The President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House and the Leader of the Opposition are all in Rome for the canonisation of Fr George Preca. Those of you who think there is nothing wrong with this – that it is, in fact, a good thing – are not thinking hard enough. If the first three are there in their private capacity as fervent Catholics, then they should be standing with the rest of the mob and making sure we know that they are not travelling on public funds. If they are there as the highest representatives of the Republic of Malta, then they shouldn’t be there at all. As for the fourth, maybe he has had a late conversion, or perhaps he realises that staying behind might not make him look so good if the others are going. Luckily for him, Fr George’s surname begins with Pr, and this saved him the trouble of hunting through the dictionary for a column title when he wrote about him last week.
The Head of State and the country’s most senior politicians – whose role is purely secular – have no business representing Malta in their official capacities at a saint-making ceremony. It is not just that they are continuing to fudge the distinction between religious and secular authority in Malta, but that they are giving credence and authority to something that is the result of an unhealthy obsession with mysticism and magical thinking. The President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House and the Leader of the Opposition should not be representing this country officially at a ceremony that is the conclusion of a process which began with a belief in the magical powers of a shoelace and a glove. Believing in God and in the teachings of Christ, and putting them into practice, is one thing. Believing in this is quite another. Making it the official belief of Malta by their official presence there is completely unacceptable.
I might be going against the flow here, but I don’t believe that detached retinas miraculously reattach themselves on people who place beneath their pillow a broken shoelace worn by a holy man, or that a glove worn to exhume the cadaver of the same holy man can cause the sick liver of babies to heal. For extraordinary claims, there must be extraordinary evidence – extraordinary, and not ridiculous. My own view is that with or without the shoelace and the glove, the retina would have reattached itself and the sick liver would have healed, and any right-thinking person who isn’t blinded by religious zeal must know this to be true. Detached retinas do reattach themselves in very, very rare cases. People with no hope of getting better do get better, even non-Catholics who pray to nobody, believe in no god, and put no shoelaces under their pillows.
The President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the House can believe what they want to believe in their private life. The Leader of the Opposition can do what he likes to try to make himself less off-putting in the run-up to election time. But none of them has the right to drag Malta into it. As the official representatives, respectively, of Malta, the Nationalist Party, the Maltese Parliament and the Labour Party, their entirely unnecessary and uncalled-for presence at the ceremony says one thing only: that the Republic of Malta, its Parliament and its political parties firmly believe in the curative powers of shoelaces and gloves, in mysticism, and in magical thinking. None of it has anything to do with Christianity.
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Our politicians have become expert at confusing their religious beliefs with their secular roles and duties. I am reminded of something that was pointed out to me by a former diplomat, when the Prime Minister visited the Vatican and called on the Pope in January. The Prime Minister kissed the Pope’s hand. Accustomed as I am to life in the land of duttrina, the significance of this escaped me. The former diplomat pointed out that the Prime Minister should not have kissed the Pope’s hand, because he was there as the Prime Minister of Malta, and not as a private citizen.
The government’s department of information had described it as an official visit, and journalists were invited to accompany him. In terms of diplomatic protocol, this was the visit of the prime minister of one State to the head of another State. Kissing a hand is not politeness or something that “one does when one meets the Pope”. It is an age-old symbolic gesture of subservience and loyalty to a leader, and has nothing at all to do with the kissing of women’s hands by Italian men. What we had there was the Prime Minister of Malta performing a gesture of subservience and loyalty to the head of another State, and more significantly still, that State was the Vatican.
So what should the Prime Minister have done when he met the Pope, as Prime Minister of Malta? He should have shaken his hand, as he would have done with any other Head of State. For our Prime Minister to kiss the hand of the Pope is as disgraceful as if he were to kneel and bow his head before Queen Elizabeth II should he ever visit her at Buckingham Palace. That would be a gesture of loyalty and subservience to the British Head of State. People would be very annoyed, because they would read the gesture correctly and it would bring back echoes of our colonial past, when Maltese prime ministers were actually subservient to the British head of state, and performed gestures that reflected this.
