Religious zealots annoy me on a regular basis, but it has been some time now since a bit of religious zeal has annoyed me as much as the bishops’ demand that carnival revellers be arrested and prosecuted for mocking their religion. The last time I felt moved to comment about this sort of behaviour was when it was widely put forward as incontrovertible fact that close contact with a magic shoelace could cause the blind to see and fatally diseased organs to heal themselves. But enough about that, and let’s stick to the carnival farce.
On Ash Wednesday, from his pulpit in Victoria cathedral, the Bishop of Gozo found nothing more serious to condemn than a bunch of young men dressed as Jesus and his apostles. Gang rapes, sheep-shagging, murders, old women stuffed down wells, dogs strung up dead, boy-fondling priests who hide in their Victoria homes from armies of door-stepping American journalists while the CNN cameras roll, homemade porn with schoolgirls, lying, cheating, stealing, drug-dealing, chucking wives off cliffs, wearing carnival masks to murder aunts, warden-stabbing, keeping old men as sex slaves while taking their pensions, and gruesome contract murders of lawyers shot and dragged bleeding from their doorsteps – all of these local Gozo problems passed him by.
In the mind of the Bishop of Gozo, what brings his island into disrepute and shame, what undermines public decency and human dignity, is a group of 20-year-olds got up in frocks and beards “in an effort to make people laugh”.
Well, what a scandal. As if that were not enough, the Archbishop of Malta felt moved to issue a joint statement with his colleague on the other side of the channel. “It is good for society to defend the rights of minorities who have different views from the majority of the public. But no one should have the right to ridicule the belief of others in this way,” the bishops thundered.
If Malta wants a lesson in freedom of expression, the last people it should consult are those who speak from the throne of one religion or another. The last time this debate took the world by storm was not when somebody dressed himself down as Jesus in an obscure carnival parade in an obscure village on an obscure island, but when a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of Mohammed and somebody in a very oppressive society declared a religious war on the cartoonist, the editor, the newspaper, Denmark, Europe and the entire democratic west. The question was asked: should the democratic west, which had achieved its long-cherished tradition of freedom of expression through centuries of bloodshed and misery, through the soul-searching years of the Age of Enlightenment, allow that tradition to be sabotaged and returned to pre-Enlightenment years by people coming from a culture which had not yet attained its own enlightenment? The answer was no.
The same holds true for Malta and Catholicism. We are free to mock that religion as we deem fit and as we wish. If we are free to mock other religions, other belief systems, and those who have no religion at all, then we are free to mock the state religion. Those who counter this argument by saying that we should not be free to ridicule any religion at all do not understand the full, dangerous implications of their half-thought-through theory. Maltese society is still fairly primitive but one would have thought that by now we would have evolved to the point where we are no longer putting forward the sort of arguments which justified the Inquisition. To say that these arguments are more acceptable now than they were then because now we prosecute those who laugh at religion in an independent court and fine them, instead of torturing them on a rack and then giving them a jolly old burning, speak madness.
Under pressure from the bishops, the police arrested nine young men and prosecuted them. One wonders how they found them. Did they knock on Nadur doors asking for information on the villains who dressed as Christ? Unlikely, given that the average Gozitan will not even tell you that the person to whose home you have been invited for lunch lives next door, when you make your enquiries, or will send you off on a wild-goose chase when you ask for directions. So what did they do – track people down from the many photographs taken on the night? This brought back memories. My friends and I were tracked down by police inspector Anglu Farrugia, after a mass meeting in 1984, from photographs showing us sitting down in the road and refusing to move when police manhandled us. I didn’t like those Stasi tactics then and I like them even less now.
The nine men were prosecuted under Section 338 of the Criminal Code, which makes it a crime for people to dress up as priests, police officers, soldiers or sailors without official permission to do so. I can see why it would be illegal to impersonate a police officer, a soldier or a sailor with criminal or fraudulent intent, but I fail to see why no distinction is made between this behaviour and fooling around in a carnival parade while wearing bits of uniform borrowed from a brother or uncle. Or is it now a crime to mock a military uniform and bring the forces into shame and disrepute by wearing a cap at an indecently cocked angle? As for it being a crime to dress like a priest – oh please. If I were a man, I would be sorely tempted to spend a week running all my errands dressed as a priest, with a large sign on my back saying “Arrest me, you suckers”. It’s not too difficult to dress up as a priest nowadays, in any case, given that most of them wear normal clothes and not a soutane.
The bishops, of course, were thrilled. You would have thought that the police had arrested and arraigned all those bigots, zealots and racists polluting the ether with their condemnation and suspicion of anyone who is black, African, Muslim or has come off a rickety boat into paradise. And, interestingly, the bishops haven’t breathed a word about all that, either. Going down on paper as Europe’s Bigotry Central does not bring the islands into shame and disrepute. No. Only dressing up as Jesus does.
