A little bit of a furore has developed after a woman in an official position insisted on the use of the hybrid word “chairperson”, rather than the Madam Chairman that more ordinarily substitutes for Mr Chairman, when the chairman in question isn’t a man. This debate already broke out once before, when Marlene Mizzi was appointed chairman of Sea Malta and insisted that she should be called chairman. And I had written about it then, too, saying that to insist on chairperson has more to do with ignorance than with feminism. The “man” in chairman, like the “man” in ombudsman and probably also the “man” in mankind, is the Germanic man, which means “person” rather than an adult male of the human species.
Chairman and ombudsman already mean chairperson and ombudsperson, and there is no need to interpret them literally for the benefit of the uninformed. Besides, I cannot imagine why some women think it is less offensive for a woman chairman to be called a chairperson rather than, for the sake of this argument, a chairwoman. Perhaps they think the latter sounds too much like charwoman? To my mind and ears, it is offensive in the extreme to refer to a man as a chairman but to a woman as a chairperson, as though she is a neutral thing made out of wood, with no sexuality or gender to speak of.
Madam Chairman is correct. Chairperson is only for those who would have the plumbers of the Water Services Corporation go down a personhole when there is a problem with the street’s drainage. These are the sort of “issues” that amuse rather than exercise us into paroxysms of righteous rage. I received an e-mail message from a friend: “Just thinking aloud over my second cup of coffee. Should we, perhaps, start a campaign to rename the ladybird? And what are we going to do about managers? Should we extend the scope of man-eating sharks to include persons of either sex? Is it possible to emancipate women? And should there be a mandate for all this?”
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Last Thursday (www.independent.com.mt – Archive), I wrote that when officials of the Church speak against the evils of cohabitation and in favour of marriage, they have a duty to put the matter into historical perspective for the benefit of their audiences. To fail to point out to the faithful that up to just over 400 years ago, cohabitation was marriage is to be disingenuous. We expect this kind of behaviour from politicians. We do not expect if from churchmen.
A couple of people emailed me because they had failed to distinguish between marriage as a sacrament and marriage as a rite. Marriage has been a sacrament for much longer than 400 years, they pointed out. Yes, of course it has. But the marriage rite was formalised, and the requirements of marriage formulated, by the Council of Trent in 1563. Before that, marriage was unique as a sacrament in that it did not involve the mediation of a priest. There was no marriage rite, still less one involving priests, churches and vows before the altar. A valid marriage was one in which a man and a woman consented to live together as man and wife. In other words, there is absolutely no difference between what we consider cohabitation today, and what was considered marriage before the late 16th century.
There’s more. The Council of Trent may have set down the rules, but the uptake of those rules was very slow indeed. For the vast majority of the population – impoverished people who had no time for such shenanigans and debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – marriage remained what it had always been: shacking up together with no need for an official blessing or the stamp of authority. Those who had entered into marriage before the Council of Trent didn’t all suddenly rush off to formalise their union according to the new formal rite. They just carried on. It was only those for whom marriage had to be clear-cut and unambiguous, because there were inheritance rights involved, who took the marriage rules of the Council of Trent on board. So, for many long decades after 1563, the formal marriage rite remained the preserve of kings and of princes, of dukes and of fabulously wealthy merchants who were the Abramovics of the time, until it crept down the social scale to minor feudal lords and wannabes, and finally, to ordinary people.
So there you have it. If it hadn’t been for the Council of Trent in 1563, all the naughty cohabitees of today would be on the right side of God and the Bible, considered as living together in married bliss rather than in sin. For the first 1,500 years of Christianity, marriage and cohabitation were one and the same thing. Bear that in mind the next time you are subjected to a righteous sermon.
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Last week The Sunday Times published the results of a survey in which 99 per cent of Maltese claimed to be Catholic, despite the majority of them saying that they did not agree with the Church on key questions of morality and decided these matters for themselves. They wouldn’t be considered Catholic by the usual rules of thumb, but as long as they call themselves that, in their eyes, it’s what they are. This is like calling yourself a Buddhist while disagreeing with 70 per cent of what Buddhism teaches and failing to put any of it into practice. But what the hell – as they say, what’s in a name? Catholic today, Buddhist tomorrow, Seventh Day Adventist next week – no behavioural changes or even belief changes required.
