I was a passenger on the flight to Brussels of the “new” KM Malta Airlines on the day following that of its inaugural slots. The service was impeccable, though not at all different to what Air Malta’s had been over the decades that I travelled on it: one of truly high quality, practically always. On this (for me) first flight, we departed and arrived on time -- something that recently, Air Malta had been failing in, no doubt for a number of reasons. Yet, it would be premature as of now, to arrive at some judgement on the basis of just one flight with the new outfit!

It seems too that the latter has retained the airplanes of its predecessor. Over the years, the biggest complaint one would hear about Air Malta was about how the planes in its fleet lacked passenger comfort. At least later, many of the Ryan Air planes, packed as they would be, put this into perspective from a competitive point of view. Still, I had heard the complaint as of the days when Air Malta was still operating tourist charters to secure volume. An American friend once told me:  If I had been born with shorter legs, Air Malta would have been champion! Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

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THE ARMS INDUSTRY

European armaments industries have been complaining for long that they have been forgotten and that governments were not ordering enough munitions from their facilities. Pope Francis and others are right to insist that governments should not allow themselves to be led on by the claims of arms traffickers. (The Pope of course was not as blunt but those who read well what he said, will understand what he really meant.)

More information should be publicly available on developments in the armaments industrial sectors -- who runs them, where they operate from, how they sell their output and how they are financed. In this way we “all” can come to some understanding of the background to the pressures which are pushing Europe towards militarisation.

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RELIGION AND WAR

All believers in a religion who find themselves in some war or other need to believe that the divine being they worship will help their side to win. This is what one sees happening  in Russia for instance, where Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, a fervent supporter of Putin’s policies, believes they will be blessed by God who will grant victory in the Ukraine to the Russians.

However, no doubt in Kiev there exists the same belief and trust in their God, worshipped also by the Orthodox Church which till quite recently was a branch of the Russian one. Here as well, nobody can doubt that the expectation is of a Ukrainian victory endorsed by the same divine being that the Russians worship.

This kind of conflict is surely not restricted to the Ortohodox faith. Catholics and Protestants in Europe have experienced many similar contradictory situations.

Which shows how futile it is for religion to get mixed up with the processes of war. Priests should just refuse to participate in all activities that celebrate or glorify acts of war, no matter who organizes them.