From Mr P. Apap Bologna

Daphne started off her column last Sunday by announcing, “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.”

Oddly enough, I find I am far more irritated by anti-religious zealots, especially those of Daphne’s ilk who are unable to work out for themselves whether they are atheists, rationalists, or agnostics, or something else. To my mind religious belief is a private matter. My own beliefs, non-beliefs, or doubts, may well coincide with Daphne’s, but I am not telling her or anyone else, for they are private, and my affair only.

In her personal attack on the Bishop of Gozo, she chastised him for not finding “anything more serious to condemn than a bunch of young men dressed as Jesus and his apostles”. She lists as more appropriate subjects for the bishop to comment on: “Gang rapes; sheep-shagging; murders,” and so on, ad nauseam, hardly any crime left unmentioned. I am surprised she did not raise the matter of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and indeed the Borgias, with whom she must most certainly empathise.

Daphne wrote, “Under pressure from the bishops, the police arrested nine young men and prosecuted them.” It turns out the police had already acted independently of the bishops’ exhortations. This is a matter of fact, which can be confirmed by the Curia and the police. If Daphne persists in reporting half-truths, then she is not worth reading.

Charlie Galea, writing in The Times (12 March), from New South Wales, deplores the bishops’ actions and compares the events in Gozo with the Gay Mardi Gras parade in Sydney. Hardly! Mr Galea, like so many others, has been misled into thinking that the objection to the Nadur event is based on religious intolerance.

It is nothing of the sort, except in the misguided and uneducated opinion of Daphne and her acolytes. The events in Nadur caused offence to a majority of people in Malta and Gozo, and must therefore be classified as a misdemeanour. If something is offensive to the citizenry in general, it must lead to admonishment and correction. I can think of ringing bells too loudly, firing excessively loud petards, not bagging your dog’s pooh, blaspheming, blocking people’s garages, slinging mud indiscriminately, and so on, for all of which our magistrates’ courts have or should have appropriate fines.

It must be obvious to your readers that Daphne will grab at every opportunity to attack the Church, in her now familiar vulgar stridency and obnoxious rhetoric, as in, “I don’t know what planet the bishops are living on – the Planet of the Apes, perhaps?” or, “I resist the urge to say to the bishops: ‘Oh bugger off and mind your own damned business’.”

There is no question that the Church is in need of reformation but, as Kenneth Zammit Tabona wrote recently, “...the Church is still a good influence as epitomised by the life and work of Mother Teresa of Calcutta...” One only has to look at the good work of the Salesians of Don Bosco, and so many others.

Helena Dalli recently warned – but in a civilised manner – against the church becoming a tool of the government. Fair enough! His Holiness has just apologised for the mistake he made regarding the Holocaust-denying bishop, proving that the Church can be receptive to reasonable criticism.

It is astonishing that Daphne has been allowed to get away with murder for so long:

Her vendettas against the De Marcos, Alfred Sant, the Labour Party, and of course the Church, to mention just a few, have caused great offence and embarrassment all round, and are totally unacceptable to reasonable citizens of this nation. She must be taught to improve her manners, and if her editors won’t tackle her, we the people must. No amount of indiscriminate mudslinging will deter us. I urge your readers to rise up and speak their minds.

Peter Apap Bologna

SLIEMA