Roamer’s column

At the Granaries, on Tuesday, Lawrence Gonzi will be delivering the celebratory anniversary Independence speech. He can safely tell his supporters that under his calm leadership – too calm for some – his government has continued to perform well under stressful circumstances.

The accusation that Gaddafi financed the Nationalist Party’s pro-EU membership campaign waits to be substantiated

These threaten to become more stressful yet; except the clouds lifted last Friday when the EU big-boys and women indicated they would give all that it takes.

Mistakes there have been, and errors that should never have been committed could, with more thought, have been avoided. But there have been major break­throughs, too, and this where it matters most: in the infrastructure and superstructure of the Maltese economy.

He will point out to the US, the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy Greece, Cyprus, compared with whom our pain has so far been more endurable. And he will express the hope that leering storms of Learite proportions will blow themselves out before they reach our shores.

That may be a pious hope; so, being a realist, he will insist that to piety must be added the skill and energy of a people with far more skills than ever before in its history. As to energy of the physical and mental kind, he will warn against its dissipation by opponents.

Where his government has gone wrong Gonzi should not feel afraid to admit this. Governments go wrong because it is they who govern, who take decisions that affect the electorate.

He should acknowledge this without flagellating himself unduly. It is important that he does what he does best: engaging his audience and pointing it in the direction he has in mind – Vision 2015. This is reachable because the platform for its achievement is being assiduously built.

The most important principle of war is the maintenance of the aim. Discarding it, unless it was ludicrous to start with, leads to confusion and defeat. Contin­gencies may arise that may require adjustments, but these must never jeopardise the aim.

Gonzi knows full well the nature of the objective he has set his government – optimum employ­ment, therefore job creation, therefore investment; and running through all these a sense of justice for the vulnerable.

These, he will tell the crowd next Thursday, are not just empty words. They are his government’s raison d’etre, the focus of its energy. Judge it on these, and yes; he will do more to minimise his own and other irritating minis­terial shortcomings.

And now for my next trip

Thrice did he ask Pope John Paul II to set him free from the burdens of office to retire to his homeland and continue with his writings; thrice was he refused.

Did John Paul uncannily recognise in Cardinal Josef Ratzinger his successor? Possibly. Nearly six-and-a-half years ago Ratzinger found himself looking down on a vast crowd in St Peter’s Square and telling it that “a humble labourer in the Lord’s vineyard” had been chosen to take on his greatest burden yet.

The world, less the comical New Atheists of this world, has since noticed and acknowledged that this gentle, steel-spined priest has surprised a media that wrote him off as an interim measure until the world recovered from the stunning papacy of his predecessor.

Instead they discovered a man steeped in the history of the Church, in the writings of the early Fathers and Augustine, with a formidable intellect judged to be among the finest in the world; above all, a Christ-centred man willing Europe to recognise that Godlessness leads to self-destruction at both the individual and national level.

Last June, Pope Benedict XVI told hundreds of Croatia’s elite, “If, in keeping with the prevailing modern idea, conscience is reduced to the subjective field to which religion and morality have been banished, then the crisis of the West has no remedy and Europe is destined to collapse in on itself.

“If, on the other hand, conscience is rediscovered as the place in which to listen to truth and good, the place of respon­sibility before God and before fellow human beings – in other words, the bulwark against all forms of tyranny – then there is hope for the future.”

There are signs that the world is starting to listen, that the “tyranny of relativism”, for example, is being acknowledged even by relativists – of late by British Prime Minister David Cameron in the wake of the UK riots. There is also a growing awareness, despite manic efforts to hound the Church out of the public square, that faith and reason are not antithetical.

Next Friday, Pope Bendict flies to Germany for his third visit to that country and five years after he delivered his Regensburg lecture, now being described as a pivotal event in his papacy.

At the time it was not so seen by the odd sociologist and philo­sopher in Malta – and elsewhere – whose sense of PC got the better of their judgement.

