It’s such a shame that Vince Marshall has called off his protest pilgrimage against the screening of The Da Vinci Code. I was looking forward to it very much. On a small island, there isn’t a great deal in the way of entertainment, and this promised to liven things up a little. The prospect of a 1960s-style procession, led by a former Satanist bearing an effigy of Our Lady of Fatima (which has been blessed by the Pope, no less), was delightful. Now, I am disappointed. To keep myself amused, I shall have to go and watch The Da Vinci Code instead.

Since the boys have grown up and I no longer have an excuse to watch every zinnata film released, I have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms, forced to watch films for grown-ups that send me fleeing to the pick ‘n’ mix counter, films that feature one adult endlessly hankering after the affections of another, or troubled people contemplating suicide, by the end of which I want to shout “Go on then, kill yourself and have done with it!”. There are no more blazing infernos in tunnels, exploding volcanoes, space aliens taking over Manhattan, or dinosaurs crashing through the jungle. I can’t watch films with talking sharks and ants as witty as Woody Allen, because nobody will go with me (“Don’t be asinine.”). But those are the films I like and now I am grateful that at last a children’s film has come along which will probably be given an AA rating. This might fool my husband into believing that The Da Vinci Code is a film for grown-ups unlike, say, Nemo (“What? You want me to go and watch a film with a talking goldfish? Take your nieces.” In the end, my five-year-old niece lent me her DVD, which I watched twice.)

The irony is that The Da Vinci Code, which promises to be an entertaining mix of mystery and adventure in the grand genre of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – the kind beloved of big kids like me – probably will be rated by the censors at AA or even AO, though AO certification is rare nowadays, given that 16-year-olds are more sophisticated than their parents. Meanwhile, that bloodthirsty marathon of cruelty and gore, The Passion, was given, to my great confusion, a ‘U’ certificate, which means that children as young as two could be taken to see it, and they were. I saw parents pouring into the cinema with their young children in tow, to watch a film that many grown-ups, me included, would not watch because of its graphic cruelty and violence. I didn’t watch The Passion for the very same reasons that I didn’t watch Schindler’s List or The Pianist. I will not go to the cinema, or even watch a film on TV, to have my face shoved up against pain and suffering. Cinema is supposed to be an escape from pain and suffering, as with The Da Vinci Code. Those parents must have imagined that The Passion is a soft-focus Bible story like Jesus of Nazareth, or a souped-up version of Jesus Christ Superstar without the flares and the Judas modelled on Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps they believed that it would be all right to expose their children to such vicious cruelty graphically depicted, as long as it is l-istorja ta’ Kristu. No doubt, many of those very same parents signed Vince Marshall’s petition to have The Da Vinci Code banned from Malta’s cinema screens and DVD rental shops. They might consider my suggestion that they did their children far more harm by taking them to see The Passion than those children could ever suffer by exposure to Dan Brown’s piece of fantasy.

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Vince Marshall may have had more than 4,000 signatures to his petition, as he claims, though nobody appears to have seen this petition or checked it. After the Curia made known its disapproval of the protest pilgrimage featuring Our Lady of Fatima, Mr Marshall told the press that he had set fire to the list to protect the identity of those who had signed it. Perhaps he feared that people like me would target them by burning their doors and their cars as a display of disagreement with their opinion. Then yesterday, there was a letter from him in the correspondence columns of The Times, in which he said that he is still adding new signatures to his petition. He is determined not to hold the pilgrimage, though, because he has obeyed his “superiors”, as he put it. Superiors? I didn’t know he works for the Curia.

The Archbishop’s office has taken the right approach in not calling for censorship, and instead planning to publish a book of notes that seeks to dispel any doubts created by the film’s story. This has been a surprising stance because it contrasts so strongly with other, atavistic messages coming from the same source (“Women’s place is in the home when they have children.”). Perhaps the disastrous way in which some parts of Muslim society reacted to the publication of certain cartoons in Denmark has focused the minds of Catholics. They might have realised, because the boot was on the other foot for once, the ugliness and insanity of having the members of one religion trying to ban the publication or broadcasting of something, on religious grounds. In analysing the question of whether a secular society should ban the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, they were forced up against the issue of Malta’s banning of the film The Last Temptation of Christ, the novel The Thornbirds, and other similar incidences. The only rational conclusion they could have reached is that, if the Muslims are wrong in asking for a ban on purely religious grounds, then the Catholics are equally wrong in doing the same. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

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Malta is changing, at last. The correspondence pages of the newspapers have been packed with letters from people objecting to the proposed ban on the film. It is very encouraging that most of them were from people who took the line that, though they are Christians and hold to the faith, they also believe that they have no right to impose their views on others. You could feel the sheer antipathy towards the very thought of censorship in each of the letters. My generation and those before us grew up under the yoke of repression and censorship, and this has made many of us wholly averse to it after experiencing, for the past 15 years or so, the pleasures of freedom of expression. Those who are a generation younger cannot begin to understand what censorship means, which is why they laugh at it, instead of taking the prospect seriously. The younger generation in our household cannot even conceive of a situation in which one group of people decides that the rest of the population should be prevented, on religious grounds, from seeing a film. They laughed in my face when I told them of the Vince Marshall pilgrimage with Our Lady of Fatima. “You’re joking.” No, I wasn’t joking, and I wasn’t surprised, either – but then, I come from a generation that read smuggled copies of The Thornbirds, a novel that was banned because it featured a cardinal who had an affair – an affair with a woman, it goes without saying, because that was the 1970s, and not with a man or a boy. There was more incredulous hilarity around the kitchen table. Then one of them got up to make me a cup of tea, in a fleeting moment of compassion for my deprived teenage years.