To marry or not to marry: my reply to the editor of the Sunday Times

Fr David Muscat

It seems that there is nothing worse than ignorant, secular editors and journalists masquerading as informed Catholics. On Sunday, 21 January, the editor of the Sunday Times wrote that the Archbishop of Malta, Charles J Scicluna, “ruffled the feathers” of the ultra-conservative camp within the Catholic Church with his comments against priestly celibacy. The editor displayed wrong-headed thinking and a lamentable ignorance about the Pope, the Church or Christ Himself. Maybe he knows Scicluna personally, but this friendship does not interest me much because I am not a busybody. 

Fr Joe Borg, with the penis et circenses play of words instead of panis, rightly lamented that the Maltese largely ignored Scicluna’s denunciations of greed and corruption and focused only on sexual matters. Well, there is an explanation devoid of theological sophistry that will help us understand why this happened. When preaching against corruption and greed, Pope Francis cleverly said: “the devil enters into the person’s soul through the pockets”.   Secondly, pockets are below the belt, and almost all heresies start below the belt. Indeed, there is a sinister link between the two. Just look at the Maltese fake economic boom and how local politicians took pride in these last few years when they did everything to destroy the natural family based on the Biblical model of “male & female He created them”. (Genesis 5, 2).

One may reassure the editor of the Sunday Times and Mark Lawrence Zammit that the ruffled feathers did not belong to the Maltese conservatives or those in the Catholic world. The only dishevelled feathers were those of Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who, just a few weeks after that unfortunate interview, is now looking more and more like a sick parrot plucking his feathers.

Regrettably, after last Sunday’s editorial, the question is now no longer about compulsory celibacy or otherwise in the Catholic Church. The issue has descended into farce whether you are for or against Scicluna. Slowly but surely, the Times’ journalists will end up uniting all the Maltese clergy against him, which is sad; otherwise, the interview was quite good.

Except for the PN’s leader Bernard Grech, who briefly replied to his Grace’s observations about the opposition, nobody seems to have bothered about the other things mentioned in the interview. This happened not only because we are living in an epoch of PRIDE that glorifies corruption and debauchery. I also lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Sunday Times, whose editorial had the gall to criticise Maltese priests for remaining silent in lieu of defending their bishop, especially those priests deemed to share the bishop’s opinions on priestly celibacy.  

The Sunday Times is in for a big surprise if it thinks it is doing Malta’s archbishop a service by aiming such blows against the Maltese clergy.  I can only hope to God that these attacks are not from a source close to the archbishop.

Indeed, the editorial’s defence of the archbishop – in addition to that made by Mark-Laurence Zammit on another page in the same issue – was so passionate and aggressive that I remembered the statements made by Ri Chun-hee, that news presenter of the North Korean propaganda TV station. Ri Chun-hee, for those not in the know, used to defend the dear leaders of communist North Korea at all costs by alternating from a sweetness when she addresses them to a fierce ferocity when she mentions the enemies of the Kim dynasty. All that was missing for Mark Lawrence was their traditional dress, like the Japanese kimono.  

The other point that The Sunday Times’ Editor and all the local media get completely wrong is the alleged special relationship Archbishop Scicluna has with Pope Francis. Undoubtedly, they respect each other, which is edifying and palpable whenever they meet. Yet there are some few things that the Pope dislikes, but Charles Scicluna cherishes, and I’m not referring to the harmless grandmother’s lace but to clericalism.

Priests sick with clericalism are like chameleons so that they can be liberal and traditionalist in different phases of their ecclesiastical careers. Clericalism is a multi-headed hydra in that when one head is chopped, two grow instead. These heads are thirsty for ecclesiastical titles, simony, boy love or pederasty and are all attached to the same body – clericalism. Pope knows this and repeatedly speaks against this disease, which he says is insidious and tempts every man of God, whatever position he has in the Church. This clericalism is one theme Pope Francis is constantly combatting; how else can one view the fact that traditionally important patriarchal dioceses such as those of Venice and Milan now lack Cardinal Archbishops whilst a young Italian missionary who pastors to a tiny diocese in Mongolia was awarded a Cardinal’s hat? This is Bergoglio’s real silent revolution and NOT what the Sunday Times editor suggested last Sunday.

