured the thousands of votes of those old Stricklandjani families and through them, their children’s votes and now even their grandchildren’s. The Nationalist Party has either failed to make the connection or it prefers to ignore the fact. Yet those people are there still, and they think very differently to Tonio Borg, who has come to epitomise all the reasons why they and their antecedents never voted Nationalist. Even though their children and grandchildren never knew the Strickland Party or even what it was or what it stood for, their outlook is different because they have been raised in that kind of family and attitudes to life tend to get passed down the line, shaping our political thinking.
The Nationalist Party tends to be nonplussed by this anomalous section of its voter base and believes that certain electoral districts are at once ‘PN strongholds’, while at the same time obviously not averse to pulling against the party line, because that is where ‘liberals’ choose to live. But it’s not because liberals choose to live there. It’s because that’s where former Stricklandjani who now vote Nationalist still live en masse, as do many of their children and grandchildren. Scratch a ‘Sliema liberal Nationalist’ and you’ll most likely find somebody whose grandparents voted for Lord Strickland – or at least, their grandfathers did because their grandmothers didn’t have the vote - and whose parents voted for Mabel.
Talk about Religio et Patria with such people and the Pavlovian response is 100% negative, not because of religion (Mabel Strickland’s party embraced Roman Catholicism in its manifesto), not because of the Fatherland, but because it encapsulates the historic differences that made people vote for the Constitutional Party, or for its splinter Progressive Constitutional Party, and not for the Nationalists, in the first place. Boiled down to their essence, these differences in thinking have little to do with political ideology and everything to do with personal attitude and mindset.
We choose our politics and our politicians because of the way we think, and not the other way round. It wasn’t so much that the Constitutional Party was pro-British and the Nationalist Party pro-Italian, but that people whose way of thinking and mindset were more culturally attuned to the British way voted for that party, while those whose mentality and outlook were closer to the Italian way voted Nationalist. What we are seeing now, and it is unmistakeable, is the two mindsets in direct, head-on conflict. The socio-cultural split in Malta is real and not imaginary, and the Nationalist Party has to carry on accommodating it or shrink back to what it was before the ‘Sliema Stricklandjani’ joined it.
Joe Friggieri, the university professor of philosophy, was asked by The Times – the Constitutional Party’s surviving legacy, ironically – what he thinks about Lawrence Gonzi’s pride in the motto ‘Religio et Patria’. His response was that it is “an old slogan well past its sell-by date. The sooner the party gets rid of it, the better.” He’s right.