In a sense it is right and fitting that Government should have embarked on a mad road-asphalting scramble, precisely in the weeks ahead of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit.
The exercise is entirely in synch with Malta’s entire attitude towards this event. It is a case of keeping up appearances, resurfacing only those roads through which His Holiness is expected to pass, while allowing the less ‘blessed’ parts of the island to fester in their usual, pot-hole ridden environment.
As has been rightly been pointed out elsewhere, the result is deeply insulting to the ordinary Maltese man in the street. By shifting into gear only in view of Pope Benedict’s visit, the government is basically informing its own people it that it does not consider their wellbeing to be of any importance whatsoever. For if this were not the case, we would hardly need a papal visit to get the decent roads we have so been long demanding for our own benefit (and not just for the smoothness of the Popemobile’s ride).
But there is a good deal more to be said about our entirely cosmetic approach to this event. By so predictably choosing to asphalt our roads only ahead of the Pope’s arrival on April 17, Government has also demonstrated that our attitude to the Church itself is of an analogous nature – more concerned with the external manifestations of this institution’s power and glory, than with the substance of its founder’s teachings.
A cursory glance at the media will reveal that it is not just our roads, but also the entire local Catholic landscape to have been buried under a defensive and artificial ‘feel-good’ facade, in order to shield the faithful from the inescapable crisis now engulfing Benedict’s papacy.
Nowhere was this more evident than at a press conference yesterday, where a Curia representative – Mgr Charles Cordina – was reported almost boasting that the Maltese Church had been ‘among the first to make public’ cases of child abuse.
It later transpired that he had been misquoted (resulting in two separate amendments to the online story in The Times) – what Fr Cordina really said was that in 1999, the Church had made public its own declared policy on tackling child abuse.
This correction, too, is right and fitting: for had the Church made the claim as initially reported, it would have been guilty of an unholy distortion of the truth.
Fact of the matter is that the local Curia did not ‘make public’ any child abuse cases – and this can be attested by the notorious case of the St Joseph Home for Boys in Santa Venera.
Without meaning to probe old wounds, suffice it to day that not enough diligence had been applied (to put it mildly) when assigning a certain Fr Godwin Serri as spiritual director of this home. Fr Scerri had in fact earlier absconded from Canada, where he was wanted by the police in connection with allegations of paedophilia.
Predictably, Fr Scerri soon found himself implicated in another child abuse scandal, this time alongside two other religious functionaries: and if this story ever saw the light of day at all, it was certainly not down to the Curia’s public policy on child abuse, but only because it was unearthed by the press in 2003... and even then, only because one of the victims (by that time an adult) was so dissatisfied with the Curia’s handling of his complaints that that he turned first to the media and then, as a last resort, to the police.
Coming back to yesterday’s press conference: Fr Cordina is naturally entitled to defend the Church at what he describes a ‘moment of great suffering’; but with all due respect the entire attitude of the Catholic Church to the unfolding crisis has so far been less than unimpeachable.
Unlike its counterparts in Italy, Germany, the USA and Ireland, the Malta Archdiocese clearly does not feel the need to apologise to local victims of child abuse by clergymen. Instead – and alone among the world Catholic family, it seems – it has resorted to its usual belligerent line of defence: impugning its detractors with a hidden agenda to ‘harm the Church’, and refusing to acknowledge that it has also (albeit on a far smaller scale than any of the above-mentioned countries) been guilty of failing to take paedophilia seriously enough in the past.
Like the asphalt truck that covers unsightly potholes only for the benefit of the Pope, the Church seems to have absolved itself of any wrongdoing, perhaps in the hope that the general public will be too blinded by the splendour of Pope Benedict’s visit to notice.
In this it will most likely be proved right – although there is at least small corner of the press that shall remain vigilant. Of this, we promise.
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Keeping up appearances In a sense it is right and fitting that Government should have embarked on a mad road-asphalting scramble, precisely in the weeks ahead of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit..>>
