A couple of weeks ago I asked you to tell me what you think about “the magic shoelace” miracle, the rush of our politicians en masse to Rome, and the relentless rise of the prayer group in our society. I was overwhelmed by the response. Many wrote lengthy messages to which they had clearly given a great deal of thought. It was as though they had been waiting to make their views known while becoming increasingly frustrated at the public dominance of the opposite view: the one that favours miracles and government-by-religion. I sympathised instantly with the underlying feeling, because it is the very same one that spurred me into writing my first-ever newspaper column in the summer of 1990. The newspaper I read every day at the time bore little or no relation to the reality of life as people lived it, still less to what they really thought. Every day I would open its pages and imagine that I was living in a parallel universe, or some kind of imaginary world. “Right,” I thought, with the arrogance and naivety of somebody in her early 20s. “I’m going to write about what I see and think, because I’m sure that it’s what lots of other people see and think, too.” Over the past few months, I have seen this “detachment from
reality” or the creation of a false or partially-false “reality”, happening again with the media in Malta. The public agenda has been seized by the predominant voices of racist sentiment and religious zeal, to the point where reportage has become irrational, as in the coverage of Dun Gorg’s canonisation, where miracles were reported as fact even in the secular press, and the correspondence columns are filled with hysterical letters about an invasion of illegal immigrants, when there are merely a few hundred compared to our population of nearly half a million. The hysterical sound of zealots and bigots has become so loud that there are those who are convinced that this is how the majority thinks. Gut instinct, which has served me relatively well over the last 17 years, tells me that this might not be the case – that the bigoted racists and the righteous zealots have been allowed to claim the public forum for themselves, and to speak on behalf of ‘Malta’ without Malta having appointed them to do so.
I have taken an excerpt from each of the messages I received, while taking care to protect the privacy of the people who sent them. A couple of days ago, a racist e-mailed me to say that nothing can force him to sit next to an African on a bus, and that he will vote for Josie Muscat or Alfred Sant because they are “hard with immigrants”. He told me that he doesn’t believe in the authenticity – though that’s not how he put it, linguistic coherence not being the strong point of Maltese racists – of any of the messages published last Sunday, from people horrified at the thought of what Josie Muscat’s party stands for. I told him that I am a columnist, not a politician or a mad egotist, and so don’t have anything to gain from manifestations of agreement with my views – and therefore, no interest in going to the trouble of inventing messages. This is a newspaper, not Norman Lowell’s Viva Malta forum, I reminded him.
I haven’t bothered to include the ones that said only how relieved the writers were to read the article and to realise that they are not alone in their views, nor the message from the man who sent me an attachment of quotations from the Bible and told me he would pray for me. My response to those who have at times told me the same thing is this: “Please don’t pray for me, because I consider it an invasion of my privacy – and in any case, there is a more deserving cause in Darfur and in the people who are drowning while trying to reach Europe.”
So here you have the spectrum of views from those who wrote in.
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“What kind of mentality expects miracles engineered by gloves and bootlaces to be placed side by side with stem cell research in a secular context, then mounts an all-out attack on stem cell research and other medical and social progress, and expects no dissent?”
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“Religion as it is practised in Malta is a mixture of magic, folklore and superstition. People have nothing to turn to; they have been culturally neutered. They are desperate and try to grip at some form of security. No wonder the mental health of so many on these islands, including children, is deteriorating, with increasing cases of depression and more and more people on pills.”
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“Your point about the Prime Minister kissing the Pope’s hand was spot on, and not something that I had thought about. Without religion, good people are good, and bad people are bad; only religion allows people to do bad things and still consider themselves to be good.”
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“Unfortunately, Maltese politicians adapt to the inward-looking and narrow-minded mentality of so many people here, instead of trying to bring them along and leading by example. As you pointed out, the Leader of the Opposition seems to have decided that he should not miss an opportunity to look good. How could he not go to Rome for the canonisation?”
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“How could Alfred Sant miss an opportunity to be seen at the canonisation in Rome? With an election approaching, kull qaddis jghin. I might be ready to believe in miracles not when a detached retina re-attaches itself, but when an amputated limb grows back. That would be a real miracle, but it’s never happened. Now that we have a Maltese saint, it will be like going to the local MP – he knows us better, understands us more, and will intercede on our behalf with more vehemence. Bla qaddisin ma titlax is-sema.”
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“I just came across an article criticising President Arroyo of the Philippines for kissing the Pope’s hand. Who else would do it but the leaders of Malta and the Philippines, the last bastions against divorce?”
