The world is heading into a storm, like the ship carrying St Paul to Rome, shipwrecked on our shores two millennia ago. The feature in The Sunday of Malta last week about the captain of that vessel acting to avoid the worst, was fascinating. It reminded me of an article by a late Franciscan theological scholar from Burmarrad, Fr Joseph, tracing how the Apostle Paul gently took up the leading role. Equally amazing is the recent discovery of the ship’s four-ton anchor off Qawra.

This is what Malta can help do in the heart of the perfect storm building up around us: to warn, to encourage, to inspire and to act. We can find the way to lead man in preoccupying matters like Brexit, ‘Trumpanantics’, monetarism, cultural wars, migration, jihad terrorism, world development, and nuclear dangers in the following simple but profound advice: “Hold together, work for progress, love God in all things”.

This was the message that the good Pope St John XXIII beamed by radio directly to the enormous crowd gathered together on the Granaries to remember the 19th centenary commemoration of the shipwreck in 1960.

It is really all about justice, peace and grace in the Holy Spirit, as it was in the blessing and breaking of bread when Paul calmed the 275 people aboard with the revelation that none would perish, but that they had to “come to an island”.

It is really in this same blessing and sharing that Malta can today best offer Europe, and the indeed the world, to find the way to the global civilisation of love. Faith in Christ with Paul militates in personal love to improve culture today, even in matters of money and sexuality.

Paul evidently shared in the life of the Trinity through Christ: today it is in a deepening of the theology of the Trinity from our personal interactivity, including digitisation, that faithful experimentation in our heart through the dialogue of civilisations will help man everywhere, not just the post-Christians in Europe and America, to find better answers to current human matters such as divorce and all attendant issues.

From our experiences of dialogue we can help mankind discover the true nature of the family, an aptitude to include everyone in economic and social progress, peace and prosperity around the shores of the Mediterranean, and most assuredly not excluding guaranteeing the achievement of the UN goal of ending world hunger by 2030.