News | Sunday, 09 August 2009

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‘We’re not a theocracy’, Martin Scicluna tells Curia

Charlot Zahra
Martin Scicluna, the lead author of the Today Public Policy Institute’s report advocating the introduction of divorce in Malta, has lashed out at the Catholic Church’s onslaught on his report.
Addressing a press conference at the Chamber of Commerce yesterday morning, Scicluna, the director of the TPPI, branded the Curia’s report published by its family policy unit Proġett Impenn as “based on incorrect premises”, “complacent on the state of marriage in Malta today”, and “hypocritical”.
He insisted that the next necessary step was to allow legally separated couples “to participate in a stable, orthodox and healthy family environment, in which re-marriage after legal separation and civil dissolution would provide”.
Scicluna will be stating his case on the state of marriage in Malta in front of Parliament’s social affairs committee after the summer recess on 28 September.
“If all those who are suffering from a broken marriage had to approach MPs and explain their suffering, then thing might start moving,” Scicluna insisted.
“We are not in Iran, we are not living in a theocracy – we are living in a secular state where individual civil liberties should be respected with total separation between the State and the Church,” he insisted.
Scicluna challenged the Church’s “complacent” assumption that “there was no real problem with the state of marriage in Malta”, as it tried to do with the ProgettImpenn report.
“If the Church formed up the 13,354 individuals in annulled, divorced or separated couples recorded in the 2005 Census shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch from the Curia in Floriana to the National Stadium in Ta’ Qali,” he insisted.
“And if the estimated numbers of individuals in broken marriages’ in six years’ time were similarly lined up, they would stretch from the Curia to the far shore of Comino,” Scicluna added.
He accused the Church of being “apparently blind to the human pain that these figures represented and in denial”.

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