Chairman of Catholic Film Classification Commission sacked by archbishop after testifying in favour of Stitching
The archbishop has given Fr Abela the sack
Fr Abela, chairman of the Catholic Film Classification Commission, has been removed from his post by the archbishop after telling the court last Friday that Stitching should not be banned, that people should watch it, and that he had learned important lessons about suffering from it. (Read my previous post.)
The Archbishop’s Curia says it will not ban Catholics from watching the play (why would it bother, when the state has done the job on its behalf, and drawn non-Catholics into the net as well?) but then again, it doesn’t agree with Fr Abela’s views. And it’s a safe bet that the archbishop hasn’t watched the play, still less read it, before coming to his conclusions.
Maybe it’s not so much Fr Abela’s views on Stitching that bothered the archbishop, but his flying in the face of the state censorship board and making it look like it’s trying to be holier than the archbishop himself, by banning something that the Curia hadn’t bothered with.
It appears that the Curia, too, has its elves. Two people commented beneath my earlier post on Fr Abela saying that he is not on the Catholic Film Classification Commission and that ‘The Times’ had got its story wrong. Well, of course he isn’t on the commission: but it turns out that this is because he’s just been fired. He was still on the commission when he testified last Friday.
One of the lawyers acting for the production company tells me that at no point did Fr Abela contradict Catholic dogma, nor did he speak out of line with Catholic teaching in any way. “He spoke as a compassionate Catholic,” this lawyer said. Yes, and now the Archbishop’s Curia is distancing itself from him, while at the same time refusing to take a stand against the play that he praised.
I hear from the courtroom that Fr Abela was, apart from the playwright himself, who came to Malta to speak before the court, the most impressively lucid witness – “somebody who has the rare gift of articulating complex ideas into ridiculously simple language; apart from Anthony Neilson (the playwright), he was the one witness who visibly impressed the judge – to the extent that his deposition turned into an exchange of ideas with the judge, livening up the hearing no end”.
The final hearing was scheduled for 3 July, but the chairman of the state censorship board told the court that she will be away from Malta for the whole of July and August, and so that hearing will be held on 25 September, when she and the other members of the board will speak.
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The Archbishop is too nice a person to take the initiative and show Fr Abela a straight red card. Some vultures must have been waiting in the wings.
I see the heavy hand of Fr Anton Gouder in this. The Archbishop made a very bad mistake when he gave Gouder so much power.
Never mind whose hand is behind all this. What on earth is the point?
Was it Fr Abela’s ideas that offended, or was it the fact that he expressed them? He was speaking in court, so did the Curia expect him to lie rather than tell the truth as he sees it?
If it’s Fr Abela’s ideas that the Curia finds offensive, why did it accept him sitting on the board in the first place? And once he was there, was he supposed to take instructions on what to say – which would mean his own ideas are immaterial, so why remove him now – or was he supposed to censor himself, acting in opposition to his own conscience and therefore committing a sin he is duty bound to prevent?
Does the Curia seriously find a play more offensive than censoring one of its own, or putting him in the morally undesirable position of acting against his own beliefs?
Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be hearing the Curia’s answers any time soon.
I think that Fr Abela should have resigned himself from the Board after speaking in court; it would have been more honourable.
[Daphne – Why?]
The Curia has held him to account, which is a good thing and needed in our culture. Not many weeks ago after the EU elections, Paul Borg Olivier and the PM himself were asked by people commenting on line whether they would consider resigning for the poor performance. We are not a culture who keeps people accountable for what they say, let alone resign.
[Daphne – Oh, you mean the elves on timesofmalta.com! God knows why you imagine that the prime minister of the party secretary-general should resign because of the result of an EP election, but I’m sure you’ll explain.]
That’s a nice tactic to delay the Court’s decison by saying that you will be abroad for two whole months. Will anybody check the veracity of such a claim? Not in Malta, I bet!
Rather than continue to deny the obvious, the Catholic Church should do what all other religions do and crawl under a rock and die.
The fact that they think they should have some kind of right to influence our lives should be reason enough to question their every motive. Instead this country laps up their every word.