The mob attack on a black man at Mġarr, Gozo, caused an uproar but was unsurprising. After all, in 2019, Lassana Cisse was killed in cold blood, his companions barely spared, for no other reason than that they “looked different”.
All hate crimes share the same anatomy: they are irrational, monstrous, and unleash violence from a deep, dark place in the heart that refuses to see the other as human. Hatred is not the contrary of love: indifference freezes the self-offering implied in acts of mercy and friendship. Hatred is what opposes empathy: the ‘feeling-with’ that urges acts of justice and love, forging the group bonds that characterise social beings. In a world that is a cauldron of suffering, hatred is blind to others’ suffering; while denying their humanity, it justifies projecting – and thus blaming – “our” suffering onto “them”. Hatred is woundedness within, turned putrid, making me monstrous.
“Love your neighbour as yourself” implies the sin of resisting God’s mercy, the healing balm to all suffering. If I resist, or even reject God’s mercy, my poison consumes me, until I can barely tolerate myself. As I detest myself, my violence erupts with a vengeance onto any ‘other’ on whom I project my horror.
Nor is hatred what happens occasionally when ‘others’ run amok. Until I recognise that the lynching mob is me, because darkness is in my heart, I remain prone to violence – even in subtle forms. I might think of myself as “too good” to be intolerant, racist or misogynist. But as I put myself on a pedestal, I am still flaunting how much better than you I am.
Nor is hatred’s shadow limited in time and space. As exposed in the thousands of indigenous children’s graves unearthed in Canada, collective memory is scarred, and its contagion spreads, even when the “problem” seems settled. Canada boasts being “the first country in the world” to adopt multiculturalism as official policy – intentionally not choosing one cultural identity – sealed in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Multiculturalism Act. But the trail of bodies exposes the intricate tentacles of “cultural genocide” as a deep-seated hatred for native peoples… paradoxically while Canada became a beacon of the postcolonial promise that immigrants from all over the world could find refuge and live peaceably on one land.
Europe too preaches integration. But colonial residential schools that sought to “civilise the savages with the gospel” are our Christian and European legacy too. When Pope Francis, son of European migrants to “the end of the world”, laments that “the Mediterranean has become Europe’s largest cemetery”, perhaps it should be our wake-up call that our monstrosity is being unleashed again.
To what extent has the Old World – including the Catholic and other churches – acknowledged, repented, sought reparation and begged forgiveness for centuries of colonialism and the horror of supremacist tendencies – often justified theologically?
As Maltese, deeply insecure about our cultural identity, do we project our unhealed traumas unto “strangers”, deemed somewhat “lesser than us”, unworthy of respect, let alone care? As baptised, are we a scandal to Christ’s gift of reconciliation? Dare we open our hearts to the mercy that brings light to the Hades within?
nadia.delicata@maltadiocese.org
Nadia Delicata, Episcopal delegate for evangelisation of the Malta Archdiocese