My original intention was to write exclusively about Christmas, but I have to depart slightly from that plan and start off with two comments.
1) There are enormous implications to the discovery that the hatching of the plot to assassinate Daphne Caruana Galizia seems to date back to November 2016. What concerns me more than anything else is that people of all persuasions and from all walks of life understand these implications, but some pretend not to. The implicit complicity gives rise to blood-curdling reactions.
2) The Vitals soap opera is obscene. Only an idiot will not be able to put two and two together. Whoever is behind this public fraud knows that the people understand and that there is no need to hoodwink them. What is really spine-chilling is that this mastermind counts on people's implicit complicity. People look the other way, possibly out of a sense of irġulija (omertà in Sicilian) or out of fear.
Tellingly, the two people someone might think of in connection with these two points were involved in the Panama Papers scandal.
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When Christian ideology not only dominated Europe but actually created it (at the time it was called 'Christendom'), the family was probably the most important aspect of that ideology.
The stories propagated by Christianity are mostly family-related. From the first story (of an ill-fated family, Adam, Eve and their two sons) down to the central story (of another ill-fated: the Holy Family), the family is the recurrent theme of Christianity. The most important prayer is directed toward a Heavenly Father, as humanity is His family.
The rules for the proper management of the family are laid down in Christian tradition and lore: tolerance and forgiveness for the wayward wife; zero tolerance for child abuse; 'No' to divorce (except in the case of a wrongly-tied matrimonial bond).
God - depicted as almighty and the beginning and end of everything - respects the will of a 14-year-old virgin, when his messenger asks for her consent to become the mother of God's son. She could clearly have said "No", and God, despite his omnipotence, would have had to accept the girl's expression of her free will.
Over the centuries, Christian ideology promoted the emancipation of girls from prostitution. Men were urged to marry girls who had resorted to the oldest profession out of poverty, and to this end the Church pushed forward the cult of the Magdalene, to buttress its policy of redeeming girls from selling their bodies in order to survive.
When it was Christianising the heathen - for instance, in Ireland - the Church imposed the ideology of monogamy, thereby helping children avoid the psychological hardship endured in polygamous family.
And so on and so on.
Christianity is indeed the Religion of the Family, with all the good and bad (and ugly) that that implies. It is thus an important landmark on the landscape of Christian ideological symbolism. It represents not just the theologically fundamental moment of the birth of the Saviour who will rectify the errors of the first family, but also the ideal of the 'holy' family. Joseph raises a child who is not his; Mary accepts the will of God; Jesus will grow up and carry the cross imposed on Him by His destiny.
This ideology was spun on the loom of the flexible approach to family issues. In the days when Europe was still Christendom, tollerantia, moderatio, dispensatio and other legal mechanisms were invoked to tackle family issues on a case-by-case basis. It is possible that the injunction to forgive was the basis for this flexible approach.
But then Martin Luther came along, with all his baggage on which doctors concur - be they his contemporaries or later ones, including our own contemporaries. Luther was scandalised by the case-by-case flexibility and advocated rigidity. Forgiveness and tolerance were to be replaced by exaction and listening to one's conscience.
From these ideas somehow descended the second meaning of Christmas. The Reformation had a profound effect on the family, paving the way for the state's appropriation of the rules regulating it. The French philosophes and later the Revolutionaries and all their misguided idealism, carry much of the blame, together with the 'psychoanalyst' Wilhelm Reich in the 20th century.
But things do not happen in a vacuum.
Ideas shape the economy and, in turn, the economy shapes ideas, in an osmotic process which is, by definition, bi-directional.
And so it came to happen that Christians also fell prey to the new socio-economic formation, and God the Father - who sent His Son into the world to correct the errors of the first human family - was now replaced by capital. Another father appeared, the 'Coca-Cola Father Christmas', whose sole commandment is to buy more and more presents.
The father figure, possibly abused in former times by the political class and others to justify monarchy and paternal authority in the family-run farm, was ousted by Father Christmas, who exercises his authority - fuelled by economic goals - to boost year-end sales, to coincide with the production and accounting cycles.
This new economy, in which capital needs more capital to create new capital, at first needed the family unit, to solidify the new wealth. Just look at the laws of the 19th century which forbad illegitimate children from seeking out their natural fathers. The economy then evolved into a family-averse system, because the family now became a useless obstacle. The idealism of the French Revolution, which had been rejected in the 19th century, finally found fertile soil in which to grow and blossom.
Late capitalism - the system in which we are living - needs cosmopolitanism. It needs individuals to forgo their ties to their family and spend their lives as atoms, floating about in perpetual adolescence looking for the new product to buy and new jobs to apply for anywhere in the globalised world, uprooted from any social context, constantly taking selfies which are carried away by the currents of one big cosmopolitan, multi-cultural ocean.
The sacred tie between mother and child is torn. It is her body, and her unborn child has no constitutional right, it is not a 'person'.
The bond between a man and a woman as the basis of the child-rearing unit is dissolved in favour of a fluid union about which, if one were really to believe in Darwinian evolution, one would ask why did we not evolve in that way if that is really how things should be.
The loyalty toward one's kin and the binding nature of one's word are constantly undermined in favour of the not-so-novel idea that the individual is free to do as he or she pleases, as long as he or she pays taxes and obeys the rules.
Little does it matter that the ultra-rich, whose wealth derives from the system enabling these social changes and 'novelties', flout fiscal morality by opening secret companies in non-cooperative jurisdictions.
But then you see them - all of those politicians who promote anti-family measures - kissing the Bishop's ring or visiting the Pope, their wives' heads covered by black veils.
You see them - those politicians who promote social models which are diametrically opposed to the original message of Christmas - wishing all their constituents and friends a Merry Christmas, with every Christmas card they write.
But at the end of the day, it's not their fault. We are like fish swimming in a bowl, and we cannot escape the system in which we live. We can only hope that, one day, earthly reality mimics heavenly ideals.
Until then, may we all have a meaningful Christmas.