“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education and politics... it will lose its identity and its greatness, not immediately, but before this century is over.”
Gonzi’s government has achieved a great deal more than most others and this was not by chance
The Chief Rabbi in Britain, Lord Sacks, was reported to have said at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome by The Catholic Herald.
He was at one with Pope Benedict, who was saying this on every occasion he could, well before he was elected to the papacy seven, eight years ago.
As Cardinal Ratzinger he lamented the fact that Europe’s demented refusal to invest in its own future, demographically, was contributing further to the loss of its soul.
He and the Chief Rabbi are as one when they point at a consumerism Lord Sacks says is “sapping our strength” so that “the consumer society turns out to be a highly efficient system for the creation and distribution of unhappiness”.
In short, what goes round, comes round and in Europe it seems to be coming round with uncomfortable speed; not least because “the still, small voice of God” on which “the most profound truth of the Judeo-Christian ethics” depends was being stifled by an aggressive secularism.
Lord Sacks also referred to Pope Benedict’s imaginative phrase – “a creative minority”, meaning that what Christianity may lose in quantity was not the problem so much as its quality; a reserve, a “salt of the earth” that must be retained that must not lose its flavour for if it does, “wherein shall be salted”?
Christianity was just such a creative minority in ancient Rome, is one in China today, was one in Africa and South America.
The Chief Rabbi suggested in his speech that “Jews and Catholics should seek to be creative minorities together. A duet is more powerful than a solo. We should use this moment of recession to restore to their rightful place in society the things that have value but not a price: marriage, the family, home, dedicated time between parents and childen... and a willingness to share some of God’s blessings with those who have less.”
Can an increasingly God-deaf, blind-to-God, God-denying Europe that has lost its way so, be persuaded by its failures that its survival as a civilisation depends on turning back to God?
Malta floreat
What a miserable fellow is The Telegraph’s Ambrose Pritchard-Evans. The man has been digging the euro’s grave and that of the EU for as long as I can remember; yet the euro refuses to enter its AP-E appointed coffin and the EU a moribund position.
He is not alone in his quasi-manic contempt for a currency in its 11th year when he thinks it should have died at birth; yet it is with the economic space that hosts the euro that Britain trades most. Its collapse would bode ill for an economy that has troubles enough of its own.
David Cameron is well aware of this; and even if he must have relished his handbag swinging moment when he pronounced his nyet at the last crisis meeting in Brussels, he is well aware that Britian’s bread is buttered by a euro-bound group the economic health of which it is in the UK’s interest to nurse.
For British eurosceptics to pour scorn on the very idea of a European idea is to lose contact with a reality that may be under internal assault, but which it is in the Union’s interest to promote.
Pritchard-Evans also gave figures that should impress those of us who remain unimpressed by the government’s performance during the three-year-old crisis through which it has steered this country.
Such as: 45 per cent youth unemployement in Greece, 49 per cent ditto in Spain; across to the other side of the world, a public debt in Japan of 237 per cent of GDP and a $15 trillion debt in the US – and here, Melita floreat.
It sounds triumphalistic but it is not meant to; rather, it is an ungrudging acknowledgment of a remarkable fact, which some find it grudgingly difficult to concede, that Gonzi’s government has achieved a great deal more than most others and this was not by chance, but by deliberate and sensible choices. Compared with this, much else is relatively unimportant, be it party funding, be it splitting up the ministry that is Dr Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici’s portfolio.
As 2012 unrolls, problems that affect Malta’s way forward are bound to roll out. It is these that must be faced, visitations that threaten employment and the industrial, financial services and tourism sectors, factors that could jeopardise projects ranging from the creation of environmentally enhancing public spaces (fountains in every village square!) to the restoration of our magnificent fortifications, the imaginative re-casting of what was called Freedom Square – and work to provide our daily bread.
New Hampshire here they come!
So Mitt Romney made Iowa by eight votes, Rick Santorum won silver, Michele Bachmann bowed out – and Newt Gingrich, who was on the receiving end of a $10 million advertisement onslaught – money talks all right – came fourth; but then so did Bill Clinton in 1992 and John McCain in 2008. Be that as it may, the dust had scarcely settled in Iowa before Mr Romney was in New Hampshire, quipping: “Do we think we can get more than an eight-vote margine here?”
We ain’t seen nothing yet; the point about the Republican contest is that the candidates for the nomination are many and it may take time, well beyond New Hampshire, before one is chosen. Not least because voters take their choices seriously in the US and influential journalists will fight for their choice to the metaphorical death.
One such is the hard-hitting Ann Coulter who is touting for Mitt Romney: “So the fact that the Iowa caucuses avoided giving the gold to Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul or some other sure-to-lose candidate shows that Republicans are dead serious about beating Obama this fall... in Iowa, the only Republican with a chance of doing that won.”
What has been remarkable so far – and remarked upon – is the way candidates polled high one week, slipped down the next, or vice-versa. The Iowa outcome notwthstanding, this fluidity is not helping to bring the eventual winner of these primaries into focus. Santorum, to take an example, was nowhere to be seen 10 days ago; last Wednesday he came back strong. Ron Paul was nearly flavour of the month a few days ago, last Wednesday he turned in a poor performance.
Frank Luntz, described as a “famed Republican strategist”, thinks the campaign will get nastier and meaner, that it will be April before things really shape out, before tradiional GOP voters get what they are looking for: “First, someone who can defeat President Obama. Second, someone who says what they (sic) mean, means what they say (sic), looks you straight in the eye and is clear about it.”
Almost wistfully he calls for a third characteristic the winning candidate needs to display: “... someone who offers a sense of confidence in the future, almost a Reaganesque approach that tomorrow is gonna be better than today.”
In short, the field has yet to throw up the man.
Talking tourism
The financial crisis that brought some countries to their knees and below them and that which raged like a desert storm across the North African littoral nothwithstanding, 1.4 million guests of Malta and Gozo spent a sliver less than €1.25 billion on our islands during the dicey months of 2011. More than half a million peripatetics chose to visit us more lesisurely by sea and left more than €33 million.
This sector has come a long way since the days when the Hotel Phoenicia was the flagship of the tourist sector and notmany other boats around, when the product then was comparative darkness to today’s light, when a few thousands came and gawked.
Today we are talking about 11-12 million bed-nights. But then, of course, we had another type of tourist and he was in uniform, his main interest beer and skittles or something.
Today we are talking in the context of a national airline currently going through some agony its workforce unduly obese and the airline in the red as a result.
Here, too, the nettle has been grasped; tomorrow, a financially under-productive enterprise will settle down to a brighter future for itself, for the tourism sector and for the transportation of merchandise.
Today we are talking five-year plans, the one covering 2007-2011 was nothing less than a miracle of achievement by the ministry (take a bow, Mario), the Malta Transport Authority, our airline and low-cost carriers (how Alfred Sant sneered at the idea of the latter), the hoteliers who invested in their product, restaurant owners, including those who have created the pavement coffee society (but not all these, where manners are sometimes in short supply and service a tad untidy), by a Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association that sometimes lacks the good grace to acknowledge just how well the sector is doing, overall, thanks to Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and... some pretty tireless work in the shape of squares and pjazzas and gardens that flourish inland and on the sea-shore where once a sort of chaos.
Over-arching the infrastructure, there are our museums, our music and dance culture, our dramas, our religious festivities, everythingthat makes us Maltese; our sea and sky, too.