ENDING ERAS

Those who attend Mass at Marsalforn’s church were saddened to learn that Dun Marjanu has called it a day.

This hyper-active cleric, who has been ploughing this field, along with working full-time in the Gozo State School system, for nigh on thirty-two years, is retiring and we will be the poorer for it. He wasn’t an intellectual preacher – in fact, sometimes he verged on the fire and brimstone – but his heart was in precisely the right place and his message was one of reasonable hope and love at the bottom line, pitched to his extremely varied audience perfectly.

Readers who know I am generally pro the secular and opposed to the interference of religion in defining policy will wonder how come I know all this. Well, the thing is, I go to Mass most Sundays.

Out of habit? Superstition? Faith? Why?

To be honest, I wonder myself. I wonder most when I’m half-listening to some platitude-filled sermon, which ignores daily realities and just spouts the party-line.

At these inspiring junctures, I find myself telling myself that I go to Mass in spite of and certainly not because of the message that the Church Organised sees fit to push all the time.

I try to live my life according to my own moral code (sorry about the pompousness of that statement) where tolerance for the foibles of my fellow man (unless he’s a Lil’Elf or a hero thereof, for instance) allows me leeway to pick and choose which strictures the Church Organised seems to think are so vitally important to apply to myself. There are very few, frankly, and it’s going to stay that way.

Frankly, an organisation that has managed to live with itself and its flirting with fascism, big business and self-interested cover-ups of criminal activity by some of its ministers, to mention but a few of the less than inspiring landmarks of the Catholic Church’s history, can’t really expect blind loyalty from anyone with even a vestige of an independent mind. I generalise wildly, of course, and appreciate that many, many, many of the priests and nuns who work in the Church are exemplary, altruistic, human beings who demonstrate a love for the rest of us that borders on the heroic.

But, by and large, it’s in spite of the curia (using the word in its widest sense, not as a reference to the staffs of Archbishop Cremona or Bishop Grech) that I still take less than an hour out of Sunday evening and sit with my mind wandering, sometimes in what they would think is the right direction, most times not.

Many of you, for different reasons, will think I’m a bit of a hypocrite, then. To confirm that you have the right to think that, I promote the idea that there should be no discussion about divorce: it’s well past about time we could get one here. I think that the Church’s official line, or deafening silence, more precisely, about racism is as shameful as that of our political parties. I keep my hands firmly in my pocket when the annual collection of money for Church schools is taken up.

In my own defence, I’m only human and I can rationalise most things along with the best of them.

You will have noticed that I’ve ignored the Budget, due to be announced today. This is mainly because this event bores me to distraction.

There will be a press-conference by the Government, during which we will be told everything is going according to plan, and there will be a press-conference by the Opposition, Joe Muscat’s first one on the subject, during which we will, no doubt be regaled with the usual sound-bites. He’s not been all that much different from his predecessor except in style, so I’m pretty sure he’ll not change on this, either, and equally, therefore, I’m pretty sure that there’ll be little to inspire me to do anything but dump on him in due course.

There will also be the same gallery of usual suspects, headed by the union leaders and the captains of industry and commerce and their spokesmen, some chippier and more self-assured (code for being like Vince Farrugia of the GRTU) than others, all being more or less predictable.

This year’s Budget will be met with more than the usual howls of disapproval from the Government’s detractors, of which there are many, even more so now that the elections are over for another five years and the spectre of a Labour Government is that distance away. The international situation, which can’t really (even though, to listen to the Lil’Elves, you’d think it can be) be laid at the door of Gonzi and his Ministers, will combine with the fact that, as I’ve just mentioned, the elections are over, to produce a brief-case full of measures that Tonio Fenech would probably rather not be toting.

In any event, I’m ignoring the Budget, for reasons amongst which not least is the fact that I’ve long since come to the conclusion that budgeting, on whatever level, is pretty much an exercise in pious hope. The best-laid plans of us mice go aglay so often because of events so far out of our control that they could be happening on Mars that – especially since I’ve about as much a grasp of economics and high finance as I have of nuclear physics – commenting except on the political level would be darn silly.

Not that that ever stops me or anyone else, of course. But the Lil’Elves need their fun, so they can have some asking me darn fool questions about why I’m not commenting on the price of petrol as charged to us by Gonzi and Gatt. My last blog has some particularly moronic comments on these lines by someone who lives in the States and clearly thinks he’s the cat’s whiskers for so doing.