The European Court of Human Rights' ruling banning Crucifixes in Italian schools has left many Maltese people humming a funeral dirge and beating their plowshares into swords. The coherent and the even-keeled may have lacked the conviction to speak out, but the shining crusaders of all things Catholic are full of passionate intensity, and have not spared us their reactionism. They've called the ruling "an infringement of human rights and freedoms" and "an encroachment on Catholic sensibilities" and have pointed out that the Catholic religion is inextricably entwined around our Constitution [like a boa constrictor, perhaps?]
Their argument is sound, nothing but sound. If the crucifix has lost all real and temporal meaning, what is it worth to them if that symbol is retired from public? Isn't it peculiar that the places which prominently display Crucifixes are the same places where the teachings of the sage of Bethlehem are most completely ignored and disobeyed? "Judge not lest ye be judged?" Tell that to the magistrate sentencing a drug user to months or years in jail. "Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven?" Try pointing that out to the educator taking out her frustrations on a classroom of children or tormenting them with failure in examinations. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?" Have a go at getting any bank chairman admit that for himself.
Do people need little statuettes and figurines in every public place and on every street corner to remind them of their faith? They are like insects groping through the darkness by the feeble luminescence of their antennae, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious character; and with such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigours of the law and all the penalties of social ostracism on those who pay their assumptions the extravagant compliment of criticising them.
Very well, I have criticised them, and I hope that in time this European Court ruling comes into play over here as well, perhaps spurring our unhappy saint-soaked island into a new era of rationality, compassion and sincerity of motive.