‘Not in our name’ is the name of a group of young
people who have come together through Facebook to look into the
possibility of seeking excommunication from the Catholic Church.
With the divorce issue fuelling the debate on the separation of state and church, the group is demanding excommunication.
At
a press conference in front of the Curia in Floriana yesterday morning,
in a bid to drum up interest in the excommunication issue, Andrew
Galea, Reuben Zammit and Daniel Schembri addressed journalists.
Asked
by The Malta Independent on Sunday if they are concerned that people
will see their actions as being a form of rebellion that they would soon
grow out of, Mr Galea replied that their initiative is a form of
rebellion to an extent, because they want to change something that is
taken for granted.
“We are working towards changing something, and
change is positive,” he said.
When the three young men were asked
if they are planning to organise an en masse excommunication, they said
that there are another 100 people who have joined the Facebook group,
but this figure is not necessarily representative of the number of
people who intend to seek excommunication.
The group hopes to
attract more support through media coverage. “We might be aiming for the
moon and end up in the stars. We don’t know what it entails exactly,
but we will figure it out and inform our group accordingly,” they
explained.
“Most of us have been brought up in Catholic,
conservative, Maltese families. We were baptised not out of choice, but
out of tradition. We have now made an informed decision and have no
doubt about what we want. We have been non-Catholic for a number of
years and now we want to declare it,” they explained.
“Although
mentality is gradually changing, we cannot accept that the Catholic
Church ideology is intertwined with politics. This is not a crusade
against faith but a crusade for freedom.
“We are here to express
the desire, shared by many, to no longer be affiliated in any way with
the Catholic Church. We, who are submitted to baptism as children too
young to understand the nature and consequences of it, now acknowledged
that it meant our forced membership of an institution with a broad
history of ill practice that characterises it as the very antithesis of a
moral, progressive buttress to society,” read out Mr Galea.
He
referred to cases of ill practice such as abuse by members of the
clergy, including child abuse, the Church’s position on the use of
condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS and hostility towards people of a
diverse sexual orientation, with the latest and most obvious example of
misconduct being the behaviour of some members of the local church
during the divorce referendum.
In the divorce referendum debate,
Mr Galea said, the church turned on the weak and infirm and developed a
web of guilt and terror in an attempt to bully its way into achieving
the desired result.
This bullying, he said, included accusing its
members of being immoral if they voted yes to a civil right and
threatening to deny them the sacraments considered essential to
Catholics should they do so, and barring the yes to divorce movement
chair Deborah Schembri from practicing in the Ecclesiastical Court in an
attempt to gag her.
“We feel morally compelled to denounce this
behaviour and wish to no longer be counted as part of the percentage of
Catholic believers that is often quoted in order to support the church’s
political goals,” he added.
“We also do not believe that the
statistics that claim Malta has a 98 per cent Catholic population
reflect the reality. We also contest the association of the Maltese
national identity with the Catholic faith. As citizens, we assert our
rights to be Maltese and non-Catholic and demand that non-Catholics no
longer be made to feel discriminated against, under-represented or
victimised because of social stigma,” they said.
“Excommunication
means we would be removed from the Catholic Church’s register. We appeal
to those who share our desire for a socially inclusive, secular state
that recognises all religious and non-religious denominations as equal
and separate from the state,” he said.
The group called on all
those who recognise the need for secularism and religious freedom to
agitate for change and open the dialogue about changing Article 2 of the
Constitution, which defines Malta as a Catholic country and thereby
undermine the unjust Catholic privileges in education, law, politics and
culture that have served to alienate so many who do not subscribe to
the Catholic dogma.
They invited all those who feel the same way
to no longer hide who they really are and what they believe in.
“Fear
and apathy are our greatest enemies. As long as we remain in hiding and
do nothing about it, we too are complicit in the repression of our
universal civil rights and the imposition of Catholic ideology on
everyone,” Mr Galea continued.
Declaring that there is no shame in
not being Catholic and in calling for our government to respect
people’s rights as equal citizens of the republic, he finished.
They
also announced that a meeting at which people who are seriously
considering excommunication can contribute to the discussion will be
held at 4pm on Sunday, 10 July at 60a, Strait Street, Valletta.