Archbishop Scicluna has stepped way over the line. His tweet some time ago about the ‘priapic’ Mrieħel towers was positively disgraceful. He has criticised our top industrialists who are investing so much in our economy and their future. He has threatened bloggers with fire and brimstone for simply exercising their freedom of speech. And now he has compared our Prime Minister to a pig!
The Church and its Archbishop should only talk about God; that’s their territory. The trouble is: God is everywhere, so the pesky Archbishop can really talk about anything he wants. This is highly inconvenient. After all, the law that government passed recently was meant to allow anyone to say whatever they want about the Church, not the other way round! Most irregular.
But in this day and age we cannot simply order the Archbishop to shut up, which in any case would be like trying to muzzle a starving pit-bull. So we need a cunning alternative plan.
Let’s muzzle God.
It would be the first of a simple two-step process. Government starts by defining clearly which parts of Malta and Maltese life God is allowed to inhabit. This would, of course, exclude areas and spheres of life that, in the national interest and for the common good, would be scheduled as Outside God Zones (OGZs). Then government would pass a law limiting the Archbishop’s pronouncements strictly to the non-OGZs.
In the spirit of good governance, government would not identify the OGZs itself. It would set up a new authority to do this and to monitor that God and his Archbishop do not encroach on OGZs. The God Monitoring Review and Restraining the Archbishop (or GoMoRRa) Authority would be completely independent. It would independently adjudicate which geographical areas and sectors of Maltese society should become OGZs, based on progressive, business-friendly, common-sense criteria prepared by objective and independent experts, in whom we trust.
The God Monitoring Review and Restraining the Archbishop (or GoMoRRa) Authority would be completely independent
And really, identifying these criteria should not be such a difficult task. After all, since they would be seeking the common good, what could be more common than a flourishing economy? With these criteria the GoMoRRa Authority would be able to outlaw the words ‘environment’ and ‘development’. They would be replaced by the much more progressive concept of ‘enviro-development’, which, of course, would automatically be designated as OGZ.
Nor would the Archbishop be allowed to discuss the morals of enviro-development and comment on corruption, nepotism and cronyism. In the national interest, all issues of morality not exclusively related to sex would be strictly OGZ.
Geographical OGZs would also be quite easy to identify. To give one example: God has long been expelled from Paceville, so designating it as an OGZ is a mere formality. A quick squiggle of the pen would include St George’s Bay to the left and Sliema to the right, and that’s one OGZ bundle tied up and ready for delivery.
In this era of the glorification of expert opinion, the Archbishop has no business talking about something for which he does not have a certificate of some sort. What does he know of buildings and beauty? Of the cacophony of our beehive lives and the symphony of land and sea? He should talk about things he is qualified in.
Archbishop Scicluna would henceforth concentrate on such weighty non-OGZ matters as how much Facebook time to allocate each nun; whether to make deleting one’s internet history a mortal sin; maintaining churches for the benefit of tourism; managing cultural activities such as Sunday Masses and the parish feasts; pushing for the next Maltese saint, preferably from the south; praying for peace on Earth, or as least between Paola’s band clubs.
However, I do foresee a slight problem. The devil, as it were, will not be in the legislation but in the monitoring. How can the GoMoRRa Authority be certain that God, who cannot be seen, and his Archbishop, who can hardly be seen, will obey its OGZ boundaries?
I tried this revolutionary idea on our 12-year-old youngest son. He gave me the kind of withering look he usually reserves for my stale jokes. “Well, it would be a bit like digging a hole in the wet sand and trying to stop sea-water seeping through the bottom, no? It just keeps coming.”
Kids. What do they know?