Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/208710
13 Interview maltatoday, SUNDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2013 He was the Vatican's chief prosecutor on the sex abuse crimes of the clergy. Now he is Malta's auxiliary bishop. And now that he's in town, he won't just stay put. Mgr Charles Scicluna on civil unions and the Church PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUDREY LIENARD n option from the Gospel – and the Gospel of mercy, I do agree we must find an equilibrium and balance when it comes to the way we preach the Gospel, and that we cannot discount the moral imperatives of the way we preach the Gospel of mercy and compassion. They go hand in hand." He describes Francis as an intelligent communicator, and that the difference with his predecessor is a question of style rather than substance. "Benedict is a timid personality and a great thinker, and a great theologian. Francis dedicated much of his pastoral ministry in a diocese as a bishop, and he had had to work with daily challenges and respond to the daily problems people face. And that gives him a street wis- dom that contributes greatly to the freshness of style that he has brought to the papacy." Scicluna had suggested, in previous reports carried by the Italian Corriere della Sera that Benedict had carried out his own coup d'etat by decapitating the papacy in a bid to pave the way for a successor that could handle some of the Vatican's inside detractors and 'third parties' implicated in the Vatileaks scandal and blackmail of highprofile bishops. While Benedict preoccupied himself with the moral relativism of European society, Scicluna says a challenge for the Church remains the fact that postmodern society finds it difficult to accept moral, absolute values. "If any in- dividual is the criterion of what is good or bad, then we cannot agree on what is a way forward as a society… Jesus says 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. No Pope is going to discount these words. No statement can be more absolute than that." "In his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), Benedict says being a Christian is not about a strict code of ethics or conducts, but about meeting Jesus Christ as a person. You listen to him, hear him tell you 'follow me', and he will test you at the end of time when he will ask you whether you gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, cloth the naked, visited the sick and prisoners – very concrete things, very basic things – it's actually a law that teaches you mercy and compassion in a very concrete, daily way. That is the criterion of how we will be judged. Christ does not do away with judgement, but speaks of mercy." As Scicluna shows, this is a church that can neither be monolithic nor withstand the various strands of thought cohabiting inside it: Dominican friar Mark Montebello, for example, who last week said the Church was moving towards its own extinction, saying that after "shooting itself in the foot" with its immersion into the divorce opposition movement, it is not repeating the same mistake on civil unions. So is it possible keep the Sciclunas and Montebellos of the Catholic world in the same church? Is this faith's church's a closed club or a fluid movement? "There's a very beautiful image in the Gospel of Peter pulling a net full of different fish onto the shore and the other Apostles help him bring home this catch of fish. The number indicated in the Gospel corresponds to all the different species of fish known 2,000 years ago. That's a sign of the universality of the Church. The Church is universal but united in one faith. It's not uniform, it's Catholic because it is a home where everybody has his own views and has his own way of life that is called to one faith, one baptism, and also one hope, which is Jesus Christ. That is the most important focus in being a Christian."