The Times of Malta carried an article titled ‘The miraculous Redeemer’ (March 24), which included promises of “indulgences” and the description of a “pilgrimage” in Senglea with “a small piece of Jesus’s cross”.

I’d like to see this “miraculous” statue and the “true” piece ofthe cross taken in a pilgrimageto Mater Dei Hospital to healthe sick children there and then have this newspaper report back to us on how many childrenwere healed.

The statue of the Redeemer in Senglea is a graphic example of the aesthetic horrors of Maltese devotional ‘art’.

Like much else in Christianity, the doctrine of the ‘Redeemer’ is a myth, as Albert Schweitzer explains: “The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah... and died to give his work its final consecration never had any existence. This image has not been destroyed from without; it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another.”

In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas writes that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the supernatural phenomena recounted in the Bible could no longer command unquestioning belief.

“Raisings from the dead, miraculous healings and exorcisms, a divine-human saviour, a virgin birth, manna from heaven, wine from water, water from rocks, partings of seas - all appeared increasingly improbable to the modern mind, bearing as they did too many similarities to other mythical or legendary concoctions of the archaic imagination.”

Before publishing the article, this newspaper should have heeded the words of Nietzsche: “They would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their Redeemer: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!”