Upset at having no courts of their own from which to perform the rituals of the Inquisition, the bishops were forced to content themselves with making sure that the police did their duty. They demanded that the police “defend the rights of the public” – that term “The People” again – and felt the need to add that this applied not only to religious beliefs but to “public decency”. If the bishops wish to see a true affront to public decency, they need go no further than the comments-board of an on-line newspaper, which is clogged with the verbal detritus of a thousand racists and bigots, suggesting that Malta is becoming the Planet of the Apes, that all Africans are machete-wielding, HIV-ridden savages, that any pregnant woman who risks the sea-trip is irresponsible and deserves all she gets, and that the invaders should be left to starve, drown or die of AIDS, but if they keep coming we can round up the hunters to help us shoot them down.
I don’t know what planet the bishops are living on – the Planet of the Apes, perhaps? – but that’s what the developed world would call an affront to public decency, and not a youth with a palpitating heart tacked onto the front of his frock.
The bishops continued to put pressure on the police by saying in their statement that what had happened at the Nadur carnival was in violation of the law, and that if no action is taken, the authorities would be “endorsing and approving such illegal behaviour”, adding for good measure that they were “sure this was not the case”. Not satisfied with this, they added that “this should not be allowed to happen again”.
It is purely out of respect for their office that I resist the urge to say to the bishops: “Oh b****r off and mind your own damned business.” Since when is carnival a religious festivity? The whole point of carnival is that it is not a religious festival and that all authorities, religious and secular, are kept right out of it. Carnival is by its very nature anarchic. Without that anarchy, there is no point to it. What you get is that ridiculous, deadbeat parade of fluorescent floats in Valletta’s sanitised spectacle – the most boring and pointless carnival in the history of the world. I laughed in despair when I read some of the comments on the internet, expressing shock and disgust at the transformation of the Nadur carnival into a bacchanalia. Somebody run quickly and tell these people that carnival is a bacchanalia and that is its entire raison d’etre.
A carnival is not a carnival without widespread drunkenness, disorderly conduct, rude behaviour, a shedding of inhibitions, much letting down of hair, obscenity, mockery of society’s sacred cows, pillorying of authority figures, and general letting off of steam. What Malta has today is not carnival but the antithesis of carnival. It wasn’t always this way, and Nadur has gone some considerable distance towards reminding us what carnival is all about. Meanwhile, the bishops and their variegated acolytes appear to have forgotten why Lascaris was the most unpopular and vilified grandmaster in 250 years of life under the military boot of the Order of St John.
Amusingly – for there is some fun to be had in all of this – the bishops, their lawyers, the chuntering fools on the internet and the suck-up police got it wrong: it is not illegal to dress up as Jesus and his apostles. If it were, whole contingents of special assignment police would have to be called out to every religious parade on the islands, every Good Friday procession, Last Supper tableau, and repetitively tedious performance by the village youth club of Jesus Christ Superstar. And while we’re at it, let’s arrest all those babies standing in for the infant Jesus at school nativity plays in every school in every town. God, how I laughed. That’s the trouble when you’re trained to think along religious lines, which demands the shelving of reason. You fail to think rationally.
So the only man found guilty was a 26-year-old dressed up as a priest. He was charged with offending Roman Catholics or the ministers of this religion, on the night between 21 and 22 February in Nadur, by wearing a sacred habit without permission and against the prohibition of the authorities. He pleaded guilty, was given a suspended sentence and now has a criminal record. Christ and the apostles got off scot-free. Five of the apostles weren’t arrested at all, given that only nine people were hauled before the Inquisition and one of them was Christ while the other was wearing a soutane and charged with doing his bidding.
Those who claim that, because dressing up as a priest is against the law the police were right to prosecute, miss the very important point that as times change, laws must come up for review. This is one of them. We cannot mock and denigrate Islam and regard it with contempt for prohibiting all depictions of Mohammed and then hold fast to a law that makes it a crime to dress as a minister of the Roman Catholic Church. But then I forgot for one moment that most people in Malta actually sought to justify the Muslim stance on coercing the secular west to comply with its religious rules.
If this country knows what’s good for it, there will be a hundred people dressed as Jesus, the apostles and Fr Anthony Mercieca at the Nadur carnival next year. And if there are not, then we deserve everything we get. Meanwhile, I shall have to remind the Bishop of Gozo and the Archbishop of Malta that a priest’s frock is not brought into disrepute when it is worn by a young man having fun during a carnival parade, but when it is worn by a real priest who has been defrocked in Miami for going after boys, only to cross the Atlantic and hide out in Gozo. Or when it is worn by another priest who does the reverse: flees from Gozo to the United States when reports that he has been fondling boys mount up to the point where the Gozo Bishopric can no longer pretend that they don’t exist. How hard it is to take the bishops seriously, which is why I don’t.
And if they demand that the police arrest me for mocking them and their religion, I should be so delighted. They are not, however, about to take on a grown woman capable of intelligent argument. They prefer to stick to the time-honoured Catholic tradition of preying on the vulnerable, hence the arrest of nine young men incapable of expressing themselves in any way other than by wearing outfits deemed offensive in the context of carnival when they are not offensive in the context of Jesus Christ Superstar or the Mosta Good Friday pageant.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com