The Maltese outpost of the Catholic Church is in financial trouble. I will resist the urge to make wisecracks about Joseph Muscat, the mittilkless and electricity bills, and move on.

But may I just say what a relief it is to hear somebody own up to personal economic woes without blaming it on the government, or demanding that the government does something about it right now?

The irony is that this is one situation where it is clear that the government can and should do something about it, and that the state is very much to blame for those woes. The Church has been crippled because the welfare state, in Malta, has great big gaps which continue to be plugged by religious orders.

In the same way that another social service – this time, social housing – was and is still being provided largely at the expense of private landlords and landowners, through a mix of requisitioned property and rent laws which protect tenants paying risible rent, so the state freeloads off religious orders in the provision of care to abandoned children, the disabled, battered wives and old people. Oh yes, and schooling, too, because there are thousands of children in Catholic schools whose parents are paying nothing at all.

The historical reason for the religious orders’ provision of these vocational services is that if they didn’t do it, nobody else would have. Babies would have been left to die in the gutter. Widows and abandoned women would have starved. The old and infirm would have tottered about the streets until they died of exposure. Only the children of the truly privileged would have learned how to read, write and count.

But as the welfare state grew, the role of religious orders shrank. Social mores changed too, and reduced that role still further. Fifty years ago there were many hundreds of abandoned children being fed, clothed, schooled and housed by religious orders. Now a baby left on the doorstep, so to speak, is a spectacularly rare event. Yet still, Catholic orders in Malta have been doing far more than they should. I haven’t checked through the system of each one of the member states of the European Union, but from what I have seen so far, Malta appears to be the only one with absolutely no state provision for the housing and care of abandoned children. This places a terrible burden on the religious orders, which is barely ameliorated by the financial contribution made by the state. It’s not just the money, either. There are all manner of stresses and responsibilities associated with caring for children.

It is the same with church-run homes like Dar il-Providenza, which looks after the severely disabled. When occasional announcements are made that it has run out of money and that immediate donations are needed to save it, I wonder to myself why this is happening. So what would the alternative be to private donations which keep the home running – putting those people out on the streets? Dar il-Providenza was set up in the 1960s through private initiative. Before that, there was no residential home for the seriously disabled. Children born with severe disabilities were hidden away by their families like ghosts in the attic. But just because it was a private initiative in the 1960s it doesn’t mean that the situation should have stayed that way for the next 50 years. I find it hard to accept a situation where the state exploits private charity. Private charity should supplement social services and not replace them entirely in some fields or take up a huge part of the load.

The driving idea behind the welfare state is not just to make sure that those who need it are cared for, but also to make sure that they do not have to beg for this care and that they are not made wholly dependent on charity. I cannot bear the idea that even now, organisations are begging for money to help them look after the weak, disabled and abandoned.

I am not suggesting that the Catholic Church or religious orders be removed from the equation altogether. That would be pointless and unreasonable. The entire raison d’etre of some orders is community work, so depriving them of it would leave them without a purpose or focus. But it is quite obvious that they are doing far more than what is fair or reasonable, and the more they strive to make up for the shortcomings of the state in this regard, the more the state sits back comfortably and lets them do it.

What we have here, effectively, is a situation in which the Catholic Church has to call for donations so that the government does not have to levy taxes. Just as with those situations where one person is deprived of his townhouse in perpetuity so that the government doesn’t have to use the anonymous taxes of the many to build a social housing flat, so the charitable donations of the relative few help the religious orders to keep going with the care of the vulnerable. The key difference is that charity is voluntary and sporadic, and though the Church managed to pick up €9 million in donations last year, the amount falls year on year, and the negative gap between income and expenditure continues to grow.

The Church has been advised to make itself more appealing so as to be successful when trying to raise funds. But surely this is to miss the wood for the trees? Last year, it spent €10.3 million on wages and salaries for all the people it is forced to employ to deal with jobs it shouldn’t be doing in the first place, like looking after orphans, old and disabled people, and teaching children who should properly be in state schools. It should turn those purely functional tasks over to the state and concentrate on its core religious mission.