An example from elsewhere was provided by Samuel Gregg, a director of research at the Acton Institute and a collector of MAs and doctorates in political and moral philosophy; he gave an example of what he called “most Western intellectuals” sheer ineptness when writing about religion.

Nor was this ineptness limited to the lay brigade. “One well-known American Jesuit, for instance, opined that Regensburg illustrated how Benedict hadn’t yet tran­sitioned from being a theolgian to pope – as if popes should only deliver the banal type of polls-tested addresses we expect from most politicians.”

Pope Bendict’s visit is being described as an ecumenical one in the context of a Joint Declaration on the Reformation being prepared by the Church and the World Lutheran Federation. Chancellor Angela Merkel thinks the visit will encourage “conver­gence and solidarity between Christians and present-day society”.

Between 1994 and the year 2000, the journalist and author Peter Seewald held long conversations (candid interviews) with Cardinal Ratzinger over a period. These translated into Salt of the Earth and God and the World; both became best-sellers and turned Seewald a Catholic. At some stage the interviewer asked the Pope how many ways there were to God. “As many as there are people”, came the answer.

More recently Seewald pub­lished his Benedict XVI – An Intimate Portrait, where I learned that three days before the con­clave, the Suddeutsche Zeitung ran a headline ‘Pope Ratzinger would be a shock’.

Prophetically, one hopes, an article in Spiegel online com­mented: ‘The Holy Spirit has actually scored a powerful point here by recruiting the Pope from among exactly those people who need him most: the Germans.’

The writer went on to remark that television commentators in Germany would like to have the Church ‘as trivial as the corner supermarket... as trivial as they are themselves’ and concluded: ‘We Germans may hope that this Pope will represent the same kind of encouragement for us, as Karol Wojtyla has been for the Poles’.

One must hope that this will indeed be the case, even as the struggle for this amazing old man (eat your heart out, Kung) remains an uphill one.

Now for Sant’s most recent boo-boo

Curses. No sooner do I have a good word to say for Alfred Sant than he goes and spoils it all by writing something stupid like, “...it appears that Libyan funds were invested in the mammoth campaign for Malta to join the European Union... that high-powered factions in the Libyan hierarchy during the Gaddafi era contributed financially to the Nationalist Party’s pro-EU membership campaign”.

Why wait 15 lonely winters, people asked, to come up with what would have been nothing less than an explosive story – if remotely true? Here was a coup, he would have thought; whence comes such another? He has been challenged to substantiate his claim; I doubt he will.

This was another contribution in the war of words between the governing party and the opposition over who most brown-nosed Gaddafi and his regime betweem 1971 and 2009.

There are those who maintain that the whole thing is a childish encounter. I disagree. The difference is one of historic importance if we believe that history is memory.

The Mintoff crowd did not merely fawn on Gaddafi; it wooed him as it it wooed charming regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Romania et al of the same hue.

This was all part of a pattern that developed into a foreign policy courting communist countries and blackmailing democratic ones.

The harm this did to Malta is now well documented; it was only after strenuous efforts by a post-1987 government to bring Malta in from the cold that we regained our name as a country operating under the banner of Western European democratic ideals.

The architecture of that foreign policy was shaped by a govern­ment whose indefatigable foreign minister, Ċensu Tabone at that time, had to persuade the West that we had regained our European credentials.

But back to Sant: that money was passed on to Mintoff’s party is no longer in doubt – his leader, Joseph Muscat, only managed to say that none had come his party’s way since he took over. The Socialist party and the government relished this relationship, nay, wallowed in it throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan warned that granting access to the Libyan military would be regarded as an unfriendly move. Mintoff’s foreign minister at the time, Alex Sceberras Trigona, is now Mus­cat’s man in the international relationships department.

On the other hand, the accusation that Gaddafi financed the Nationalist Party’s pro-EU membership campaign waits to be substantiated. What’s that about hell freezing over?