THE SEA, THAT GIVES LIFE

This is such a Catholic country that the famous convoy that gave us a lifeline just when the country was at the end of its tether was immediately dubbed the "Santa Marija Convoy".

Virtually everything that is done here seems to be done in the name of some saint or other, or someone even more senior in the religious hierarchy, and the social fabric is held together by constant references to religious icons and symbols. Even that which is negative finds echoes in religion, with every possible combination of blasphemous characterisation used to emphasise a point being made.

We rend the sky with blasts in honour of some saint or other, we mess the streets up with the flotsam and jetsam of quasi-idolatrous celebration and we go about our daily business secure in the knowledge that God is in His Heaven and everything is peachy.

I suppose we should be thankful that our religious types don't go to the lengths that others do, such as flying above the country blowing their Horns to ward off swine flu, but we still have our own levels of "we've the best religion there is, so there".

To be fair, it's not a bad religion, really, there could be a worse set of maxims to live by than "do unto others" and "love thine enemy".

That's until someone sticks his or her oar in and disturbs our smug complacency, challenging our secure and serene existences with reminders that there's a bigger world out there. Then out of the window go all these cosy notions of love for our fellow man.

I'm not talking about the tremors that go through society when the received wisdom shows its cracks. The idea that Malta is special and that divorce has absolutely no place in the regulation of the civil contract of marriage is one that many people seem to accept is a valid one. Clerical gentlemen, who must know better (really, they must) stand up at their altars and continue to propagate the myth that in Malta Cattolicissima, marriage is for ever, and ever, and ever.

What the pseudo-deluded don't admit, of course, is that for most of us, if needs must, a solution is found and we make accommodations. I haven't had to, though all I can say is "yet" (and I hope I don't have to, in case ‘er is reading this!) but many have and they're not any the less for it.

But that's not what I'm referring to when I describe our Christianity going out of the window as soon as it's challenged.

No, all you need to do is take a look at the comments below the story last Wednesday about the airlift of the new born and its immigrant mother to Malta - and then tell me whether this country really deserves to be called Christian.

Or even human.

I know it's all the usual suspects, with their revolting sanctimony and "send them back" theories, and I know (hope?) that most of us would not subscribe to the inhumanity of the theories these thinly-disguised racists espouse, but even a few such specimens are enough to make me ashamed and there are more than a few.

I have no doubt, and the comments that will spawn below will prove it, that I will be called all manner of names because of this.

I also have no doubt that many of these crypto-fascists will wrap themselves in the flag and claim that all they want is for the law to be obeyed.

Most of them couldn't spell the words humane justice if they were asked to, and an equal number probably don't care that they haven't the most basic of basic grasps of what it means to be so desperate to try to get a better life (yes, and if that means they're economic migrants, so what?) that someone will take risks the smug and the comfortable can't even begin to contemplate.

I'm not pointing fingers: they'll identify themselves by their own words, as they have already, so many times.