The Curia has bossed church-run schools into not distributing to pupils a World Health Organisation questionnaire on health behaviour. It includes four questions on sexual behaviour, and the Curia apparently believes these questions to be unacceptable. Maybe it prefers to bury its head in the sand, and to believe that all the children in its schools will have sex for the first time when they are married at, say, 28 – or never have sex if they stay unmarried, as is the fate of increasingly large numbers of men and women.
What can I say? Plenty, of course. The questionnaire was marked for distribution to the first, third and fifth forms. It is true that perhaps the sex-related questions may not be suitable for first-formers – many of whom may be very innocent and uninformed – but they are certainly more than acceptable in the context of the third and fifth forms. If boys and girls of 13 and 15 do not know about sex and how babies are made, then they have a serious problem, and there are dreadful shortcomings in the education process – or dreadful shortcomings in their intelligence because, at that age, even if your parents and teachers have failed to tell you how it’s done, you should have worked it out for yourself.
Fortunately, independent schools give their pupils sex education classes at around the age of 11, so parents are spared all of that. I can’t imagine a more embarrassing or awkward scenario than sitting around the kitchen table with the kids and explaining how sex happens – embarrassing for the children, that is, as well as the parents. Children do not like their parents talking to them about sex (at whatever age and in whatever context). They would much rather somebody else did the job in the formal setting of the classroom, but unfortunately, some parents like to maintain total control over everything to do with their kids, including where, when and how they find out about sex, so they get angry about formal sex education. Luckily, for the most part, the Education Department ignores them. Thank God for the teachers who take it upon themselves to give this little talk instead of the parents, I say – we have gone from the great parent-child gulf of the past to the overweening intimacy of the present – with parents trying to be all buddy-buddy with their sons and daughters. I can’t think which scenario is the more off-putting, though quite frankly, my inclination is towards the gulf rather than the intimacy, the latter being insupportable prurience and, in my view, an attempt by parents to live their children’s lives vicariously.
Anyway, the World Health Organisation questionnaire – called the Health Behaviour in School Children Study, which is carried out every four years – has 76 questions, only four of which tackle the subject of sex, but the Curia in its wisdom saw fit to frown upon the entire questionnaire. This is a great pity, because the other 72 questions deal with eating habits, weight, physical appearance, exercise, smoking, drinking, bullying and family relationships. The Curia’s backward attitude means that the results for Malta will be distorted. There is a disproportionately high number of teenagers in Church-run schools, and none of them will be surveyed.
The government schools have adopted a middle-of-the road attitude. Fifth-formers will be given all 76 questions, but the four questions about sex will be removed from the questionnaire given to the younger ones. This is the formal position adopted by the Education Department, which has left it up to the individual heads of school whether to give third formers the questionnaire in its entirety, or whether to remove the sex questions only.
Children in independent schools will be answering the entire questionnaire, and so what? When I brought up the subject over dinner, my sons said they remembered answering all the questions when they “were about 11” (of course, I didn’t even know about it at the time, but then, I tend to leave school stuff to the school, and stay out of it). The Curia should accept my assurance that it doesn’t seem to have maimed them for life, and they considered it to be of so little importance at the time that they didn’t come home to tell me about it over tea – unlike, for example, the very important news of fights in the school playground in which somebody lost teeth or had to be taken to the health centre, or who got given a wedgie in the lavatories for sneaking.
The government’s health promotion department is very annoyed at the Curia’s stance, as well it should be. As the department pointed out, in the last WHO questionnaire four years ago, there were 19 questions about sex and not just four, and yet the Curia had no objections. Well, that was probably because somebody was fast asleep at the time. I can’t for the life of me see the Curia not objecting to 19 questions about sex, handed out to 11-year-olds.
The World Health Organisation asks the same questions in all countries, because this gives the organisation the statistical information to make inter-country comparisons and to map international trends in child health behaviour. As a result of the Curia’s ‘let’s pretend nothing is happening’ stance, Malta’s figures on sexual health among young people cannot be compared to those of other countries, and are not even realistic, because a great swathe of the teenage population has been precluded from answering the questions. As Mario Spiteri, of the Health Promotion Department, has said: “There is nothing wrong with these questions, and Maltese children can handle them like those children in other countries. They are living in the same world and we cannot think of our children as not being exposed to the same issues as those to which others are exposed.”
But that is precisely how the Maltese Curia thinks. It thinks that Malta and the Maltese are enclosed in a bubble, and that Maltese children still live in the world created by Enid Blyton. Well, perhaps not Enid Blyton, because the Famous Five had adventures at least – so let’s say an enclosed world in which the greatest height of fun is to be had at duttrina lessons and while prancing about as an altar boy, with the rosary said every evening and the Bible on the bedroom shelf. No wonder that so many of our kids grow up into warped adults, but let’s not go into that. The Health Promotion Department suggested to the Curia that it instructs church-run schools to distribute all questions apart from the ‘sex page’, but the answer was an inflexible and obtuse “No”. Why? That’s what I would like to know – why?