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“Some people are unable to understand the distinction between Church and State. It’s not their fault; they’ve been brainwashed. So if the Church says that something is bad, then these people believe that the State should make it illegal or unavailable. I hate to say this, but religion can be the greatest obstacle to a tolerant and free society.”
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“Who knows how many pious people took to heart what you said about our famous saint? The best thing to come out of it was that I got the day off work.”
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“I would like to let you know that I much enjoyed reading your two articles about Dun Gorg and the clerical/religious scene in Malta. It is a long time since I read such clear reasoning and cogent arguments in the local press.”
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“Thanks for standing up for rationality in an increasingly irrational country. I believe that many are genuinely in search of a religious experience they can’t find in the stuffy environment of the traditional Roman Catholic Church. It’s a pity they don’t try instead to understand the world around them, in all its richness. Maltese society has a long way to go to free itself from cobwebbed thinking, so that it can achieve progress in the pursuit of knowledge.”
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“Having for so long noticed the subtle intermingling of church and state in Malta, I couldn’t possibly ignore your invitation to comment. Look at popular television forums like Xarabank and Bondi+, where the debate on legal and moral matters – divorce, abortion, illegal immigrants – always includes a priest. If the debate is going to be about moral and ethical considerations, then it must be argued by moralists and ethicists who cannot revert to dogma. Another point: all Maltese are taxed regardless of their beliefs, so legislation must be based on non-religious criteria. After the government waived the departure tax for pilgrims to the canonisation ceremony in Rome, I would be very amused if the Muslim community of Malta were to petition the government to do the same when they attend the annual Haj ceremony. As for the miracle, medical texts are replete with statistics on cancer mortality. In no case that I can remember off-hand is mortality expressed as 100 per cent. Liver cancer is no exception. Certainly, as Dr Dhawan said, complete and spontaneous cures are fascinating – not for the reason of providing the wherewithal for the canonisation of holy persons, but for the means of understanding the processes that led to the cure. If, for example, pancreatic cancer is fatal in 90-95 per cent of cases at two to five years from diagnosis, there are perhaps complex factors in the ‘cured’ five to 10 per cent that explain the course of the disease. The alternative explanation is that those five to 10 per cent are all routinely miracles worthy of investigation to build the case for new saints, to whom the sick person may have prayed – if at all, and if Catholic. I think all this is rather obvious, and that makes it all the more sad.”
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“Some people seem to have been upset because of your stance on miracles and saints. Well, now they know how the rest of us feel when we have to face, day in day out, the preaching in the newspaper correspondence pages and opinion columns of some holy Joe or Jane, or some priest, telling us to whom and how we should pray, why suffering is a divine whip urging us towards the carrot of paradise, and why divorce, sex outside marriage, euthanasia, abortion and stem-cell research are evil – and which Catholic taboo to include in the Constitution. The Church cannot seem to understand that it has no right to prevent scientific and social progress, or to run people’s lives through its influence with elected representatives – even though a large percentage of citizens may not be interested in their religion, or at least their view of it. Nor can pious people realistically expect anyone who disagrees with them to stay silent. They cannot cry foul and invoke ‘religious respect’ when dissenters voice secular opinions in a secular newspaper in a secular State. As for the magic glove and bootlace, the system is loaded towards how many followers of the dead guru are working on the public relations project. So Dun Gorg
tal-Muzew and Joe Maria Escriva of Opus Dei are fast-tracked because they have thousands of followers plying the hospital wards with bootlaces, blood-soaked cotton, gloves and other relics, while all the English priests who were hung, drawn and quartered in Protestant England, martyred for their faith, languish without a halo because there are few Catholics in England. Until I read your piece I thought I was the only one who thinks like this.”
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“I live in Australia, and have done for most of my life, bar a couple of years in the 1990s. My parents emigrated from Malta, which accounts for my interest in my ethnic heritage. Malta is a society many centuries old, unlike Australia, and with strong connections to other societies that led the way in free thinking and democratic practice. Yet the atmosphere of the village remains. Malta has Internet, education, travel, was part of the British Empire for the better part of two centuries, and yet the village mentality pervades all. The great material leap forward in the post-war period was accompanied by a great leap forward in importing foreign concepts, with the notable exception of free thought. For many, the only thing left to cling to now is religion, which has become an expression of culture and of national identity. In Malta, religion is not just a part of culture but the whole of it. The country is still content to play the part of the beleaguered Christian outpost at the edge of the ‘civilised’ world. It is a deeply insecure society, one which has a massive inferiority complex that manifests itself in religious fanaticism, racism, lack of the right kind of national pride, and petty jealousies and conflict. The ability to appreciate and understand one’s weaknesses and mistakes is a strength that can be used for improvement. It is only through education that there can be any hope for the future, and by this I don’t mean only academic education, but a genuine push for self-improvement and free thought.”
