People who want to run with the hare, hunt with the hounds, have their cake and eat it too

That goes for Mark Montebello (we were in the same class at sixth form, so he’s never going to be ‘Father Mark’ to me) and the men in this story in The Malta Independent.

Mark Montebello wants to be a priest who does things he’s not supposed to as a priest, which is a bit like getting married but insisting on still carrying on with other people because you don’t agree with the laws (religious and secular) on marriage but want to define your own.

And these two newly engaged men, while living a life that is completely alien to Roman Catholicism, at the same time and for some reason that I will never be able to fathom, want their union to be blessed by the Roman Catholic Church. And because it can’t be, they find an alternative and get a renegade priest to bless their engagement rings instead.

Who in the 21st century gets their engagement rings blessed by priests to begin with? That practice was already out of date when everyone I knew was getting married 30 years ago. Nobody even gets engaged anymore – you just buy a ring and make the arrangements for marriage, and that’s about it. No ceremony, no fuss and certainly no announcements in the newspapers.

The ‘Social and Personal’ columns in The Sunday Times used to be thick with announcements of engagements up to three decades ago. Now you don’t get a single one and there hasn’t been for years.

That’s just aside, a note on social history. The real issue is why somebody who doesn’t want to live by the rules of the Roman Catholic Church would want to do something as wholly unnecessary and pointless as have engagement rings blessed by a priest, when this is something not even heterosexual couples planning on getting married in church bother doing anymore.

People just want to have their cake and eat it.

As for Mark Montebello, if the rules of the church bother him so much, he should just leave. It won’t kill him and it won’t kill the church to lose him.

He can go off and be a renegade social worker – heaven knows we need more of them.

Ah, but that’s just the thing. His membership of the Dominican Order provides him with the platform and context he needs to make the statements he craves. Take those statements out of the context of his being a priest, and they are worthless – just another person being difficult, another over-dramatic, attention-craving man with an ego problem to add to the massively extensive list of them that we’ve got already in this cabin-fever island.