Once we started with idioms of “feathers,” here is another one that comes to mind to understand the Pope’s mind. “Feathering one’s nest” means advancing one’s career on the backs of other people’s mistakes. Unfortunately, this is the unlucky impression many in the Catholic world, especially in the United States, have of Scicluna. Sadly, the Sunday Times is convincing readers mistakenly to think that he is good at catching paedophiles and that the Pope will soon reward him with the red hat. Unfortunately, things in the Church don’t work that way, for this speculation only reinforced the lie that he became an Adjunct Secretary in the Holy Office on the back of the sins committed by the priests in various clerical sexual abuse scandals. 

So it becomes clearer why many of us fail to see how the Maltese mainstream media simply misinterpret and misunderstand Pope Francis and, in doing so, damage Charles Scicluna. Of course, one hates to see them frame the Pope as one of their own, but I expect no better from these media outlets, given that they will print anything that sells. Additionally, they adopt this journalistic stance because they look at the Church through Marxist lenses that pit people and categories against each other – conservatives against liberals, progressives against traditionalists, and so on.

Through the eyes of faith, a Catholic understands the Church and the decisions of the Popes. I will not hold my breath expecting the Sunday Times to improve its vision of Catholicism.  After all, this newspaper sees the world solely through the lenses of political confrontation, and the only opinions it listens to are those in its echo chamber.

That is perhaps why the editor of the Sunday Times seems to have forgotten that Scicluna’s work in the Holy Office investigating clerical sexual abuse has been conducted since Pope John Paul II’s days.  He overlooked that after Pope Wojtyla died, a subsequent Pope was elected and resigned, and now we have Francis, who has already been in office for over ten years… and Archbishop Scicluna has more or less remained stuck where he was. Pope Bergoglio found him there and left him there because, like the previous Popes, he needed him in the delicate work of cleansing the current wave of clerical sexual abuse.  The cynics and the sceptics insinuate that the Pope kept him because Bergoglio knows it takes a thief to catch a thief. For my part, I have no opinion on this assertion.

This is why the foremost opinion leaders of the Sunday Times fail to see that the archbishop’s comments on priestly celibacy that the secular journalists echo will do this Maltese prelate more harm than good.  Especially in Rome, if it reaches the ears of the Pope, who has just made his opposition to the notion of married priests quite clear. The Pope must agree with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who once said in Those Mysterious Priests (1974): “Once a celibate falls out of love with Christ, he is more apt to appear on television condemning celibacy as anti-human. Only love makes it possible.”

I ask the Sunday Times: are you unaware of how many politically incorrect positions the Pope has taken, such as in his recent declaration of Fiducia Suppilicans, where he closed the doors of marriage definitively to irregular couples? Don’t you know that a few weeks ago, Pope Francis said that gender ideology would harm the world as much as an atomic war? And that he condemned surrogacy, which the Times considers reproductive rights? Or do the influencers at the Sunday Times wish to continue nurturing false hopes in irregular couples that this Pope has changed Catholic moral teaching?

Mark Laurence Zammit and the other “gurus” at the Sunday Times seem to be ignorant of why Pope Francis is staunchly in favour of keeping celibacy obligatory in the Western Church.  These are some of the reasons why.  In 1990, the Jesuit Christian Cochini, S.J. wrote the Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), where he argues how Christ remained throughout His whole life in the state of celibacy, which signified His total dedication to the service of God and men. Are the Sunday Times gurus aware that Pope Francis canonised Pope Paul VI, who wrote the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus?  Clearly not. In that document, the pontiff states: “Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church as a special jewel”.

Among the Apostles, only Saint Peter is known to have been married because his mother-in-law is mentioned in the Gospels. Some of the others might have been married, but there is a clear indication that they left everything, including their families, to follow Christ. Do the gurus at the Sunday Times understand this?  Thus, in the Gospels, Saint Peter asked Our Lord, “What about us? We left all we had to follow you.” The Divine Master answered: “I tell you solemnly, there is no one who has left house, wife, brothers, parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not be given repayment many times over in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life” (Luke 18, 28-30, cf. Matthew 19, 27-30; Mark 10:20-21).

Let’s pray for our spiritual pastors as The Virgin urged in Medjugorje.