Politics in the Gospel
Authour: Charlo Camilleri
Publisher: Horizons / 2023
Pages: 139
The heading of this review would quite fit as a title of a sermon to be delivered these days in the wake of the controversies regarding the possible acquisition of HSBC Bank Malta by the Church bank APS Bank Ltd.
It wouldn't be a bad idea more so as the one who came up with the original comparison was none other than Pope John Paul I himself, the author tells us.
When Albino Luciani was still a Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, that is before he became Pope, the local church had been badly impacted by the crisis in the Vatican bank, IOR and financial experts had been brought in to advise the local church on managing its finances.
This was when Cardinal Luciani sarcastically asked whether they knew the difference between "il dio trino' and "il dio quattrino', between the triune God and the god of money.
I could almost hear the author timidly asking the same question in the context of the tiny church bank in Malta trying to gobble up the far bigger world bank.
Those of us who have been round the block remember APS when it was the Bank of the Apostleship of Prayer and more recently when it joined the group of ethical banks along with German and Spanish banks with the same orientation.
Then came a change of chairman and the board and APS got bigger ambitions.
This is a slim book containing the author's contributions to the weekly reflections on the Gospel and the readings carried on the Sunday Times.
The book's cover reproduces the altarpiece Cena in Emmaus by Riccardo Tommaso Ferroni for the Santa Maria in. Monte Santo church in Rome - the pale risen Christ with the symbols of the Resurrection, bread and fish, spread on a newspaper as a altar table cloth with the disciples wearing contemporary and 16th century clothes.
I was time and again struck by the wide range of reading which serve to set off each week's reflections - the recently deceased Ernesto Cardinale, Carlos Mesters, Friedrich Holderlin, Charles Baudelaire, Elie Weisel as well as rivetingly Marie-Francoise Hanquez-Maincent on her experiences as wife to an ordained permanent deacon touching on the wider debate on further contributions by women in the church which now does not seem to be reaching a conclusion in the current Synod.
This is not the first written contribution by the author (and shames those among his colleagues who have not).