Roamer's column

Parliamentarians exist to serve their country as best they can and always in its interest. That last phrase is loaded. The national interest tends to be coloured by a kaleidoscope of political beliefs. Thus, Dom Mintoff found no difficulty in claiming that the suspension of the Constitutional Court for three years was in the national interest.

Joseph Muscat's concept of the national interest has its genesis in a specific period of history. He cut his political teeth under Alfred Sant and from him, I imagine, imbibed many of his beliefs. I suspect strains of Mintoffian ardour course through a few of his veins or, perhaps more accurately, he reckons a degree of reverence is still the man's due even if the tens of thousands of supporters who thought he was Malta's saviour - with a capital 'S' - has shrunk to a dwindling coterie.

Muscat once thought that joining the EU was not in the national interest, nor Malta's decision to switch its currency to the euro. Did he really believe that or was it expedient for him to go along with Sant? He has pointed out, inaccurately it turns out, that Tony Blair was also against Britain joining Europe, as if this absolved Muscat's bad judgment. Writing in In-Nazzjon last Friday, Salvu Felice Pace quotes Mr Blair as saying that as far back as 1975, he voted in a referendum in favour of membership.

Muscat's political opponents thought both events were indeed in the national interest. Today, Muscat is over the moon about the EU and it was into its parliament that he opted to go when he could have decided to test the local political waters instead; nor does he have a problem paying his bills in euro.

On the issue of VAT, the Leader of the Opposition was adamant about its removal and fought like a tiger against any shilly-shallying, when shilly-shally party members did, just before the 1996 election. Now, having sorted himself out on those three issues, issues that were vital to the national interest, he is getting all steamed up about the problem of illegal immigration, or rather a welcome, if partial, solution, to it in the shape of an Immigration and Asylum Pact.

There is a general consensus that given our size and resources, Malta cannot cope with the number of immigrants that land on our shores. We understand that we must do all we can to help. We acknowledge that 'hosting' these human beings, some of whom leave their country under tragic circumstances and arrive here under tragic circumstances, too, is a work of mercy that must be performed; but finally, it is also the case that such corporal works must find succour from our partners.

To this end, Malta has been agitating with its European partners that they need to act in solidarity with us by sharing the burden. It was a long and difficult haul. Our line was for the creation of a structure to allow immigrants who qualify as asylum seekers to move on to other EU countries. The US, outside the EU, has been generous in this respect; long may it remain so.

To the government's credit and against great odds, agreement was reached last week on an Immigration and Asylum Pact which, for the first time, takes on board the principle of burden-sharing. Next week, the European Parliament will be asked to approve a similar burden-sharing proposal tabled last month in the Budgets' Committee by our energetic and switched-on MEP, Simon Busuttil. He initiated the idea of a pilot project to facilitate the voluntary reallocation of refugees and beneficiaries of international protection from EU member states under severe pressure from immigration flows; hence the pact which the Prime Minister will be signing at an EU summit later this month.

What will the Labour Party's MEPs do? Unless they wish to receive a hefty fine, they will follow their leader and either not get involved in the debate and abstain, or vote against it. For quite ridiculously, Muscat has called on government not to sign the pact because the 26 countries we helped persuade to sign on the dotted line have not bound themselves to share the burden. They cannot be so bound under present EU rules. The EU simply has no competence to dictate migration policy at this stage. Anything but voluntary burden sharing was "politically impossible".

Muscat is insisting that other EU countries must accept beneficiaries whatever their own circumstances. Not so incidentally and as a matter of national interest in the context of this pact, how often if at all did the opposition leader in his role as an MEP speak on the subject of Malta and illegal immigration?

Muscat may take heart from the fact that Harry Vassallo, erstwhile leader of Alternattiva Demokratika, thinks the pact a total fiasco, "a slap in the face". Both, presumably, would rather have had no agreement at all. In Vassallo's case it matters little what he thinks; Muscat's attitude, however, has a touch of autumnal madness.

Venerable Pius

Next Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII, a great Pope, whose diplomatic brilliance, personal holiness and loftiness of intellect, among other credits, earned from Graham Greene in 1951 the wholesome praise that Eugenio Pacelli would go down in history as "a pope who many of us believe will rank among the greatest".

The target of Bolsheviks in Bavaria soon after the Great War - he was Benedict XV's papal nuncio there - and later the target of Nazis (both offered violence to his person). Pacelli was openly hostile to both camps. The Nazis looked upon him as a Jew-loving cardinal and the Soviet regime later cast him as a hater of Jews. The latter smear developed over the years into what Justus George Lawler termed "a new papaphobia".

In his book The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Rabbi David Allan examines what he describes as the "sloppy scholarship" to be found in Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, which is in turn slated by Jewish historian Rubenstein as "a malign exercise in defamation and character assassination". Cornwell's book won the acclaim of the liberal media and anti-Catholic Catholics. Its author now publicly admits that "...evidence published in the last 10 years indicates that Pius may well have been trapped by circumstances - speaking out may have had worse consequences than doing nothing".

Allan sifts through post-war vilification of Pius XII by, among others, a young, leftwing German Rolf Hochuth in his 1963 play The Deputy, the American Gary Wills (like Cornwell an ex-seminarian), James Carroll (an ex-priest) - no fury like an ex-believer's unbelief - and, of course, Susan Zuccotti Daniel, Jonah Goldhagen et al.

The contributions of these authors shared a common thread. What happened in Nazi Germany was not so much the fault of the Nazi regime led by a megalomaniac, as everybody else's. For Hochuth, Pius XII was nothing less than a Nazi collaborator. Goldhagen blames the Pope's alleged anti-Semitism on "the profoundly anti-Semitic establishment of the Church".

That assertion has been strongly challenged by a number of Jewish scholars including Michael Berenbaum who takes Goldhagen to task for "(omitting) all mention of the countervailing traditions of tolerance" to be found in Roman Catholic thought. But then, as Lawler rightly points out, Berenbaum makes the critical observation that Zuccotti's treatment of the depths to which the papacy could sink "will only further enhance (her) reputation for balance, scholarship and appropriate gravitas", the same reputation, incidentally, that Lawler pretty well, and not so prettily, tears to shreds.

The accusation made against Pius XII is that he did nothing to help save the Jews from Nazi persecution. Documented evidence shows that under his pontificate and instructions, the Church saved the lives of more than 850,000 Jews. To the charge that the Pope had not spoken out against Nazi genocide, Pope Benedict recently told a conference of Jewish scholars and rabbis that, "Wherever possible (Pope Pius XII) spared no effort in intervening in their favour" and in providing assistance directly or through Catholic organisations. His help was made "secretly and silently... because in that historical moment, it was possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews only in this way".

He could have added that in his Christmas broadcast in 1939 and on several occasions after that, Pope Pius XII spoke out in the strongest terms against aerial attacks on cities and industrial centres (in 1939 he could only have been referring to the blitzkrieg Hitler unleashed on Poland three months before) - and was ignored.

It is not unreasonable to think that had he spoken out about the horrendous treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and the occupied lands, that treatment would have been intensified. And it is a documented fact that far from fearing anything the Pope would say, Hitler's Pope was the target of a Nazi plot to kidnap him!

Perhaps the last words in this short piece may reasonably be those of Rabbi Isaac Herzog. He noted that Pius XII "worked to banish anti-Semitism in many countries...God willing, may history remember that when everything was dark for our people, His Holiness lit a light of hope for them."

It is time for the cause of this great Pope to be concluded, even as the work for ever-closer Catholic-Jewish relations proceeds.