When a nation loses its culture and its morality, it loses its backbone. Malta is falling to pieces and, yet, no one speaks up. Everyone maintains a horrible silence.

What matters to us nowadays are power, money, property. We are satisfied with what is futile. Silence prevails and everything continues as normal.

But why do the ones who have the obligation to lead, to act and to decide remain silent?

Napoleon Bonaparte exclaimed: “The world around us suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people but because of the silence of the good people.”

I believe that, at first, a battle may be won by dishonest people, because they are cunning, but, ultimately, the war is always won by the honest man because he perseveres in truth and justice.

Let us not forget what Don Bosco used to say: “Man is different from animals, especially because he is enriched with his soul, thinks, reasons and knows what is good and what is evil.”

For Confucius: “A man is great not because he has failed. A man is great because failure hasn’t stopped him running the race.”

The problem today is that intelligent individuals learn from everything and everyone and the average person learns from one’s own experience. However, the ignorant will only come up with puerile reasoning.

Life, we constantly need to bear in mind, is like a piano: white keys are the happy moments in our life and the black ones are our sad moments. Still, when both keys are played together, they give us the sweet melody called life.

At times, we look at things through the eyes of people who are only in love with themselves. We think everything is thanks to us, to our many achievements. But the scales of God do not use quantity as a measure. In the letter to the Romans, we read: “I do not act as I mean but I do things that I hate.”

We must repent, meaning we must change our mentality, our way of living. We need to experience God in our heart and identify our origins. The teachings of the Church do not permeate our daily life, our actions, our thoughts.

A wise man wrote: “If we give all our life to earth, the earth will give us a tomb. But if we give our heart to Heaven, Heaven will give us a throne.”

We are living a moral and cultural crisis

Sometimes, people wonder: “My God, where are You?” But we must admit that, without faith, we are all weak. The Gospel of Christ raises our hope, transmits the tenacity of hope.

There has to be self-discipline, which begins with the mastery of our thoughts. If we do not control what we think, we cannot control what we do.

The great Dante wrote: “Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty.”

Man, by nature, is always in search of light, peace and harmony. Yet, I humbly think that, sometimes, in Malta, we are obstructing the hope and love emanating from God. God sows so many graces in our heart but, in return, we give very little.

Little things can change our life. So let us be positive because fear and unhappiness block our life. St Augustine wrote that human beings go where their hearts lead them and where they find happiness. We have to turn on the power of our heart.

In our lovely Malta, we have experienced a collapse of what used to make us feel secure, a collapse of the meaning of humanity. Our way of reasoning today does not solve our problems. We have lost the true perception of the teachings of God.

We need to go back to our origins and put in our heart the experience of God. We need to read the signs of the times: Vatican II.

It is not the accumulation of material things that will satisfy the restless heart of a human being today. One young man told me: “Europe has a big problem today: to find its identity.”

We are facing tensions and contradictions in life. We are destroying the roots of our Christian identity. We have to change our way of thinking. Only the good news of the Gospel will create new horizons in our heart.

We are living a moral and cultural crisis. Should we be thankful to TVM for programmes like Love Island Malta?

Poor young people are selling their dignity, their body and, especially, their soul for some money.

Where are the authorities? Do they stand behind the curtains, peeking and enjoying the dirty performance? Why does no one stop such things from happening? What type of morality does TVM embrace?

What a pity!

Here is some wise advice from Socrates: “The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.”

 

Fr Charles Cini is a member of the Salesians of Don Bosco.