And yet, like me before somebody pointed it out, nobody seems to have registered the significance of our prime minister bowing in supplication to the head of the Vatican State. It is possible that he himself did not understand the diplomatic significance of his gesture. But then why does he have advisers, or did he ignore them? I think the real problem is that he fails to distinguish between his personal identity as a fervent Catholic and his public role and identity as Prime Minister of Malta, which is a secular State and not a religious one, though the current frenzy might have you believe otherwise.
Having our prime minister kiss the hand of the head of the Vatican State offers no comfort to those of us who hope that Malta will learn to separate Church and State.
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Every day, it seems, I get fresh news of two sorts: more marriages that have broken up, and more people who have joined prayer groups. The rise of the prayer group is inexorable. When I first noticed this phenomenon several years ago, I used to write about it a lot, because it perplexed me. Those were the days when every other person I seemed to speak to at parties broached The Subject at some point in the conversation (usually the point where the conversation ended), and tried to tempt me to a meeting, or to persuade me that my status as somebody who had not yet seen the light would end before long and they would be praying for me. Fifteen years on, the prayers haven’t worked (perhaps a shoelace will?) and I remain resolutely and cheerfully free of the need to search for meaning in my life. I still think of it as self-preoccupied navel-gazing.
My attitude then towards prayer groups is pretty much what it is now: that people deal with difficulties in their lives in different ways. Some turn to pills, others to alcohol, a few to illegal drugs, some sleep around, others find God, and some just get on with it. I belong to the last category. My attitude to problems is that they are part of the human condition, and that trying to understand why bad things happen is utterly pointless.
What is happening in Malta that is driving so many thousands of people into religious groups? What are the factors causing it? Why are people not content any more to believe in God, practise their religion privately and get on with life? Why all this ganging up together in prayer groups, and why all this preoccupation with the “frills” of Catholicism – the rules and regulations, the letter of the law – rather than the essence of Christianity? I have no answers to any of those questions, but I suspect they are linked to deeper issues of fear of change and the insecurity it brings. Also, if prayer groups serve at least some of the functions of support groups (solidarity, the feeling of having the support and personal interest of a like-minded group of people, the comfort of strangers who become friends, safety in numbers, moral support) then why are thousands of Maltese people locked into a system that is the religious equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous?
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In many ways, this is a reversal to the earliest days of Christianity, when “churches” were precisely such groups of people who gathered to pray together. But there were reasons why they huddled together then that simply do not apply now. No Christians are being persecuted in Malta in 2007. There is another parallel between what is happening now and the early development of Christianity. When it first began to spread, it was among women and slaves – the oppressed and powerless chattels of Roman society. Christianity gave them hope and meaning, and told them something that contradicted the laws and mores of the time: their lives had value; they were not chattels, but individuals with significance in the eyes of Christ.
Most of those in prayer groups now are women. Lots and lots of them don’t work. Of course, you can argue that the fact they don’t work gives them plenty of time for praying, and even the time to think about deeper issues like religion. Working women, on the other hand, might love to join prayer groups for all we know, but they just don’t have the time. That’s what I used to think, too, but not any more. Now I think that prayer groups fulfil a need that has little or nothing to do with religion – a need for significance, and a need for personal meaning. Women (and men) who work get this from their life outside the home. Women who don’t work, and whose children are growing up, need to get their meaning elsewhere. There is a group called Men for Christ, but men in prayer groups remain the minority, and I’ve noticed that many of them are retired or have undergone some life-changing crisis.
The prayer group phenomenon cuts right through society, and yet it reflects society in that there are posh prayer groups, not-so-posh ones, and ones which are completely beyond the pale (“prayer groups for hamalli”), as one silly person put it, causing me to blush in her stead. Some people find this absolutely hilarious and hypocritical, and in conflict with what prayer groups should be about. I don’t, but that’s because I’m not interested in what prayer groups should be about, but in what they are about – the need of women to feel the solidarity of a large group of other women who share their values, their background and their aspirations. It’s not about religion; it’s about feeling safe and secure – the prayer group as extension of the schoolgirls’ clique, but this time with meaning beyond boys and jeans.
Let me know what you think. This subject really interests me, and I’d love to hear your views.
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