MALTA
Malta Today
Saviour Balzan 22 February 2016
I am sure the Maltese Archbishop has been privy to studies and reports which he has opted not to publish for public consumption. Archbishop Charles Scicluna chose to publish the Church’s position paper on conversion therapy because he deems it fit and because somehow it contributes to the way he believes things should work out.
I am sure for example that, for reasons known only to himself, he opted not to publish the reports he has seen on paedophilia and sexual abuse in the Maltese church.
With the plethora of unknown cases of priests who have abused young children abroad and in Malta I can understand his line of thinking.
I cannot of course agree.
Yesterday’s decision to publish the paper as a reaction to the government’s decision to criminalise the conversion therapy of homosexuals goes to prove that the bubbly, intelligent, devout hard core Nationalist, semi-modern cleric is nothing but a conservative and a dinosaur.
I know that the contributors to the church’s report are all eminent scholars or academics but it does not change the fact that blocking the criminalisation of the conversion therapy is equivalent to taking the clock back. The only conversion therapist I have heard of is a Gordon Manche, a Maltese evangelist who looks and sounds like an anorexic version of Emy Bezzina and who thinks that God’s grace is awarded according to how many times you can say Jesus in one sentence.
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