There’s dirty work afoot

Last Tuesday’s front page headlines were chilling while the photograph that went with it was even more so. Gaddafi Says Islam ‘Should Be The Religion Of Europe’ during a highly choreographed and orchestrated visit to Rome; the Eternal City, the cradle of Christianity, the shrine to European imperialism, the repository of all that forms the basis of our civilisation.

The photograph shows the cavaliere and the colonel seated in what looks like one of those buggies used to ferry around not so sprightly golfers, both looking incredibly grimfaced on their way to visit a photographic exhibition “tracing the history of the Italian-Libyan relationship, including the bloody colonial period”. What a treat for the colonel that must have been!

The cavaliere may have taken him to visit the wonderful Bernini Apollo and Daphne at Galleria Borghese or the Mantegna Entombed Christ at Palazzo Barberini, however, no, this apologia about what practically the entire continent of Europe was guilty of doing up to WWII, namely exploitative colonisation, had to feature largely on the agenda as part of the mysterious deal between Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi. A deal that, in the short term, no doubt, is keeping illegal immigrants away from Italian shores and, in the process, Maltese ones too, a deal that the Italian government is paying millions of euros by way of compensation, a deal that we in Malta cannot be unaffected by.

Malta is a sitting duck. With these two mavericks on either side of us and very little by way of either moral or physical support from the EU, should our relationships with either Italy or Libya go phut at any time, we have just our wits and our guile to fall back on. As the rank and file of Malta scream blue murder about the divorce issue, we do not realise how tenuous this Catholicism of ours actually is and how if it is going to survive renewed Islamic onslaughts of the subtlest kind it must rearm itself in such a way as to garner support.

We have reached a situation where the Church is clearly stating that it is definitely not going to give any of us marching orders as how we ought to vote should the divorce issue reach referendum stage, which, by rights, it really shouldn’t. We have the Church disowning and disavowing the vociferously opposed members of the laity who are boring the pants off everybody with their uncompromising anti-divorce rantings and ravings. While I believe that without actually saying it the Church is advocating long overdue Church-state separation, the divorce issue being the tip of the iceberg, the choices we have to make are not at all easy.

It is so difficult to wear different hats; at least it is for me. As a Catholic, I do believe that marriage as an institution should be strengthened. Who would not agree with that? Yet, at this stage of the proceedings, hindering the state from legislating divorce with the idea of strengthening marriage is like locking the stable after the horses have bolted. It’s too late.

Yet, you cannot begin to imagine how peripheral the divorce issue is to the real concern which is the islamification of Europe as proposed by the colonel that was made not a stone’s throw away from the Vatican last week. As the families of the once colonised Libyans, Pakistanis, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians increase and multiply in Europe, they will, in the short run, outnumber the original Europeans and hold a majority even in Brussels. Then what? When Berlin and Dresden become Turkish and when Turkey joins the EU what do we do about the religious issue? Do we become confrontational Christians? Absolutely not; it would be a disaster.

I believe that unless our laws are irrevocably secularised, namely designed in such a way as to allow full freedom of worship for all EU citizens but making it a heinous crime to impose the tenets of any particular religion on anyone else, we have no hope. This is why all references to Christianity were omitted from the defunct EU Constitution, much to the consternation of those who still require a belief to sustain their waning European identity. By not allowing any religion to take the upper hand we would, of course, be blocking and thwarting Col. Gaddafi’s dream of Islam being the religion of Europe while guaranteeing religious tolerance; something that can only be achieved by enacting the most stringent and uncompromising of laws to ensure that our religious freedoms remain forever unhampered. This is the only way forward.

New secularised religious laws would allow me to be as Catholic as I wish and you as Islamic as you wish. We must divorce politics from all religions and give to Caesar what is Caesar’s in the true sense of the word, leaving God to our own individual beliefs.

If and when we appear before God, whether he is God, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva or a helicopter, I very much doubt whether He would be in the slightest bit interested in whom we voted, whether we divorced or not, who we slept with, whether we were gay or whatever but only in the kindness, generosity and understanding that we showed our neighbour throughout our lives. That is what should be the main focus of our lives; all the rest is sheer prurience.