MALTA
Independent
by Daphne Caruana Galizia
Where there is true separation of Church and State, in the hearts and minds of the people as well as in their legal and political system, priests are not viewed as being above or beyond the law, and nor is the Church seen as a State within a State, with the right to deal with its own criminals as it deems fit or not at all. As long as I live, I will never understand why, in 2006, the Catholic Church in Malta has been permitted to assume the right to investigate criminal acts performed by Catholic priests or by lay workers who operate under its auspices, to the apparent exclusion of intervention by the police, and with the seeming collusion of an indifferent government.
More so, I will never understand how the citizens of this country continue to accept such forms of abuse of the democratic process without so much as a whisper, unless it is because they have been indoctrinated from birth to understand, sometimes even against their better judgement, that the laws of the Catholic Church take precedence over the laws of the land and the principles of democracy. If so, then we have no right to condemn the Muslims who defend the regime of sharia, wherein the laws of their religion are also the laws of the State, because our thinking is remarkably similar and secularism has had to be forced upon us.
It is a reflection of our lack of sophistication in these matters that, when our children tell us that they have been fiddled about with by a priest or a doctrine instructor, we don’t head for Police Headquarters in Floriana, but for the Curia across the road. This is roughly equivalent to going to the headmaster when your child tells you that he has been fondled by a teacher, and letting the buck stop there instead of filing a police report.