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“I think you have the wrong perspective on a number of issues, especially prayer groups. Some prayer groups I have visited were attended by doctors, ministers, teachers, students, young people and all types of species who are not desperate and free like the women you mentioned in your article.”
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“The prayer-group concept has more to do with psychological/social needs than with religion. I think that the man who has just been canonised, and who introduced duttrina to our children, may have been largely responsible for the serious detachment between what we say we believe in and what we actually do. What do you expect when you teach young children to believe in mysteries and miracles? His eccentricity and his fear and suspicion of women have been forgotten, it seems.”
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“Prayer groups are definitely not an ‘extension of the schoolgirls’ clique’. The people who attend prayer groups do so because it is written in the Bible that where two or more people pray together, God is surely in their midst. If you attend a prayer group with good intentions, not just to meet friends or pass the time, you will feel God’s presence. My attendance at prayer groups makes me feel peaceful and happy, and helps me to live a better life and pray more.”
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“My friend was led to believe that if she joined a prayer group, her loved one who had been ill with cancer for some years would be cured. Her fellow prayer-group members told her that she should place pictures of Dun Gorg on her loved one’s sick body, but the young woman died all the same. I had told my friend, when she asked for my opinion, that prayer is useless in these stricken circumstances, and that what she needed was hope that the medical treatment would be successful. Now my friend is bitter that she was ‘cheated’ by her prayer group at a time when she was desperate and clutching at any straw that would save her loved one. They played on her weakness when she was passing through hell, and now she finds it hard to believe in anything at all.”
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“There is a difference between religion and faith. Religiosity is what many people live by, but faith gives sense to religion. In our prayer group, we try to explore faith and being, and to move towards God, and religion helps us with that. Religious issues such as contraception and abortion rarely crop up in our discussions, though we do talk about them sometimes. They are not the issues which move us – rather, we try to discover the real meaning of faith, and try to live it.”
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“Many Maltese grow up with a strong religious background, and though we manage to wriggle out of the ‘guilt’ and to live our lives according to our own creed, there is a strong feeling of belonging when we return to religious organisations and groups. Now I am in my 30s and live in The Netherlands, far away from the religious dome that covers the whole of the Maltese Islands. I have given up the Catholic rulebook but can see why some people find prayer groups so reassuring. They are much fresher and more enjoyable than Sunday Mass, which I believe almost everyone finds boring. If a person is already God-fearing, prayer groups are a great way of fulfilling religious obligations in a more stimulating way. But that is not the only reason why people join them. Many join for the same reason that others join the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Church of Scientology, or any social club for that matter. The prayer group I used to go to was full of single women and some men, including gay people. Much dating took place. Partner-searching is one of the reasons for the popularity of these groups. I’m not sure about the social scene in Malta today, but when I left, places where people could meet, which were not bars or clubs, were virtually non-existent. Compare this situation with the ready availability of prayer groups, religious youth centres and church organisations, and you can see why people flock to them.”
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“Why, in an age when State and religion should be moving further apart, are we continuing to merge them? You may have missed out on something which is possibly a bit more worrying than women ‘who don’t work’ going to prayer groups. More and more university students, the supposed intelligentsia of tomorrow, are signing up for them. At a time in their life when they no longer need an excuse for going out and meeting people, which will keep their mothers happy, why are their social groups still seated on the lap of religion?”
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“In my prayer group we are mostly men, students at university. We have decided to consider the possibility of religion or faith in our lives. We pray, we share stories, we discuss topics like justice and church morality, and we mock or try to understand trivial church issues like id-damask tal-knisja and the occasional blood-spewing Madonna statuette. In this we are of one mind with you. But we sigh and go on with our religious beliefs, because we try to see the whole picture. Why should we fret over why politicians go to religious ceremonies that are in contradiction with their daily lives? We all know why they went to Rome – votes, or maybe not to feel so hypocritical. Religion can do a lot of good. We work with refugees; we do voluntary work abroad. I did not go to Ethiopia because my religion told me to do so. I went because I wanted to see what life is like for so much of humanity.”
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“I wouldn’t put all prayer groups in the same basket. The Church is a multi-faceted organisation. It’s true that the neo-Conservative fundamentalism of many Charismatic and Neo-Cathecumenical groups is despicable, but there are much smaller groups who have a more liberal and socially-aware interpretation of the Catholic faith.”
