To start with, this article is not about the veracity of claims regarding the apparition of the Virgin Mary to Anġelik Caruana. I was and still am totally unconvinced regarding the truthfulness of such visions.
This article is about violence; mediatic violence by some of the country’s main media outlets. (Credit to the Times of Malta for not taking part in this assault and for the sobriety of its reporting.)
So a person claims to be receiving visions of the Virgin. The protagonist would have had his small coterie of followers and the whole thing would probably have died down after a year or two had not the media turned the spotlight upon him.
Nothing extraordinary up to this point. An exceptional claim is made and the media rightly reports it. Yet, sections of the media start turning this into an item that recurs repeatedly in news bulletins, reports and even talk shows, even if a little serious investigative journalism would have nipped the whole thing in the bud.
A whole array of professionals, prelates and ‘well-known personalities’ get dragged into an idiotic debate that splits those involved into faithful and sceptics.
Even after the findings concerning the nature of the tears and the blood are communicated, and even if the claims by the visionary become more outrageous and ridiculous as the years pass, important sections of the media – some of which have a huge influence over which issues locals discuss and do not discuss – keep running the Anġelik show.
The stage is set for a grand finale. The endgame occurs when the Curia apparently bursts the bubble. In contrast to those who soberly report this news item, some media outlets find gusto in (metaphorically) kicking the protagonist when he is down.
The lowest ebb was hit when a news feature on national TV featured neighbours of Mr Caruana being interviewed about their fellow villager’s integrity. (This is the same station whose newsroom did not consider newsworthy recent public initiatives that are critical of the government of the day in matters that pertain to poverty, senior citizens and foreign affairs, even though these involved a former Labour Prime Minister and would hence have been considered prime news anywhere else in the world.)
The public is divided in the jubilant about the news, the deluded, the few who still give credence to the supposed visionary and the indifferent.
Assuming Anġelik invented the whole thing and that innocent people were fooled by his antics, Caruana would not have been the only person to ever have misled others.
Stories like Anġelik’s (non-)encounter with the Virgin complement other tales about welfare-abusing unemployed, nail-obsessed single mothers and unrepentant prisoners
First of all there would have been other individuals, including professionals and clerics, who would have been involved in the set-up. Why were they not hounded by the same mediatic wolves? Why were their religious and professional credentials and integrity not questioned?
Moreover, a number of politicians, business people, academics and clerics would not (assuming the whole thing has been staged) stand much higher than Anġelik in the scale of integrity given their records, with some having had their misdeeds exposed even by the magistracy and/or by official investigations. These are obviously reported by mainstream media.
Yet, why are crooks belonging to these categories never hounded in the same manner as Caruana was? Why is it that no PBS journalist interviewed their neighbours in relation to their integrity?
I have a hunch in this regard. Not merely is Anġelik weaker than such people (and hence less likely to get one back if he bounces from the scandal, as is the case with people in these other categories) but, culturally, he does not belong to the middle or upper classes. Culturally and socially, he belongs to the working class or to the lumpen proletariat.
Now, as Meinrad Calleja rightly notes in a recent article (‘Faith, Hope and Charity’) which I had the honour of publishing, the middle class, real or apparent, needs another class that does not have its supposed virtues – a class which is perceived as clumsy, uncouth, generally dishonest, lazy, untalented and unintelligent – in order to assure itself that it is ‘relatively fortunate...that [theirs] is the best of all possible worlds’.
Stories like Anġelik’s (non-) encounter with the Virgin complement other tales about welfare-abusing unemployed, nail-obsessed single mothers and unrepentant prisoners. All serve this purpose splendidly.
By way of conclusion, what is perhaps most frustrating regarding the latter is the fact that many supposed left wingers, including many do-gooders and/or supposed radicals, fail to see such connections. (Clear proof of the dangers involved in not having sharp political acumen complementing a kind heart.)
While usually being (quite commendably) very sensitive about the ordeals undergone by prisoners, addicts and others who clearly do not fit comfortably in the saintly category, many such militants or social activists seemed untroubled by the excessive hounding of this individual coming from the lowest echelons of society and about how this hounding fits into the larger picture concerning hegemony.
Indeed, some, especially those belonging to some positivist-dogmatic cliques, were elated by what happened. No wonder that the poor will always be with us.