MALTA DILEMMA

By a Commonwealth Correspondent • By a Commonwealth Correspondent • THE promise of Maltese independence next year leaves the dispute between the Church and Mr. Mintoff's Labour Party still unresolved, as well as questions of Commonwealth membership, monarchial or republican status, and the method and timing of elections.
The other four parties refused to accept any of the amendments to the draft constitution put up in the London talks by Mr. Mmtoff.
Some of them seemed to observers to be irrelevant to a constitutional document. But they include some reasonable demands. guarantee religious teaching in state schools, and open the door to state aid for Church schools, subject to inspection. A big stumbling block is Mr. Mintoff's insistence on provision for civil marriage and recognition of divorce in the case of nonCatholics. His requirements that religious considerations a 11 d influence should not be used to interfere with freedom of speech and assembly, or with the conduct of elections, are perfectly fair in principle. What troubles even some of his sympathisers is the way in which he insists on freedom of conscience. The concept. as such, 16 beyond question but why, in an island almost wholly Catholic, does he want special provision for parent% to be free to withdraw their children from religious classes? There is a feeling, rightly or wrongly, that his motives go further than a desire to protect the tiny handful of non-Catholics on the island. The question is: does he simply want to keep the Church in the sacristy, or would his leadership mean a largely secularist character for Malta,
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with a outright threat to faith itself? Some of his statements in the past have suggested, in spite of his appeals to encyclicals that God is irrelevant to the social order, This may, of course, have beeen "loose talk", but no one really knows—perhaps least of all Mr. Mintoff himself. Arguments that, where the spheres of Church and State overlap, the Church's rights are paramount, according to Immortale Dei, will not of themselves convince Mr. Mintoff. More and more people arc coming to believe that the only real solution is for the Church to open her arms to Dom Mintoff, to call for the slate to be wiped clean on both sides and to invite him for talks where everyone can start afresh.