When the priests go barging in

The bad news is that the state of the priestly vocation in Malta is in a mess, at least according to a number of well-cultured citizens of the Republic. The worse news is that THEY have taken over broadcasting.

Prepare yourself to be shocked.

A certain reverend with the name of Joe Borg has been identified as the chief pornographer of the Island. He unwittingly revealed his evil perversion while trying to banalise a fantastic play on TV! What a cheek! L-anqas jaf jisthi! If he speaks porn in public, imagine what he does in private! Defrock the b****** now!

The clerical establishment and its faithful lap dogs always projected Rev Prof Peter Serracino Inglott as the wisest of them all. Now it has turned out that the intelligence of this professor is a myth. Prof Serracino Inglott had the cheek to write that Howard Benton’s play about St Paul had practically no value bar that of offending the Maltese. How shallow! You got it wrong professor. The play is, in fact, a strong and vigorous meditation on how we still need the Pauline Christian philosophy in an increasingly secular world. Anyone with a milligram of intelligence and a few catechism classes could have seen the great catechetical and evangelising value of this play.

These shocking revelations about these two so-called priests were made by Chris Gatt the General Manager of St James Cavalier. Mr Gatt said more. Borg and Serracino Inglott are muggers. Pictures of them lurking in dark corners hitting old women and cultural general managers on their heads and in other places as well immediately come to mind. Awful! Disgusting!

If you are shocked prepare yourself for the worst one of the lot.

Reverend Prof Emanuel Agius who hails from Qrendi has just carried out a coup d’etat, or so it would seem to anyone reading Kennth Zammit Tabona in The Times of March 10. This youngish rouge from Qrendi (the professor and not KZT, the whistle blower), it would seem, stormed Parliament armed with the little grey matter that he garnered from the half dozen or so Universities where he studied. He ordered the honourable members to stop dragging their feet about assisted reproduction. They should not waste time in study or reflection. All they had to do was to go to the Curia and receive from the ecclesiastical warlords the draft of the necessary legislation. Aguis banged his hand on the Parliamentary table exclaiming: Ma qui commanda l’vescovo. Following this shrill crescendo, it seems, he dutifully gave a two-fingered salute to the statue of democracy, which graces Parliament. Few people know that the intolerant bigot from Qrendi has already commissioned an ecclesiastical tailor to fashion a female religious habit for the scantily clad statue.

This is a victory for decency.

Don’t take any of this too lightly. Agius is a member of the prestigious bio-ethics consultative committee of the European Union. Will Brussels be the victim of his next coup? KZT please alert the European Commission.

I differ, and aggressively so, from one point mentioned in the erudite musings of Mr Kenneth Zammit Tabona. He opines that “it seems as if Malta is being run by a bunch of Catholics Brahmins.” Brahmins my foot! Such rogues as Agius and the Curia cronies should only be compared to the Taliban – though the latter are far less intolerant than the former.

It’s good that these scoundrels have now been outed and ousted. Borg will be sent on perpetual retreat to a desert monastery where he will be able to see nothing but holy pictures, Serracino Inglott will be sent to a skola tan-nuna run by Chris Grech and Agius will be frozen in the midst of one hundred thousand frozen embryos.

The bad news is that this is not just a question of three upstart priests. There is an epidemic of arrogant priests as very ably documented in Prof Mark-Anthony Falzon’s expose in The Sunday Times. The heading of the piece encapsulates their arrogance: Let me through, I am a priest. They pretend li jibilghu id-dinja although they have so far only succeeded in jibilghu Maltese TV. The clerical invasion of TV space was bared for all to see in the terrific broadside that Dr Raphael Vella published one week before. It seems that the root of all evil lies in the perverse compulsion of Maltese TV presenters to invite priests to offer us moral advice on virtually every topic under the sun and the moon as well.

Let all the Peppone’s of this Island rally together to finally banish these frocked, cocksure, sanctimonious moralisers. The Peppone’s have nothing to loose but their chains.

(Now off to Mater Dei to distance my tongue from my cheek. A little humour does not harm anyone. Or will the above quoted brigade opt to censor me finding the Mickey a dash too offensive?)

It’s the context stupid

The above caricatures in part some of what these gentlemen wrote, but the piece is close enough for the readers to get the drift of the various arguments presented. One particular argument deserves an answer couched in tones that are more serious. I refer to the number of accusations levelled against thanks to my quoting form Stitching during my participation in Xarabank.

One of the ploys being used by the producers of the play to give a completely false description of its contents. They started by saying that the play was banned because it discusses abortion. When this bubble was burst, they claimed that it was just about the breakdown of a relationship, giving the impression that all those who had read the script had failed to understand it.

When on Xarabank I brought out, in no uncertain terms, the true nature of the play, they made a false appeal to context. In so doing, they hoped to mitigate the cruelty and perversity which saturate the play from beginning to end. While claiming that they have no intention of changing a single comma of the text, they are now using interpretation as an excuse, to make people believe that there is nothing obscene or offensive about it.

The producers have tried to depict the members of the Classification Board as a bunch of incompetent readers who can’t understand the sublime message the play is trying to convey. They have attempted to dilute its contents by giving an erroneous picture of what it says.

Rather than trying to do this, they should have had the courage or their convictions to admit that the play is highly offensive and yet claim the right to stage it regardless. People who have not read the play might be fooled into believing that there is nothing gruesome or morbid about it. But, as one critic has put it, “If it’s a cleverly told story about everyday life, why go the extra mile to make it revolting?”

The play has been described as “sick” even by those who argued against its banning. Its local apologists, on the contrary, have wanted the general public to believe that it is merely a love story gone wrong.

A simple rule governing interpretation states that first you have to see what the words mean, rather than saying what you would like them to mean. Xarabank viewers could sample the artistic delicacies the play has to offer. They could also witness the producers’ desperate antics to cast a cloak of respectability over the corpse that emerged. In spite of their gallant efforts, one particular guest, a young lawyer, could not bring herself to read a particularly gruesome passage from the text, and the presenter had to do it himself.

In their vain attempt to justify their choice and heap abuse on the Classification Board, the producers had the temerity to draw parallels between Stitching and such masterpieces as Euripides’ Medea and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. One would expect people with their theatre credentials to know better.