Roamer's column

No sooner did Renzo Piano indicate in a pretty general manner what he had in mind for the site of the Opera House than people rushed in to give their pennyworth. The Great Unfurling of his plan took place yesterday well after I submitted this piece, but the presentation, carried on the national station, promised to be as good as it gets. Well before that, we had somebody feeling "insulted" by the idea of a roofless theatre; surprised, perhaps, but insulted?

Others have as yet expressed no delight that the bombed-out space was not going to become Parliament Square, although, why not? Instead, it will be filled with the sound of music, song and the hum of across-the-range cultural activity in an environment Piano says will be magical.

Others still, remained mute to the fact that Parliament, which Piano is craftily erecting next door, will rise above the ashen ugliness of what Dom Mintoff dubbed Freedom Square, probably the ugliest space in Valletta - equalled in frightfulness only by the city's squalid entrance.

By airbrushing the former out of visual existence, the architect intends to create another magnificent point of reference in a city peppered with unimaginably beautiful points of references: from the recreated entrance, past the Piano creations that will rise inside, past the gasp-inducing St John's Co-Cathedral, past Pjazza Regina where we can now see the pigeon-strutting statue of Queen Victoria, still unamused, and in the background the handsome Bibliotheca, past St George's Square, the restoration of which has drawn criticism, past the President's Palace, which will lose Parliament and gain an exciting, cultural identity within the next four, five years while retaining the President's offices, past it and on to Elmo Agonistes awaiting its renaissance, past so much that has been restored and across the entire grid that connects this unique city threaded by gems of churches, auberges and baroque munificence.

By 2012, Valletta will emerge, Phoenix-like, into a World Heritage capital worthy of its name. Here is a vision like no other, a second chance for Valletta; whence comes such another?

Yesterday, the government launched the project we have been waiting for oh so long - the entrance to the city, the new Parliament and a multicultural centre.

I was delighted to read the comments made by European Court of Human Rights Judge Giovanni Bonello a fortnight or so ago; he reminded those who would thoughtlessly nudge the country's highest institution out of sight as if it were some dreadful carbuncle, that everywhere else in the democratic world a parliamentary building is a lapidary symbol of democracy. It has an intrinsic importance in the story of a nation and calls for the aesthetic recognition due to its station.

No doubt there will be whirling dervishes and the clatter of gnashed teeth in the days to come; no doubt we are in for performances worthy of grand opera; above the cacophony, though, what I hope to witness is some humility and the homage due to a concept deserving of calm discussion, not hysterical reactions. I fear there will be much of the latter as prima donnas queue up to hurl insults as if at a hit-the-clown stand in a carousel.

Silly remarks to the contrary, we are witnessing at first hand the rebirth of a city and this due to the creative energy of Lawrence Gonzi and his government. Alongside Piano's creations and adding to their grandiloquence the city now has pavements and cobbled ways, less traffic and noise, beautifully restored gardens (let's have a massive fountain on St George's Square), pedestrian zones, monuments professionally restored.

Gonzi's eloquent vision of Malta 2015 remains intact; his touch on the macro-tiller, sure.

Let Joseph Muscat wallow in the mud he enjoys so much, rather like the song about the hippopotami's penchant for the stuff in that Sixties Swann and Flanders revue, the refrain of which went something like this:

Mud, mud, glorious Mud!
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
Follow me, Follow,
Down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud.

In a glorious tradition

If yesterday we were made privy to Piano's plans for a City, tomorrow Pope Benedict's long-awaited (and delayed) encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, will be made privy to the world; and the G8 meet at L'Aquila. Eleven short of Pope John Paul II's tally of 14, this will be Pope Benedict's third. It was delayed because the Pope wished to have a firm grasp of the world's current financial and economic condition in order to provide a serious comment on the situation.

Caritates in Veritate will be another in a line of great encyclicals that make up the Church's formidable social doctrine. It is apposite, too, in the light of capitalism's current fall from grace and its urgent need for redemption, and in the historical context of socialism's proven inability to provide a workable alternative. It will be a difficult line it needs to tread but, as Fr Thomas J. Reese, SJ, reminded us in The Washington Post, the Pope said as far back as last February:

"It is the Church's duty to denounce the fundamental errors that have now been revealed in the collapse of the major American banks. Human greed is a form of idolatry that is against the true God and is a falsification of the image of God with another god, Mammon." And, earlier this month, "The financial and economic crisis clearly shows that certain economic-financial paradigms that have been dominant in the past years must be rethought."

In so saying, Pope Benedict will be expressing the sentiments of millions who have been witnessing a drama that has hit the guilty and the guiltless, too, those who placed their trust in men who deserved none.

He will address a manmade catastrophe, midwifed by an unrelenting greed and the manic thought that the price of property had only one direction - upwards.

Never mind the hundreds of millions in underdeveloped and developing countries who have been savaged by the experience.

The Pope will not be tackling this issue in a vacuum, naturally, but in the context of the theology that permeates her social doctrines, emphasises man's dignity and worth and has as its central tenet the commandment that calls on men to share with one another.

There is a series of worthy antecedents - Leo XIII's inspired and inspiring Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno, , John XXIII's Mater et Magistra, John Paul's Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus on which he will build his argument for reform and change.

The abyss that separates wealthy nations from those that barely have the means to survive is clearly scandalous. "We cannot", Reese quoting Pope Benedict, "remain passive before certain processes of globalisation which not infrequently increase the gap between rich and poor. We must denounce those who squander the earth's riches, provoking inequalities that cry out to heaven."

None of this will endear him much to those who have made an idolatrous god out of an unbridled, inhuman capitalism. There will not be those who will disagree with the main thrust of his argument that for all its wealth creation, for all the success it can claim as a system, and it can, capitalism has failed to address, in a humane manner, "inequalities" that clearly "cry out to heaven". This failure is tangible; the Pope will ask that it be addressed institutionally.

Before all else, I imagine, he will call for solidarity. In a section in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, we find: 'The immediate purpose of the Church's social doctrine is to propose the principles and values that can sustain a society worthy of the human person. Among these principles, solidarity includes all the others...'. Pope Benedict will demand a meaningful solidarity, not the lip-service it so often receives in our international forums.

Oh dear!

Those of you who have seen The Magnificent Seven, and no film buff should have missed it, will recall that memorable scene when one of the good guys is in his room waiting for the bad, very bad guys to hit the peasants the Seven have come to protect.

Suddenly three flies settle on the table at which he is sitting. He watches with an almost painful intensity, then makes a sudden grab.

He opens his hand. One of them has got away. Tormented by this failure he mutters to himself, "There was a time when I could have caught all three" - and you know he will not survive the day.

The scene surfaced from the past when the media showed President Barack Obama chatting with somebody or other. A fly catches his attention. He takes an elegant swipe at it and, of course, kills it dead as the advert says. Camera pans on dead fly on White House carpet. The whole world saw this fly-swatting achievement. Sadly, there is more to presidential life than dead flies.

A day or two later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on our fly-killer to "apologise" for "interfering in Iranian affairs. That was bad enough; he also asked him why he "(had) fallen into the trap and repeated the comments Bush used to make".

"Such an attitude, he went on, "will only make you another Bush in the eyes of the people". Ouch! Welcome to the Iranian reality, Mr President.