On August 5, 1914, the Governor of Malta, Sir Leslie Rundle, made the following statement: “We hereby announce the outbreak of hostilities in humble trust in the guidance and protection of Divine Providence.”

At about the same time, a circular was read out in Malta’s churches, in which the bishops assured their congregations: “We believe it with deep faith that there is a God who holds the hearts of kings and all in His hands.”

During the four years that followed these pious pronouncements, there wasn’t much evidence of Divine Providence or of “a God who holds the hearts of kings and all in His hands”.

Those terrible years, in fact, were to go down in history as yet unsurpassed for the carnage and destruction that was inflicted on Europe.

If the former Pope Benedict had witnessed the horrors of World War I, he would have asked himself the same question he asked at Auschwitz – “the question that made millions lose their faith after the Holocaust... Where was God?”