Did Christian Peregin at The Times really ‘pick the brains of political commentators’ over the Cyrus Engerer issue and Edgar Galea Curmi’s conversation with the Police Commissioner? Hardly, but listen.

If Lino Spiteri would not “get into whether (Mr Galea Curmi) should resign or not”, you can rest assured there is no case for resignation and, as one bright on-liner among an array of dim-liners remarked, the whole business is a tsunami-in-a-thimble. So forget the Galea Curmi red herring and concentrate on the real issue.

Engerer was interrogated by the police on June 23. The reason? A report lodged by his ex-boyfriend who alleges that Mr Engerer e-mailed photographs showing allegedly pornographic photo­graphs of his former partner. Sixteen days later, Engerer asks the police to expedite the case.

Three weeks after the interrogation, Engerer resigns, ostensibly because he disagreed with the ‘no’ vote cast by the Prime Minister at the end of the divorce debate. He could not live with this, at least not on the benches of the Nationalist Party. Mmmm. On the benches of the progressive Labour Party was another matter.

The next day he announces that he will stand for the Labour Party when elections are called. Labour leader Joseph Muscat is euphoric, ecstatic; into Labour’s fold, the crowing suggests, another pot of gold has fallen – but it has since turned into a poisoned chalice.

Engerer had said nothing to the Labour leader about the police investigations and pending charges; as he had said nothing to the party from which he divorced himself.

Given that he was fully in the picture as to the direction in which police proceedings were moving, and why they were travelling down that path, this was by any standard a matter for resignation from politics altogether – or sacking.

Strangely, Muscat, who had stretched out his arms in welcome only a few days before, found it difficult to unstretch them. Engerer’s appalling decision to circulate those photographs was his business, a personal matter (here he echoed Lino Spiteri). Given that it had entered the public domain via the man who had chided Gonzi on his principles, it manifestly no longer was. Anybody with an ounce of grey matter could have told Muscat otherwise; many did not.

So, something had to be done; a passing red herring in the shape of Galea Curmi and a totally innocent conversation he had with the Police Commissioner was hooked, only to wriggle itself off the line.

Muscat was left with the one that got away. Up to the time of writing he has still not recognised the herring’s disappearance; nor, outwardly, has the position of Engerer as Labour’s flavour of the month.

Muscat has the unfortunate habit of dashing in where ’twere better he tiptoed around in angelic slippers before rushing to judgment; this inability is called immaturity. He sees himself, however tortuous this vision is in reality, as a latter-day Don Quixote – a role it is easy to see the leader of the Opposition assuming.

Otherwise, he would not dismiss so cavalierly a judicial inquiry that has been set up on the grounds that the judge selected heads a Permanent Commission Against Corruption that had not found a case of corruption in 12 years. Maybe there had not been enough evidence? He also called for two further inquiries in which Labour-nominated board members would be included. Why should they be? Echoes of the past as the jingles of the present rhyme on.

Now what?

So, an amended divorce Bill has been passed and we will now live happily ever after, before death do us part. The passage of the Bill was called a historic decision; and so it was; it remains to be seen what history will make of it – and of Maltese society.

A cursory nod in the direction of so many countries who have taken divorce-on-a-whim on board with such insouicance gives us a strong indication of the future our children and grandchildren face. For that, in the final analysis, was what the debate was all about, even if this facet of that debate hardly featured.

Will they witness, or be participants, in multiple marriages? They will certainly grow up in a social environment where this possibility approaches the probable. Or will many of them, once the culture of divorce takes root, prefer to cohabit rather than marry? I imagine so; more divorce, less marriages, more cohabitatiom – that, everywhere else has been the name of the game.

I came across a comment, or a series of comments, made some time ago in Newsweek magazine by a John Hopkins sociologist. Their bottom line was an acknowlegment that the US has a divorce rate higher than any other country in the world.

“We divorce, re-partner, and remarry faster than people in any other country”, and children were more likely to grow up in households where parents, step-parents, and live-in partners move in and out of their lives; than which, surely, there can be nothing worse.

One observation in particular demands sharing. “Many of the problems faced by America’s children stem not from parents marrying too little but rather too often.”

In the wake of the referendum decision we have been informed that, “The first bitter truth... is that the Church’s word is no longer heeded”.

This sweeping assertion was made by Fr Alfred Micallef in last Sunday’s edition of this newspaper. The numbers bear this out only if we place 90,000 abstainers in the ‘Yes’ basket. It remains the fact, however, that “fings ain’t what they used to be”.

But I wish to take Fr Alfred up on one point in particular; there were more. He is of the opinion that “...our ministry tends to be too sacramental and devotional”. There is a reason for this. We are, before all else, a sacramental Church.

In a contribution on the centenary of the birth of “Marshall McLuhan and the divine message,” Fr Raymond J. de Souza describes him as “a scholar of communications and mass culture”.

De Souza observes that a convert to Catholicism, McLuhan’s Catholic faith was “that God makes us holy through the sacraments... The Catholic sacramental imagination, the conviction that God uses the tangible things of this world – water, oil, bread, wine – as a means of grace...” So, rather than knock sacramentality let us instead teach it and live it with conviction starting with a reverence for Christ’s presence in the tabernacle instead of a disregard for it.

And if I agree with Fr Micallef wholeheartedly that priests “are there to serve and for no other reason”, I would urge him to make it his mission to persuade hierarchy, fellow priests and community to enter, body and soul, into the life of the Church, a sacramental Church, and teach this sacramentality so that it flows into every priest’s pastoral life, a shining light to faithful and unfaithful alike.

Wasteful if in any effort to get things right, wrong things are done, like losing the baby down the plughole.

But it is not service alone that is required, essential though that is; needed is a quintessential recog­nition that cathechisis at its deepest and, for that matter, at its shallowest, has failed and we must get back to basics.

Who will blink first?

By last Thursday the White House-Congress war on the debt crisis gave every impression that neither the President nor the Republican party was prepared to flinch; more dramatically, to avoid Obama’s emotive ‘Armageddon’. At one stage it was reported that even in the unlikely event that the bill the Republicans pass through (a) the House, controlled by them and (b) Senate, controlled by the Democrats, the President would still give it the thumbs down.

This scenario has not yet evolved, but Friday night it half-did when GOPs passed a debt bill which the Senate shot down and Democrats came up with their own plans.

This means the nail-biting crisis may well run up to tomorrow night; if it remains unresolved, few doubt that failure would grill Barack Obama’s bacon and see him out of the White House. There will be a number of sizzled Congressmen in his company.

There is much political shena­nigan in all this; it is highly improbable that an agreement will not be reached before D-Day on Tuesday. Should this turn out to be correct, the rest of the world, still scarred by the international crisis it has been living through, will breathe a sigh of relief and call for “a plague on both (Republican and Democrat) houses”.

For while Washington goes through tantrums made more explosive by the proximity of next year’s presidential elections, the rest, including Malta – given the sparse attention given to it by our media you wouldn’t have thought so – are left to contemplate Armageddon.

Last Monday, Obama addressed the nation. It was, as usual, a good performance as far as his supporters were concerned; and instructive to hear him appeal in favour of American exceptionalism, some­thing he has scoffed at in the past.

“The entire world is watching. So let’s seize the moment to show why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on earth”. His listeners must have nodded and muttered – let’s.

But at the end of the day, the buck stops with the President; he cannot be seen to be playing politics and clearing the ground for an election year free of Congressional pressure – the entire American experiment of government hinges on this tension; indeed, is based on it.