As my cynical friend remarked: “Perhaps they’re afraid that some of the children may reply that their first experience of sex was being poked by a priest.” Good point, though I prefer to think that it’s because the Curia believes that these questions will put ideas into the minds of kiddies. Yeah, right.
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So, while the Curia feels absolutely no inclination to allow others to investigate the health behaviour – sexual or otherwise – of children in church schools, it is action stations on the latest in a long series of weeping Madonna statues. The entire Curia forensic team appears to be out with its magnifying glasses and its chemical identification substances. The Church does not wish to check out the sexual behaviour of its pupils, but it is gagging to get the facts on yet another effigy of the Virgin Mary which weeps red tears.
“Oh God,” I yawned. “If only one of these blinking statues would weep blue, green or purple tears for a change, or give us all a ticking off like a Mediterranean mama, hands on hips. Then I might be interested.” But no – if a Madonna statue is going to do anything at all, it is going to weep, and the tears have to be red for blood. Why don’t statues of Christ crucified or crowned with thorns ever weep? They’ve got more than enough reason to do so. “You dummy,” says my cynical friend. “We’re in the Mediterranean. Men are not allowed to cry.” What, not even a statue of a man?
And it’s inevitably a statue that cries – never the Madonna’s face on a medal or a holy picture. Because these things are catching, you see – if one Madonna statue cries in Spain, then five Madonna statues have to cry in Malta, and there is mass hysteria and pilgrimages. Little has changed in this way since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer.
When we were teenagers living at home, some women of the parish (nothing-better-to-do busybodies, I called them, much to my mother’s annoyance) used to go round the homes with some kind of sacred Madonna statue, bestowing the privilege of keeping it in residence for a couple of weeks at a time. It was supposed to sit in the hall with a candle in front of it, so that all who passed by could pay homage. Even at the time I thought it was a load of old b******ks: I could see that what everyone was worshipping was the statue itself, rather than what it represented. Going mad for a statue meant idolatry, but nobody appeared able to see the point.
Being disrespectful to the statue (a piece of painted clay in the shape of a woman in a blue nightdress) meant being disrespectful to the Mother of God. Catholicism, after all, is rooted in idols and holy images, which tend to be worshipped for what they are rather than for what they represent. Look at all these warring and competitive Madonnas in our parishes: the Madonna of Victories, the Star of the Sea, Our Lady of Sorrows – all of them slugging it out in the yearly feasts, and with a completely separate identity. It’s insane, and unlike others, I don’t think it’s cute.
The latest weeping Madonna – take it as read that there are many more to come – is located in the world centre of Birzebbuga. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Birzebbuga. I just wonder why, when the Spirit in the Sky chooses to make the image of his mother weep or appear somewhere in the world, it has to be some obscure European village like Medjugorge, Lourdes, Fatima, Girgenti, the grotto in Rabat, or Birzebbuga. You would think that, if public relations impact is what Jesus and His Mum are after, they would choose to make a Madonna effigy weep in the middle of New York City’s Times Square, or Piccadilly Circus in London (preferably in Top Shop). Somehow, I can’t envisage a celestial planning and brainstorming session in which the angelic advisors say: “Oh I know, the best way to communicate your message is to make that Madonna statue in the front parlour of Mrs Borg’s house in Birzebbuga, Malta, weep blood tears. That will make them all sit up and take notice. Then they might stop having sex with each other outside marriage.”
And then we laugh at Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. Aren’t there people who cut themselves or hurt their children to get their doctor’s attention? It’s a psychological condition with a specific name, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called. Well, here in ‘Catholic’ (for which read, hysterical) Malta it’s a lot less painful. All you have to do is prick your finger, peel an onion under your nose, and mix the resulting blood and tears together. Then dab them on your effigy and begin screaming and fainting so that the neighbours rush round to see what has happened. The next thing you know the Curia will be investigating.
The last time this happened, in 1999 at the Grotto in Rabat, the forensic examinations found that the liquid the Madonna shed was a mixture of human blood and human tears. Yes, exactly – human blood and human tears with, presumably, human DNA, indicating beyond doubt that the source was human and not divine. Perhaps they should have DNA-tested the mixture and then performed a similar test on all the obsessives who had contact with the Madonna effigy. The results would have been very interesting.
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Sometimes, ethnocentricity can be taken to the limits – for example, when there is a disaster in another country, and all we seem to care about is whether there were any Maltese people involved. The latest such example was with the terrorist bomb attacks in Dahab in Egypt last Monday. “No Maltese in Egypt blasts” ran the headline in one newspaper. Oh, that’s all right, then.
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It’s not just Maltese newspaper headlines that are embarrassingly out of order. Take this one, which appeared on the BBC World website, heading a report on the Egyptian parliamentary elections: “Women and Copts named Egypt MPs”. We’re one step away from the black one-legged lesbians. As somebody pointed out to me via email: it’s like that newspaper advertisement published a couple of years back – “Computer courses for housewives and children.”