For a nation that sets so much store by catechism classes, we are remarkably short on understanding as to what makes us Christian – or doesn’t. Stories that underscore our poor comprehension of Christianity – you can call it humane behaviour if you don’t want to give it a religious tag – sat side by side in our newspapers, over the last few days, with other stories that underscore our interpretation of Catholicism as the direct descendent of ancient paganism and mysticism.
On one page you’ll find descriptions of how Dun Gorg’s face emerged from a holy picture and how a bit of one of his shoe-laces wrought a miraculous cure in the year Malta achieved its independence from Britain. On another page, you’ll find a report of how black people are routinely prevented from boarding our public buses, and how, when they do succeed in getting on a bus, the Maltese people next to whom they sit stand up and move to another seat.
And on another page, the stories are more shocking still. A small boat crammed with 57 people, which was clearly letting in water, was spotted from the air by a Maltese patrol. So many hours went by before a rescue vessel was sent to the area that the boat had vanished. All those people, including a mother and small baby and several children, drowned. While the good people of Malta were sitting in homes and churches decorated with effigies of the Madonna and child, the real, live human equivalent was sitting in a sinking boat that nobody appears to have been in a hurry to rescue.
The pathos of the photograph taken from the air, clearly showing that woman and her baby about to drown with 55 others, should be unbearable to us, now that we know the horrible fate they met just a couple of hours after the Maltese patrol spotted them. But it isn’t unbearable. They were only Africans, and we’re too busy worshipping Dun Gorg and emailing each other with photographs of the (white) British toddler Madeleine McCann and appeals to help find her. In the frenzy over Dun Gorg, we have missed as usual Christ’s essential message, the one that underpins Christianity: whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.
If those who are whipping up a frenzy about the canonisation of Dun Gorg had truly Christian consciences, as opposed to Catholic ones, they would be feeling some sense of shame about Christ having been left to drown in a boat while Malta hummed and hawed about what to do. Unfortunately, my experience of people like this is that they tend to dismiss the essential teachings of Christ while tying themselves up in knots about the rules made by men centuries after He was crucified. They’re too busy counting fasting days to bother with the hungry, and too committed to prayer groups to go down and lend a hand at a refugee centre.
Do I sound cross? That’s because I am cross. One of the benefits of not being religious is the ability to see the deathly irony of a nation that lauds its first saint while letting people drown, refusing to sit next to black people, and – this is just as bad – refusing to stand up and be counted when you are on a bus and see a woman refused permission to board because she is black.
There was another terrible story in the newspapers last Monday, in the same edition as yet more news items about Dun Gorg. He was such a good man, we were told for the umpteenth time. Yes, but what I want to know is this: if he had come across 24 people clinging desperately to tuna-pens in the open sea, would he have left them there and gone back home? We will never have the answer to that one, but what interests me is the fact that we are defining the goodness of this saint-to-be in terms of his mysticism and his preaching and teaching of the semi-literate and the completely illiterate.
That’s not my definition of doing good, but then making sure that people have food, clothes and a roof over their head has always struck me as being more important than making sure they have religion. The volunteers struggling to cope every day at the open centres for refugees are the ones performing Christ’s work, to my mind, and not the ones marshalling reluctant children into duttrina classes when they should be playing and carefree instead of being forced into thinking about hellfire and naughty sins. But that’s me.
Our understanding of religion remains rooted in the days when people went to church while burning witches at the stake and flaying slaves alive. We do not make the link between religion and responsible behaviour towards our fellow human beings. Twenty-four people were found clinging to tuna-pens in the open sea by the four Maltese men who went out in a boat to check the cages. They left them there. The owner of the pens, trying to justify his men’s behaviour, told another newspaper: “As a Maltese, I’m prepared to help people, but there’s a limit to everything. What if these 24 strong men rebelled and tried to take control of the boat?” The remark was reported in newspapers elsewhere in Europe, where a rather more serious view is taken of abandoning people who are in peril on the sea.
Questioned further by the journalist, the owner of the tuna cages admitted that 24 lives were at stake – but you know, there’s a limit to everything, isn’t there? That is such a typically Maltese expression, the justify-all clause, here being used to try to justify leaving 24 people clinging to fish-cages in open sea. It is also typically Maltese, I am afraid to have to say this, to think of yourself as somebody who is part of a nation that is ready to rush to the aid of the unfortunate, while at the same time thinking of yourself first, and leaving 24 people clinging to a cage because there is a distinct possibility that if you allow them on board they will do away with you. What – do away with their rescuers after hours of exposure in open sea? I hardly think so.
A government spokesman told the press that the Prime Minister and his government expect everyone to provide assistance whenever and wherever lives are imperilled. Strangely, it took the Prime Minister, through his spokesman, to point this out, and not the Archbishop, through his.
I don’t know whether the Italians who eventually went to their rescue as the Maltese scurried away were Catholics, but they didn’t pause to think before gathering up their fellow human-beings and giving them food, water and first aid before taking them to Lampedusa. Meanwhile, Malta found itself locked into a dispute with Spain over who was responsible for 26 people picked up while in danger of drowning, by a Spanish trawler.
The trawler didn’t have facilities for an extra 26 people on the long haul back to Spain, and asked to let these people down in Malta. Malta said no. The trawler’s captain, interviewed by the international press, didn’t begin his sentence with “As a Spaniard, I am always prepared to help.” As conditions on his trawler deteriorated around him, he said instead: “It was foul weather and we had to take them aboard. We realised they were good people. They haven’t complained once despite having to sleep squeezed in passageways and next to the engine.”
Captain Ruben Vazquez may not be Maltese, Catholic, or a church-goer, but I have no doubt who God in his heaven is best pleased with right now.