The convenience of using the Catholic tag without sticking to the rules allows you to do all kinds of interesting things, like posting calls to arms on the website forum run by the organised lobby which calls itself the Federation of Conservat-
ionist Hunters and Trappers. A few days ago, these messages included such Catholic gems as “We need to wake up and we need to skin our adversaries... Yes, we’re prepared to fight with fists of steel. I’m prepared to be arrested... I will kill.” I’ve deleted the expletives, though I suppose I should have replaced them with asterisks, just to give you an idea of how many there were. The same person – now that’s an appropriate use of the word – challenged his fellow hunters to stop sitting around and to take the law into their hands, fighting their cause through vandalism and beating up the minister for the environment. It’s a shame he’s lost so much weight. He could have just sat on the twerps and squashed them, guns and all.
A few weeks ago, one of Malta’s 99 per cent Catholic population (as a gun-toting right-winger, he doesn’t fit the profile of the other one per cent, and probably sees Catholicism as the same kind of badge of identity as his gun) suggested a coup d’etat in which hunters would take control of the state. Arguing against moderation, which is only for sissies, apparently, he warned us all: “We are armed... In the past we have shown that we are no pushovers. Don’t forget: there are many more armed hunters than there are policemen and soldiers! We should take advantage of our power. This is a need, not a whim.”
A need, eh? Like food and water and sleep. Please excuse me while I deploy an expletive of my own: what a bunch of w****rs.
The spokesman for the group (or perhaps that should be spokesperson), Lino Farrugia, brushed it all off by saying that these are just expressions of anger. You got the impression that he was speaking about a classroom of toddlers throwing tantrums because Jane had taken their crayons. “People are angry. They cannot be treated in this way,” he said. I’m sorry to have to point this out to the spokesperson, but lots of us get angry about lots of things, and we don’t threaten death, violence, destruction, and retribution through hugely illegal means. He and his God-and-guns crowd may have failed to notice this little bit of information, but there are far, far more people without guns who are wildly, madly angry at those with guns and none of us are threatening any kind of violence.
Nobody has suggested, anywhere, that we all go out in a crowd of 100,000 and lynch that mob down at their headquarters near the Msida gibjun. That’s because we’re law-abiding. When we protest against the depredations of bird-shooters and trappers, we refer to the law. We write letters to the newspapers, or columns like this one. We sign petitions. We try to present them to prime ministers and then kick up a fuss. That’s what normal people do. They don’t wave their guns about and scream because they have a ‘need’ to shoot things and deprive the rest of us of the sight of them and we don’t have a right to stop them.
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Morality isn’t only about sex and its various permutations in marriage and homosexuality. It’s also about things like this. If the new archbishop wishes to make himself relevant in contemporary Malta, he would do well to bear this in mind. In 2007, we don’t need any more hectoring lectures about woman’s role in society and in the family, which sums up roughly as woman’s role in a pinafore and in bed without a condom. What we do need is a few well-placed words about gun violence, the pleasure of killing, the destruction of threatened species, and about how killing birds deprives others of the joy of looking at them. The archbishop might find it in himself to remind these joyless bearers of arms that their desire to kill and trap birds does not supersede everyone else’s desire to enjoy their presence.
Grand Harbour is not just renowned for its curious natural formation and the bastions on either side. There’s another reason: the fact that it is the only port in the Mediterranean where there are no sea-gulls or any other kind of sea bird. Sea-gulls are as much a part of ports and harbours as are ships and bollards. The residents of harbour areas live with the background sound of gulls cawing and shrieking. The residents of Vittoriosa, Senglea and Valletta don’t even know what a gull sounds like. The Maltese countryside is silent. In 16 years of living surrounded by fields and trees, the only time I have ever heard the sound of birds settling in at dusk is when I happen to be in a certain square in Mosta, where there is a large tree in which they gather for the night. They have worked out, with their little bird-brains, that sheltering in a tree in an urban core where shooting is not allowed is much, much safer than bedding down in a tree a couple of miles down the road, where shooting is allowed. Silent countryside, no gulls in the port – go on, Your Grace, remind your flock that questions of morality extend to beyond the bedroom door. That will make a refreshing change.