Dr George Abela’s worthy initiative in dedicating his second annual President’s Forum to a discussion of the Constitution of Malta was unfortunately marred by two errors of judgement.

The first misjudgement was committed by President Abela himself for inviting the former US Ambassador to Malta, Professor Douglas Kmiec, to give what effectively was the keynote address to the Forum. It is the convention that former ambassadors do not return to the countries to which they have been accredited for a period after they have relinquished their posts – normally a couple of years or so – in order not to steal their successors’ limelight. The fact that Professor Kmiec left Malta under a US State Department cloud and that his successor, a professional diplomat, is about to take up her post, should have given the President pause before inviting him to speak on such a sensitive subject. One has to question again the quality of political and diplomatic advice available to our President on such occasions.

Let me say at the outset that I had the pleasure of knowing Doug Kmiec when he was Ambassador to Malta. He is a charming, intelligent and most likeable individual. He seemed to love Malta and undoubtedly saw Malta’s brand of Roman Catholicism through rose-tinted spectacles. He is a respected academic and a US constitutional expert, but was clearly not a professional diplomat.

The second misjudgement – far more serious than the error of inviting him to speak at such a Forum – was Douglas Kmiec’s. In an effort presumably to ingratiate himself with his audience, Ambassador Kmiec, began his address by urging the Maltese to acknowledge “the Creator of the Universe” at the start of a revised Maltese Constitution. This “picture of the Maltese” as he put it, “Respectful of the Creator of the Universe and His abundant blessings, we do ordain by this Constitution a Republic by, for and of the people of Malta founded upon respect for human rights, the human family and the fundamental importance of human labour in service of the peace and comfort of all” was something he yearned for.

Well, what can one say in response, except “Beautifully drafted words, but in our context absolute bosh”? As he would know if he had been a professional diplomat closely observing the Maltese scene, Malta is no longer the confessional Papist State it was even 50 years ago. It is a pluralistic State, made up of people embracing diverse religions or no religion at all. It is a secular, parliamentary democracy with a nominal separation constitutionally of Church and State – albeit perhaps not as clearly separated as some of us would wish and as modern governance requires.

For Douglas Kmiec, who is himself a leading US constitutional academic lawyer, to propose such a backward step in Malta’s constitutional development (with its shades of creationism) was a shocking error of judgement which has served to undermine the excellent initiative taken by President Abela in highlighting the need for a review of Malta’s Constitution. The error is worse compounded when you recall that a great American, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, was also responsible for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a seminal statement dealing with both freedom of conscience and the separation of Church and State in the United States.

Much harm has been done in the name of religion. In Malta, we have only to recall the appalling behaviour of the Maltese Church in the 1930s and 1960s. The harm has been inflicted, in the main, by those who believe they know the will of God and that they have an obligation to impose it by threats on the unwilling (like Monsignor Grech, the Bishop of Gozo, in the recent IVF saga).

Against such temptations, western societies have adopted the principle of separating civic and religious authority, as enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom. For Thomas Jefferson, a Christian, his was a God who is the final judge of man, but who does not intervene in the affairs of man – a God who gives man the freedom to believe or not to believe. A society that treats religion as a matter of personal conscience, and is not necessarily guided by what Professor Joseph Muscat of Ta’ Xbiex pompously called “the Magisterium of the Catholic Church” (whatever that may be), is not the same thing as a godless society. Of course, secularists should not dismiss religion as inherently irrational, but Catholic believers should not think that they alone should define the nation’s morality. All our experience and history itself tell us that the Church does not hold a monopoly on establishing the moral foundations in society.

There are a number of lessons to be drawn from the sadly misconceived attempt by the President – not entirely through his own fault – to review where Malta stands on its Constitution. The first, perhaps, is the need to choose carefully from whom to take evidence on such a sensitive issue. The Today Public Policy Institute, which had first implanted the thought in the President’s mind about a review of the Constitution three years ago when he kindly met the Board, had invited the late lamented Father Peter Serracino Inglott, a member of the Board, to lead the study. But the approach adopted by the think-tank was to hear the views not only of legal experts in the field, but also of those who had had direct experience of how the Constitution worked in practice, such as former Prime Ministers and former Presidents of Malta. That approach must remain a sensible pre-requisite for success.

The second lesson is that you tamper with any Constitution at your peril. We have only to see the disastrous results of the Hungarian government’s recent reform of its Constitution, or even the United Kingdom’s reforms – still incomplete more than 10 years after the event – of the House of Lords to recognise the severe risks involved. In constitutional matters it would seem wise to be guided by the old adage: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”.

And thirdly, thanks to Kmiec’s heavy-handed intervention, we have been reminded that there is an urgent need to review Article 2 of our Constitution dealing with the Maltese Church, either by re-writing it to reflect modern conditions in Malta or – as I would prefer – to write a fresh Church-State Concordat outside the Constitution based on the one signed on Good Friday in 1969, re-calibrating the clear division that should exist between Church and State in a modern, secular (as opposed to theocratic) parliamentary democracy.

That there is an undoubted need for a review of our Constitution, and that as The Today Public Policy Institute has proposed it should come under the auspices of the President, cannot be disputed. But the President’s Forum two weeks ago regrettably did not advance its cause beyond underlining the need to address the matter with care.