Over the years, we've had too many religious programmes on the non-religious station Campus FM. The latest is a series of lectures by a woman on women and religion - as if there isn't enough proselytizing in priest-ridden Malta!

In this age of religious fanaticism, we now have female proselytizers too. Women have always been religion's most gullible dupes, from the hysterical Mary Magdalene to the God-doubting Mother Teresa.

Maltese women are devotees of id-Duluri, a cult that harks back to Isis, the original Sorrowing Mother, and to Demeter, the Mater Dolorosa of the ancient Greeks. 

A week before Easter, you see mournful Maltese women shuffling behind a kitschy statue of Mary, with a dagger in her heart, while they mumble their dreary rosaries.

It is a fact that women can shed tears on demand. No wonder they're so devoted to the sad, lachrymose cult of id-Duluri! 

In Mediterranean countries, religion is "a secondary sexual characteristic of the female".

 

John Guillaumier

St Julian's