Roamer’s column

It is evident that over the past three or four decades a number of us have turned sceptical about religion and our practice of it. Fifty years ago few would have dreamed of using the vocabulary of the gutter to criticise the Church and Catholicism to the extent that this is now beingdisplayed in the printed andvisual media and, in a woefully illiterate manner, by many users of the internet.

Some see this as a sign of progress; moderns no longer feel tied, have untied themselves, from the Church’s apron strings and in many cases from a belief in God – which, they claim, is for the superstitious and those with mindsets anchored in the Middle Ages. This disapproval, it need hardly be said in literate circles, is as tiresome as it gets.

It fails to take into account, more likely, is totally unaware, that fundamentalist pygmies like Dante belonged to that era; as did Chaucer; as did Charlemagne before them both; as did many great saints, Francis and Thomas Aquinas, to name but two. Splendid Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals were built all over Europe during that time; Giotto brought life back to pictorial art; painters and sculptors gave birth to great masterpieces; the political outline of Europe was drawn and well before that, the Magna Carta was signed. There is much else besides about that age; inventions galore.

Yet even intelligent Johnny-come-latelies in journalism use the term Middle Ages pejoratively. We need not worry; perhaps the Church’s apron-strings may be a good thing to which one may reasonably attach oneself; if only to learn from her the meaning of life – and death.

But the fact remains that many delight themselves in unlearning Catholicism and choose pale shadows as substitutes. Cardinal Newman – pace Leone Ganado who went online to call for unenlightened intellects like Newman and Chesterton to be consigned to oblivion – Newman confronts this problem with his usual eloquence.

Rather in the manner of Peter asking Jesus to whom they could go if they did not follow Him who had the “words of eternal life”, Newman, a convert, asks: “Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? It is your only chance of peace and assurance in this turbulent changing world. There isnothing between it and scepticism...Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic in a dreadful, but infallible succession.”

Rum resignation; rum calls for another

Cyrus Engerer, the none too successful deputy-mayor of a none too successful Sliema council, called on the Prime Minister to resign after Lawrence Gonzi exercised his right to vote against the divorce Bill.

Engerer is the councillor who voted Nikki Dimech out of the council after allegations of wrongdoing by the latter. Nobody knows what happened to this case. Perhaps it is time to bring it to a conclusion.

What we do know is that the party to which Engerer belonged, backed his appointment to deputy-mayorship. Only a few days ago he pledged his allegiance to the Nationalist Party that herepresented on the council. When Gonzi cast his No vote, Engerer resigned from the party and announced that he would be an active member of the Labour Party – to Labour’s Mephistophelean delight. Great, Cyrus. How the man’s political future will develop remains to be seen.

What exercised Labour minds more than the Bill itself, or the principled Engerer for that matter, was the way the Prime Minister would cast his vote. That exercise has now been resolved. He voted against.

We need not dwell too long on Joseph Muscat’s reactions and his party’s, not least because that collective has quite a history on referendums and perverse election results at the back of it.

Lino Spiteri, who seems to be taking on the role of deus ex machina for that party, agreed with our gutsy Engerer; Gonzi should resign, but “immediately”. He gave no incontrovertible reason to back his demand. This business of the supremacy of the will of the people, even over conscience, has a potential for Orwellian drama – and tragedy. All dictators have forced through horrendous policies in the name of that supremacy.

Gonzi followed his conscience, as every man must. It was his inalienable right. No will of the people can gazump that right.

Supremacy of conscience was the name of the game before the referendum, that supremacy continued to operate after it. Listen, either conscience exists in the deepest part of man – not in its subjective application: I think this, therefore it is – or it does not.

To deny that it does, is to deprive the word of all meaning. Meantime, that noble leap from the ignominious Gonzi to the principled Muscat was quite something, Cyrus. Loved its selflessness.

That dastardly Vatican

I wonder how a re-incarnated Malthus would have reacted to the Demographic Summit held recently at the Vatican? With his version of fire and brimstone, I imagine.

Had Malthus’s projections on overpopulation turned out to be remotely correct, that is, based on the theory that the number of humans increases geometrically (1,2,4,8,16 and so on), food production arithmetically, (1,2,3,4,5 and so on), the world’s population today would be 2,000 billion instead of the circa six point something billion it actually is.

What we are witnessing instead of overpopulation, is the frenzied battle cry rising from the throats of UN Family Planning cohorts advocating the promotion of contraception on an unimaginable scale, and abortion on an inconceivable scale; to keep the natives in check. The Vatican summit declared that “the whole world community (is) fac(ing) the unprecedented social and historical problem of humankind survival.”

Its final declaration filled less column inches in our media than the martyred dog, Star. There was a dark reason for this. The summit reaffirmed the “natural family” as the “basic unit of society, the fundamental social value that is a necessary prerequisite for the very existence of world civilisations...” Trust the Vatican to be so pompous.

It underlined the importance of the natural family as “a necessary condition with no alternatives for the survival and sustainable development of all nations and states; and as an ‘integral condition for the demographic well-being.” No pussyfooting there; nor in the recommendation to governments to develop pro-family policies and put an end to a policy imposing birth-control and birth control by any other name. It regarded these“as one of the greatest threats to the survival of humankind”.

The Vatican summit promoted marriage, a union of man and woman, the mother’s and the father’s primary right and duty “to directly educate, bring up, protect and provide comprehensive spiritual, moral and psychologicalsupport to their children... the indissolubility of marriage” – even as Malta gives up on the latter.

So; why did this summit receive so little attention? Simple. There was no Vatican summit. The declaration was drawn up at a Moscow summit. So there was no call for a media assault against the Catholic Church.

And thereby hangs a tale

The Europe we joined is exhibiting an alarming tendency to self-destruct. There is a loss of identity as it denies its roots and an imminent civilisational crisis.

Europe is failing to see the signs of the times – signs the Church is often and patronisingly asked to discern. Following seamlessly from the Moscow summit’s concern, there is abundant evidence that a fatal rate of depopulation is taking place, the promise of a demographic disaster of biblical proportions.

In his introduction to Christopher Dawson’s Understanding Europe, first published in 1952 and reprinted recently as the prophetic work of this eminent historian is becoming increasingly recognised, George Weigel offers this chilling observation.

“By the middle of the 21st century, some demographers estimate, 60 per cent of the Italian people will have no experience of a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin; Germany will lose the equivalent of the entire population of the former East Germany; Spain’s population will decline by almost a quarter. Europe is depopulating itself in numbers not seen since the Black Death of the 14th century.”

For bad measure, Weigel adds: “When an entire continent, healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before, fails to create the human future in the most elemental sense – by creating the next generation – something very serious is afoot... that “something” is a crisis of civilisational morale.”

Not for the first time, God is not mocked; in fact He is, much of the time, but it is the mockers who,in His good time, receive their comeuppance.

As the post-Christian world – so the secular and humanist atheist enemies of Christianity like to describe the era we live in – staggers in rudderless fashion to the radiant future that is not there, we, who know other civilisations have come and gone, may understandably feel perturbed. We should not be disheartened.

The Church has been seen off by its enemies before; or so they thought and hoped.

But as we glance back down the avenues of history, we notice that it is her enemies who are no more – while she wandered on, wounded as her Founder was; in Chesterton’s priceless words, “reeling but erect”.

For this miraculous survival – no human institution could have survived the experiences of the Church; none has – I will, one day soon, call forth the non-Catholic historian Thomas Babington Macaulay as her witness.