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“I am a member of a prayer group. The hypocrisy of many who claim to have faith, but who live otherwise, worries me greatly. The tuna-fish net incident is a clear demonstration of this. It disgusts me to see how many people hold their rosary beads in one hand and slap refugees with the other. You shouldn’t judge religion as a social evil, or put all believers under the same umbrella. Many try their best to change the world for the better, though those who exploit religion for power or for security taint all such efforts.”
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“Praying is an intensely personal matter and not something to be done publicly with a crowd or group. From what I hear, they do a lot of singing, shouting, waving of hands, and other manifestations of devotion. I suppose there are also sermons and frank discussions about the nature of God and Man, where everyone is in agreement that it is good to be a Christian, better if you are a Catholic Christian, and best of all if you are a born-again Catholic Christian. I have a sneaking suspicion that these Catholic prayer groups are being organised to counter the threat of Evangelical Baptist groups, hence the faith-healing and laying-of-hands, besides waving them in the air.”
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“I don’t need saints and miracles to believe in God. There is an explanation for everything, even if we don’t yet know what the explanation might be. Unexpected things happen in life all the time – good and bad – and they are not predetermined by God but are accidental quirks. If we are able to accept this fundamental truth, then we are also able to deal with life and all it throws at us, and to move on. If we are unable to cope with the understanding that there is no plan or destiny in our lives, then we are unable to bear unexpected bad things or tragedies. They overwhelm and depress us, and we petition God to intervene and change the course of our lives. It is here that prayer groups come in, as a reaction and a ‘solution’ to this inability of many to cope with life. They encourage people to believe in the possibility, even the desirability, of divine intervention. People in prayer groups pray to God to accommodate their wishes, to change their present misfortune, and to safeguard their future. They tell God what they want him to do for them and instruct him as to what they expect from life. In their depression, they become hysterical, and in their detached state of mind they experience things which they believe to be the Holy Spirit. They fall to the ground and are ‘healed’, but this only until they experience another stressful event – and real life is full of stress.”
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“My need to attend a prayer group comes from fear – fear of the future, fear that my sons will take the wrong track, fear that my savings will run out long before I die and I will have to live in poverty, fear of isolation, of losing my friends, of not having the wisdom to deal with problems, fear of becoming ill and not being allowed to take my own life, and fear of the present – of not being understood, of being judged wanting, of making bad decisions and being rejected by my family, of not reaching the extremely high standards I was taught to aim for. There’s also guilt, for not doing things perfectly in the past, and for now being too tired and depressed to enjoy my home and family, to clean the house properly, and for not having the self-esteem to believe in myself. I can’t forgive myself for not being perfect. I am admitting all this to myself for the first time as I write this message. The fear is real and is pushed aside by hard work, drowned out by television programmes and deeply thoughtful books, by being creative and busy, and by going to the gym for a gruelling work-out. My prayer group allows us to put ourselves in the loving hands of God and he’ll take care of us. Knowing God loves me as I am makes up for the rejection I have suffered at the hands of my parents and siblings, and fills the void in my heart. There is only one difficulty with this: I can’t see God, but I can see reminders of my problems every day because they are tangible. In the group, we never talk about our real problems. We talk about our vulnerability and look for passages in the bible which console us. Then we have sessions of hard and frenetic prayer. It’s as though we are begging God to carry our load. It is comforting knowing that the well-off businessman praying for his wayward son has problems too, that the well-dressed woman is there because her brother hasn’t spoken to her for 15 years. I feel and know that God hears us more when we pray and sing together and we need to be heard. Nobody listens to me, and it is reassuring to know that I am significant, worthy of being heard.”
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“Many of the women I know have steadily, over the years, joined The Prayer Group. I believe that one of the reasons they have done so is that they have a problem, or problems, which they cannot cope with or understand. The group helps them carry the weight. But religion-in-a-gang? Once I went along out of curiosity, and was amazed to see women I knew actually fainting and falling to the ground when The Healer touched them on the head. Women were also invited to stand up and share their problems. There were a lot of hands waving in the air, and singing and crying. The whole scene reminded me of some sect where people put themselves in a trance. To me it was plain mass hysteria, and I never went again. There is another reason why women join these groups. They really believe that if they can save the souls of ‘sinners’ they will gain brownie points towards a place in heaven. They strive very hard to live a perfect life on the surface, but beneath there is a lot of hypocrisy. Some of them are self-righteous and judgmental. One of them told me that if I lived in Saudi Arabia I would be stoned for adultery, because I live with a man whose marriage broke up. I find it outrageous that many of them don’t allow their children to read Harry Potter, because it’s about witchcraft and so ‘not in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church’. I can’t understand why everything is linked to religion here. People are like sheep, and woe betide any person who strays from the flock.”
