Roamer’s column

After 13 years as the general secretary of the General Workers’ Union, one trade you could safely say Tony Zarb is deficient in is the craft of cracking a joke. Somebody must have pointed this out and advised him to hang loose, Tony, try the odd funny every now and again. Lighten up the terrible times in which we breathe and live. And sure enough he had a stab.

One needs to be coached on how to tell the truth by Peppi Azzopardi? Or by anyone else, for that matter?

He addressed an audience and fired off this side-splitting joke. Nationalist governments have always been hostile to the GWU. Difficult to say that he had his earnest listeners rolling down the aisle, but in the real world he brought grins to thousands of faces belonging to people who remember well which the hostile party was in the union-Nationalist government confrontation months before, and on the run-up to, the 1971 election; and thereafter.

They remember well how the union reacted to the very thought of introducing flexibility in the workforce. They remember, too, how Dom Mintoff was returned to power that June in 1971 and how the strikes the union was organising were called off that very day – and Mintoff proceeded to work on a more flexible workforce anyway. That ended with insults he hurled at dockyard workers on Gavino Gulia Square. The union had done its job; now he was doing his. Did the union call a strike?

The sad part of the joke was that Mintoff hauled a couple of union representatives to sit at Cabinet meetings, where they lived under the delusional impression they were going to have a say in government. On the ground, so to speak, the union became Mintoff’s lap-dog, bound formally, statutorily, to the government in good, old Ruski style. And the Treasury became saviour, some prefer to say hostage, to an over-manned, under-productive dockyard made more bankrupt by the creation of something called the Red China Dock. But there were no strikes. The union was in government – how could there be?

The writing which was on the wall in the 1960s was now bolder still. This in-the-red non-enterprise needed not so much the annual bail-out provided by successive governments as a programme of re-structuring in terms of man-power and work practices.

It was left to the Nationalist government led by Eddie Fenech Adami in 1987 to bring this about and it did so with what anybody who lived those days will tell you, an extraordinary calm, one step after another. Some critics said each step was too slow – they were not taking the decisions, nor did they hold any responsibility for them. It worked; even the 1996 Labour Party government admitted that the country could no longer be held hostage. None of this was an act of hostility; it was the realisation of a reality.

And Fenech Adami’s slow, deliberate and firm policy to downsize the oversized behemoth was an act of courage in favour of the national interest, which was worst served when scores and scores of millions of euros, needed urgently in other areas of the economy, were thrown into a bottomless pit.

Perhaps the general secretary was not being all that funny, after all.

Of rehearsals...

Anybody who can recall that moment prior to casting his vote in the 2008 election will never forget the incident that, arguably, lost Dr Sant the election: his refusal to have Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando among the panel of journalists at a televised press conference.

Nobody can forget the sight of an almost tearful Pullicino Orlando asking Sant why he would not face him; nor Sant’s blundering insistence that he would not submit himself to any questions by the Nationalist MP.

It has now emerged that before he was ready to appear on said programme, Pullicino Orlando took lessons from Peppi Azzopardi on how to conduct himself during his confrontation with Sant; or, as he testified last week in a libel suit filed by Malta’s representative to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana, against the managing editor of Malta Today, how the Xarabank presenter coached him – not in what to say, but, as reported, on “how to tell the truth”.

One needs to be coached on that by Azzopardi? Or by anyone else, for that matter?

...and education

Three-and-a-half thousand new students started their studies at the University a fortnight ago.

I stand to be corrected but this figure is more than four times the total number of students attending a university deprived of its autonomy during the Mintoff days; nor did they register under a Flintstone scheme that included bonus points for state school students and was weighted against entrants from private schools.

But if we go down that road it will be difficult to ever end this piece; and yet last Sunday the Leader of the Opposition had the nerve to tell an audience at Qawra that his party needed no lesson from anyone on how to conduct any education programme it had in mind.

If Muscat can say that with hand on heart, he has either learned from the gross errors of his predecessor up to 1985, or he is in a serious state of serious denial.

One thing is certain. No Labour government has the slightest chance of returning to the bad, old days when godfathers were the order of the day. Today’s students, living in an atmosphere of freedom denied to their counterparts of the 1970s, will see to that.

Back to the Catechism

But first, a reference to a talk that is being given by David Quinn, on Friday at 6.30 pm at the Hotel Phoenicia on the theme ‘Divorce Legislation: The Aftermath’. It seems to be just in time because there appears to a mistaken understanding that the divorce issue is no longer relevant to these islands. Parliament has spoken.

The fact is that in its deepest sense the issue has only just begun. Divorce legislation has set up a pastoral challenge that demands a pastoral and catechetical reaction.

To go on as if nothing had happened, nothing changed, would be a dereliction of pastoral care. Any reaction, however, has to be based not on polemic but on a well thought out, properly formulated understanding of the problem as it now is and its effect on legislative initiatives on, say, cohabitation, which is being brought to the fore.

The worst possible thing our bishops could do is to step back from the fray presented by a state dictating forms of union that undermine marriage still further.

Their task is to launch a missionary, visionary effort in much the same manner as the bishops of England and Wales have done a year after the hugely successful visit to the UK of Pope Benedict.

They unveiled a five-year plan. At its heart is the proclamation of “the universal call to holiness in Christ”, and placing mission, teaching and witness as their chosen priorities.

The Church in Malta should do no less; time and time again the history of the universal church has shown that it is strongest when it is at its weakest.

The leaders of the Church in Malta would do well to recognise this, to ignore the visceral hatred in which it is held by a vociferous few, to fortify those within, to win back those within who act and speak as if they were a voice without, to harness its spiritual, intellectual and pastoral resources and place these at the service of its faithful and of those who no longer regard themselves as such.

They must find the courage and the dynamism “to proclaim the universal call to holiness in Christ by promoting a culture of vocations within the corporate identity of the Catholic Church, marked by a confident faith”.

This will need far more than good intentions; like hard work. Before all else it will require the catechetical re-education of the entire clergy, first; and only after this, the laity. The laity cannot be catechised by a clergy weak in catechesis.

Our bishops know more than anyone the shortcomings of its clergy, be it the delivery and substance of a homily, be it an outdated method of apologetics, be it an inability to rouse parishioners from their stupor – not by happy-clappy stuff but by a genuine spirit of evangelisation.

Perhaps they could consider and then pinch an idea from the business word and organise ‘refresher courses’ for all priests, religious and lay activists.

I submit that at each and every refresher course, priests are encouraged to preach the Real Presence in the tabernacle and due reverence to it – nothing is more insolent to Christ, I imagine, than the shameless entry into a church as if into a club, not a nod in the direction of the Eucharist never mind a genuflection.

This is in part due to the meaningless queue-up for Communion which resembles more a queue to a cash counter than the approach to the reception of the Eucharist; and in greater part to lacunae in religious teaching. Henry VIII may have stripped the altars, did; did we have to strip what remained – the altar rails? If we insist on getting this wrong, there is very little else we will get right.

And contrary to the hatred hurled at the Church, let it preach Christ and love and be ashamed, contrite but undeterred by the gross failings of any of its own – as Pope Benedict does every time he transforms a visit anywhere into a pastorale.

Let our bishops make their own Christ’s call to the disciples who were with Him on the night before He died, “Rise, then, let us be on our way!”