Roamer’s column

Friday afternoon and I am waiting to hear what Pope Benedict will be telling his audience at Westminster Hall in three hours’ time. Clear from what I have followed so far of his journey to England and Scotland that he is unlikely to mince words by calling a spade an agricultural implement.

I get to admire the 265th successor to St Peter more and more; his intellect, his knowledge, his steel wrapped in softness, his courage, his coherence, his holiness. Asked by a journalist on the plane bound for Edinburgh whether the Church could be made “more credible and attractive for all”, his sure-footed response was not the one the questioner expected. “I would say that a Church that seeks above all to be attractive is already on the wrong path.”

Worried about how he would be received in a country where the media and the dopes were being unremittingly hostile? No, he wasn’t; and he enlarged. When he was in France, he was told it was “the most anti-clerical country”; when in the Czech Republic that it was “the most anti-religious country of Europe and also the most anti-clerical”. What mattered to him was that he received a warm welcome from the believing community, had been shown respect by those who could be classified as anti-Catholic, and attention by those who were searching. As for Great Britain, it has “a history of tolerance” and he was looking forward to his visit with “courage and joy”.

And he has been greeted with warmth and affection; the Cassandresque media and the pop atheists, it is true, have been horrendous – so eat your heart out, Peter Tatchell, now that you have relished the one-hour prime time television tantrum you delivered on BBC, methinks; do likewise, Dawkins, as your plan for a citizen’s arrest of the Pope came to nought; ditto Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has been reported as being sacked from his post as president of the Special Court to Sierra Leone back in 2004 for refusing to withdraw, as judge, in a case whose defendants he had proclaimed guilty in one of his books. Eat your heart out, Stephen Fry, and join him, Matthew Parris. Eat whatever heart is left in you, Fleet Street. Never have the media been so out of sync.

The Queen set the tone at Holyrood when she welcomed Pope Benedict and reminded her subjects that they and the Pope’s faithful shared “a common heritage” – I wonder how many knew that? As did the Pope in answer to her speech of welcome; but he did not shirk the truth and spoke of the dangers of secularism and, later, during an open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park, he referred to his fear of a “dictatorship of relativism (that) threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man’s nature, his destiny and his ultimate good. There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatise it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty.”

At Westminster Hall, he must have pleased Thomas More as the spirit of this martyr hovered over the place, when he called things by their proper name. Pope Benedict did so with gentleness and firmness as he pointed out new dangers to democracy, even chiding his audience over the significant shift that was encouraging the marginalisation of Christmas out of a mistaken sense of political correctness.

He pointed out new problems that have surfaced in Church-state relations, or rather, old problems differently phrased, starkly enunciated in a socio-political context where religion and faith were being nudged out of public discourse and legislation was tending to sideline the right of Catholic institutions to operate without fear of censure by the state.

This, he warned again, threatened not only the freedom of religion but ultimately the freedom of the human person himself. Belief cannot be cast out of the legislative process, cannot be ignored, because that way lay tyranny via a democratic process that led unerringly to laws and practices that lacked ethical foundations – witness the recent global financial crisis – and, therefore, failed to take into consideration the whole human person.

When he addressed the Queen in Scotland, he had already taken up this point, which was to become the leitmotif of visit: Then, he had remarked: “As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated version of man and society and thus to a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.”

Now he was telling the representatives of British civil society, “I cannot but express my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity… even in nations which place great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the private sphere.”

Today Pope Benedict will be in Birmingham, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman – his last pastoral task before returning to Rome. Unless something untoward happens before that, he will leave behind him a more joyful Catholic parish, a Britain that has had more of a chance to evaluate a man vilified in its media, which much prefers celebs to the voice of authentic truth, and heard in that voice echoes of the faith of their fathers, which is living still – and which perhaps needs to be less still.

And now, for the next 46 years

It is a statistically interesting thought that roughly half of the population was not born when this country assumed its sovereignty as an independent state in 1964. Those who were around that year were either mewling and puking in their baby cots in the first stage of their seven ages, or are today into their middle age or grandfather-motherhood.

Yet it is apparent from the crowds that attend the annual celebrations organised by the Nationalist Party that the bawlers and pukers of the early 1990s, youngsters in other words, enjoy keeping a date with that anniversary. It is a good thing for the nation’s memory that they do. How fractured memories are by the fact that we manage to hold not one but five National Days is another matter.

Who would have thought, in 1964, that Malta would be hosting more than a million visitors to its shores? Let’s fast forward to 1980 when our pukers were 16 years old, and ask a more radical question. Whose mind did it cross, even then, when the hardware and software of information technology was regarded balefully by the government of that day as a threat to employment, that Malta would be perched close to the top rungs of the ladder of the digital age?

And if one can descend from the sublime to the not so ridiculous, come to think of it, where did all those roundabouts dressed up in Joseph’s many-coloured coat in the springtime, some clothed in lawn, come from? For roundabouts mean roads and traffic and transport from one end of the island to another, one side of it to the other. And yes, potholes exist but only the jaded can honestly fail to acknowledge the vast improvement that has taken place.

But let us return to 1964, when even then, at least in the minds of visionaries, the idea was germinating that this tiny island in the Mediterranean, all of 100 square miles, had as its destiny a place among the nations of western Europe, the eastern part of which was then separated by an Iron Curtain sprung by the Soviet Union’s post-war takeover.

It took 40 years as near as dammit to get there, but we did. Anchoring ourselves into the European Union provided us with a security – and with challenges to our identity. Membership brought its own difficulties, social and cultural, not least a drab tendency by the centre for harmonisation in areas that should not be its business and that impinge on a state’s sovereignty. When that happens, we must resist.

Post-independence Malta has taken enormous strides forward, strides that have firmly established the island in a number of service sectors, from finance where we have experienced an unadulterated success, to leisure, to the maddening language of information technology with its broadband (whatever happened to narrow?) to the birth of e-Government, e-commerce, i-pods and u-pods and pod-pods no doubt, to the creation from scratch of industrial estates, to high-tech manufacture and pharmaceutical industries, to an economy unencumbered by loss-making industries devouring scores of millions of euros – and wasting them.

The past 23 years have not been an easy ride, but most agree we have been cantering in the right direction. For this, and it is a matter of record, not of opinion, successive administrations led by a government wearing the colours of the Nationalist Party led by George Borg Olivier, Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi, and sometimes under painful circumstances, must take credit. Of course, there have been warts, still are, that need to be excised; but achievement far exceeds failure.

Postscript

How strange that Fr Joe Borg, who lectures in social communications at the University, a decades-long friend, should have aimed a cheap jibe at me, not at my argument – a no-no in good social communications – for wrestling with the Dean of the Faculty of Theology and another member of that faculty.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that when it comes to decades-long friends there is no need for enemies.