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“It doesn’t necessarily take courage to go against the grain in Malta, especially in matters of religion, but it definitely takes great patience, because you open yourself up to all sorts of bores and pedants. My parents began attending a prayer group some years ago, and I began to notice differences in their speech. God became ‘The Lord’ and the prayer said before meals changed slightly, in what seemed to me a sinister fashion. It wasn’t the new sentences themselves which were sinister, but the infiltration of their previous life with new speech patterns and phrases. It bothered me no end. The prayer meeting had an influence on them, grown and mature adults, which I did not expect it to have. I felt that the prayer group had insidiously infiltrated our home. Prayer groups offer the participants a context in which to group-think. This is a harmless form of fascism, as in my parents’ case. But it can go further. The Catholic Church as an organisation is too large to create a situation in which its followers adopt similar language, turns of phrase, and group-thinking, but prayer meetings are the perfect place for this to happen. I observed and spoke at length with many people at my previous place of work who were very much into their prayer group. Their arguments were puerile and had no religious basis at all. It struck me that in most cases they were simply part of a social group, with prayer used to create a group identity for them all. It could have been stamp-collecting or football, but instead it was religion. I consider religion to be a private thing, and when the private turns public, there is reason to worry. I much preferred the black-clad women of my childhood, mouthing prayers they couldn’t understand and leaving their land to the parish priest, than I do these well-heeled prayer buffs ghettoising themselves in the misguided belief that they are following the footsteps of the first Christians.”
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“You argue that these prayer groups are different from the early Christian groups in that there is no persecution in Malta in 2007. Yet the feeling of being persecuted exists strongly in these groups, as in all sect-like groups. Ironically, you would classify as one such Big Persecutor. The sense that Malta is changing very fast, and that the whole mass ‘out there’ is turning against the church, gives rise to this feeling of persecution, real or imagined. Some of these groups, like the Neo-Cathecumenate, specifically recreate the liturgies of the first three centuries of Christianity. You are right in highlighting support as one of the functions of prayer groups. This holds true for two categories of people: those who come in from ‘outside’ after a personal crisis, and those who feel that the mainstream church is disconnected from them. Most of these groups encourage the expression of personal experiences, which some find cathartic and helpful. Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Bereaved Parents and other secular support groups are still in their infancy in Malta, so prayer groups have filled this gap. While there are some like you who want to journey in faith alone, many want to do this with others. The Bible is replete with images of joint journeys. Some of the groups offer a better and less glib reading of the Scriptures. In some cases, this leads to Jehovah’s Witness-type proselytization; they say there is nothing more obnoxious than someone who has just found God and wants to ram the fact down your throat. For others, it becomes a genuine discovery of the Scriptures as a source of faith. In most of these groups, the priest is not the leader. The leaders are lay persons, or charismatic (in the leadership sense) people. Paradoxically, reverence for the priest is very high in these groups. I’m with you on the point of fear and insecurity. Most of these groups tend to think in black on white: Satan versus God; in-group versus out-group. I’ve always found the psychology literature on group-think particularly relevant here. As you so often write, this is dangerous stuff, the prelude to moral and wide-ranging fundamentalism. While some of these groups do go through the pains of complex moral discernment, others think in black or white: ‘this is good, this is bad’. For many people, this is easier and more appealing than going through the anguish of making tough moral decisions of their own. Forty years ago, it was the parish priest who had the answer to all moral questions. Now it is the Group which develops the moral code or adopts a strict interpretation of the official church teachings. We’re not speaking here only of women’s groups. There are groups for couples and groups for men – though yes, there are more women. But there are more men in these groups than there were in churches 50 years ago. A worrying aspect of the prayer groups is their focus on the inner circle. They are so focused on bettering themselves that they are closed to the world outside. This is a contradiction in terms for a Christian group, which should be extroverted. There are some groups that achieve a good balance. Most, however, are falling into black holes of spiritual navel-gazing. Those who study the history of religious life are able to see cycles in which some orders die and new ones rise up. Diarmud O’Murchu is the authority on the subject. In one epoch you had St Benedict and the Benedictines, then St Francis and the Franciscans, then St Ignatius and the Jesuits, and so on. Dun Gorg is the result of a French movement at the turn of the 20th century. The phenomenon of prayer groups can be part of another such cycle, in which the old groups like Catholic Action and the Legion of Mary are no longer relevant.”