What is it about religion that makes it a rallying-post for the psychologically unstable? Religion fulfils our need for certainty, but to those with mental and emotional problems, it is a source of succour that takes over their lives. They miss the essential meaning of the religion they espouse, and instead dive right in, inventing what it means to them as they go along, and using it as a buffer against what they perceive to be the nasty reality of the world outside.

With those who have run-of-the-mill personal and emotional problems, and who might have turned to drugs or alcohol instead of to prayer groups and clapping and singing, there is nothing to bother society. This kind of solidarity within a religious group actually serves a useful psychological purpose, even if it is essentially selfish and inward-looking, and would outwardly seem to negate the very concept of Christianity by encouraging its members to turn inwards instead of to go out into the world and serve. Yet when you consider the loyalty with which people follow these prayer groups, and their need to attend them on a regular basis, you also see how easy it would be a charismatic but unhinged individual to start a dangerous cult.

* * *

But with those who are dangerously unhinged, it's a different matter. They start off looking for something that will give them an identity and an outlet for their curious psychology, and when they have found what they want, they throw themselves right in. Sometimes, it is religion. Christianity has thrown up its fair share of lunatics, madmen and maniacs in the past. Where these have been charismatic individuals, they have been even more dangerous to society, gathering losers, the lost and the disturbed into their frightening fold, and causing untold damage.

For such people, religion is just an excuse. What they are really looking for is a reason to be alive, and a sense of belonging. They are disaffected and detached from the society in which they live. Sometimes, they might perceive society as having rejected them, for whatever reason, and so they rush to reject it in turn. They become modern-day outlaws. If religion does not give them what they need, they rush headlong into the contemporary substitute for religious fervour: the Cause, with a capital C. There is a variety of such causes, ranging from the Animal Liberation Front to head-on terrorism. They don't really care about the cause itself. That's just the means to the end of self-fulfilment, a self-fulfilment that is brought about by rejecting normal society so as to belong to something else that will give them a better sense of identity.

* * *

It is easy to make the mistaken assumption that the current spate of hideous terrorist acts in London and Sharm el-Sheikh is driven by religion, and that the perpetrators are acting as Muslims and in the name of Islam. Common sense should tell us that their religion is just an excuse, a way of lending reason - if it can be called such - to behaviour that they would have given vent to in any case. Usually, it's a case of potential terrorists looking for a cause, rather than a cause looking for potential terrorists. People like this are not made by their cause. They would have been like that to start with. You cannot take any 19-year-old and turn him into a suicide bomber. You have to start with a 19-year-old who already has serious problems, and then you have to work with those problems. How easy it is to blame things on religion, rather than admitting the obvious: that normal, well-balanced individuals, no matter their religious inclinations or the lack of them, do not become suicide bombers or act violently towards complete strangers in this way.

Let's remember the Bader Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse for a moment. One assumes that the highly educated, middle-class young men and women, who became murderous terrorists under the auspices of the two organisations, were raised as Christians in Germany and Italy. The latter would have been raised as Catholics. Yet my entire childhood, as I remember it, appeared to have been peppered with shocked references to these terrorists by the surrounding adults. They were always in the news. They even blew up a train station at Bologna, causing untold carnage and many deaths. Madrid's Muslim terrorists were not the first; Bologna's 'Catholic' terrorists were. They even went so far as to justify the killing of their own former prime minister, Aldo Moro, shocking not just Italy, but the entire world. I still remember, very clearly, the news photograph of his corpse in a car boot, plastered all over London, where we were on holiday when it happened.

How quickly we forget.

* * *

The 1970s were the heyday of terrorism in Europe. What is happening now is as nothing when compared to those years, wracked as they were by the bombings and other hideous acts of the IRA, the Brigate Rosse and the Bader Meinhof. The IRA killed and maimed under the banner of Catholicism, but nobody used the line of argument: "My God, what are those Catholics doing? What an aggressive religion, killing the innocent with bombs." This is because Europe is familiar enough with all forms of Christianity, and certainly with Catholicism, to know that while the terrorists of the IRA were baptised and raised as Catholics, and saw themselves as such, they were in reality nothing of the sort. Well, that is how Muslims see the situation now. As I have had cause to write several times, one is not a Catholic simply because one has been born and raised as such, or because one chooses to call oneself Catholic. One has to behave like a Catholic, and to adhere to the tenets of the Catholic religion. It is the same with Islam. You can't go around killing people and call yourself a Muslim.

Catholics the world over would have been deeply upset had non-Catholics judged them by the behaviour of the IRA, or blamed Catholicism for IRA terrorism. It shouldn't take a superhuman stretch of the imagination to see that this is precisely how millions of Muslims around the globe are feeling now, because we are judging them, and Islam in general, by the actions of terrorists who were raised as Muslims. As various Muslim leaders have pointed out in strong statements to the media, you cannot be a Muslim and at the same time be a source of murder and mayhem. By definition, through their chosen way of life, these terrorists are Muslims only in name - just as the IRA murderers were Catholic only in name. The Brigate Rosse, brought up as Catholics, did not need to have religion as a banner under which to fulfil their personal need to cause pain and suffering, because they had communism, which made them atheists.

* * *

We shouldn't rush to judge, to blame Islam and to point fingers in this or that direction. We should just count ourselves lucky that there is no terrorist set-up that might appeal to problematic young Maltese men. There are problematic young men in every country throughout the globe, but where there are no appealing terrorist organisations, the most trouble they can get into is drug-dealing, theft, GBH, and so on. Sometimes, they turn their aggression inwards and destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol, or by drifting their lives away. I'm sure the parents of those young people from nice, middle class Catholic Italian homes, who killed Aldo Moro and blew up the Bologna train station, went to their graves wondering where they went wrong.

That is precisely how the parents of the London bombers, a couple of whom were just 18 and 19 (and we know how vulnerable to trouble many boys are at that age) are feeling now. Their relatives have issued statements to the press, spelling this out, presumably because the parents themselves are under sedation somewhere. Like the Catholic Italian parents of the wayward young people who killed their prime minister and bombed a train station, these Muslim British parents will go to their graves wondering where they went wrong. And nobody will be able to convince them of the truth: that it wasn't their fault, that their sons were sucked into terrorism in their teenage years the way other people's sons are sucked into the drug world - by being vulnerable in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If a terrorist organisation were to crop up in Malta, several Maltese young men would join it - let's have no doubts on that score. They would cause murder and mayhem with the same alacrity that they have in ferrying Chinese and North Africans “to Sicily”, and then leaving them to drown or killing them with blows to the head, before pushing their bodies into the water. Please, let's not delude ourselves about religion. The people who do this ferrying are Catholics.