Photo: Curia Communications OfficeThe Maltese Church has recently been criticised for a lack of leadership, but it’s not clear to me (and perhaps to some others) what exactly its critics mean by “good leadership”. Do they mean the return of some form of fundamentalist ‘Inquisition’? I hope not.
One really needs to reflect soberly on the balance between the good and bad consequences of religious faiths of various persuasions throughout the world today and in the past.
The current Arab civil wars between Shia and Sunni Muslims are similar to the various European conflicts between Christians of Catholic and Protestant persuasion. Christians also demonised Jews for ‘killing Christ’. Although Jesus Christ was actually one of them and the Roman colony of Judea had every right to use Roman administrative power to eliminate what they saw as a serious threat to their Jerusalem Temple establishment, Christians instigated horrific crimes against Jews throughout Europe.
This demonisation of Jews must also be at least partly responsible for lingering deplorable anti-Semitism even in supposedly educated and cultured societies. If that wasn’t enough, the Roman Christian Church also launched an inquisitional witch-hunt which committed terrible crimes against humanity, burning alive hundreds of claimed heretics or non-believers in its version of religious faith.
Some of the Arabs have been at the avant-garde of urban civilisation, science and art in the distant past. The Muslim faith, however, appears to have largely fossilised the minds of many of them into a permanent medieval setting, combined with a jealous hatred of a far more technologically advanced West, which they view as God-less and led by the ‘satanical’ US.
Unfortunately, the ‘Arab Spring’ was a false alarm. Most Arabs don’t yet understand the essentials of liberal democracy, namely, freedom of speech, equality of women, religious freedom and the protection of minorities. Their dictators, like European ones, have used the ballot box for their own ends.
Against this backdrop, we now have Sandro Spiteri (Times of Malta, Talking Point, ‘The Muslims are coming’, August 22) describing how a young Maltese Catholic priest was apparently spouting out inflammatory divisive-sounding rhetoric from the pulpit. Much harm has been done in the world by the mind-poisoning lies of some politicians and those of some clerics of various religions. This is definitely not what the future of our society needs.