October 16 marks the seventh anniversary since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. We all reacted differently to this event – but to the extent it shook the Maltese psyche, we all did react. My reaction came from shock augmented through “academic” suspicion. How could Malta, that calls itself “Kattolika”, allow such corruption, criminality, horror… and continue as if nothing had happened? It was a moral injury that shook me as moral theologian – and propelled a scrutiny of whether “being Church” (or ordinary Christians) makes sense in a country where evil seems to have the last word.
As a believer, I knew that the beauty and immense challenge of faith is keeping firm in the hope and trust that “evil” is but a chimera: a credible lie, but empty fiction nonetheless, whose aim is to make us give up our agency. Unlike naming objective harm that, in being concrete, emboldens human action (even when misguided), when “evil” enters our hearts, its spin depletes our soul, as we give up, not only on the possibility of human justice, but also on confidence in God’s mercy, and thus on a horizon of meaning. Without this ground of unconditional love, we collapse under immense helplessness.
Helplessness evokes feeling buried alive and is eerily experienced like “death”. But we tend to react to any tragedy, big or small, by numbing further and shutting down even more. The “banality of evil” becomes self-fulfilling prophecy: as justice, solidarity, relationship fade to oblivion, so love dissolves to impossibility.
How could Malta, that calls itself “Kattolika”, allow such corruption, criminality, horror… and continue as if nothing had happened
Following any personally or culturally traumatic event, we are tested to confront this tendency to “death”; to face personal and collective memories of paralysing terror; to befriend the enemy of helplessness within; and to come to a renewed attestation that only life – not evil – can have the last word.
But no one can reason their way into such an existential conversion: one can only become attuned to seemingly insignificant crumbs of life that confirm the truth that, irrespective of what happens, it is always within our power to receive it peacefully; to accept it with equanimity; and thus, to act (or react) with prudence. The worst suffering cannot break the human spirit; it is rather the falsehood of helplessness that makes us sink deeper into despair, as we forget the dignity of our birthright of freedom.
Simultaneously, to not succumb to despair, to embrace our personal and collective dignity, is also to wake up to revere the “other” as ourselves. For one cannot be grateful for one’s life – and torture the life of another. One cannot be at peace with oneself – and seek to harm another. One cannot live the conviction of being loved by the universe – and hate life in its manifold manifestations. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28) is neither madness nor religious fanaticism. It is a basic truth of the “good life” that annihilates the lies of evil.
If misery’s toxicity spreads like a virus, being comfortable in one’s own skin, accepting who one is, is the ground “to love one’s neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31) – and the only solid foundation for a political revolution.
Nadia Delicata is an associate professor at the University of Malta’s Department of Moral Theology.