I.M. Beck - quote unquote

That's what the new chap down Vatican way is being called by the cardinals who elected him, apparently. It's a good one, really.

One must now hope that we will have heard the last of the mediasteria surrounding first the death of John Paul II and then the elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.

I can understand Italian television going a bit over the top over the whole thing, being as there's something of a connection between the Papacy, the Vatican and Rome and all that, but precisely why outfits like Sky News and the other segments of the tabloid media actually got all het up about the whole thing is somewhat beyond me.

After all, if there was ever any public manifestation of total ignorance (as in, the process of ignoring, not the fact of being ignorant about) of the Church's message it lay in the British popular press, so why there was this sudden fascination on its part with the election of a new leader of the Catholic Church is not, frankly, all that clear.

That being as may be, we have now been surfeited to the nth degree with information about the new chap at the top, with silly pictures of him as a member of the Hitler Youth as a child, right on up to the wise-cracks about him being God's Rottweiler and the enforcer of the modern inquisition.

In the run-up to the election, every so often I found myself being asked who I thought would be elected and what I thought of the various "candidates". My answer, every time, was "I don't know who any of them are and therefore I am not able to comment on - interested in - who is going to get in".

My attitude hasn't changed. I know pretty much as much about Benedict XVI as I do about the chap from Nigeria or Cuba or wherever, except that now I know that B-XVI is German and a conservative. What that adds to the sum of human knowledge can be compared with the sum of zero plus one.

Do I think the new Pope is going to be a good thing or a bad move, I wonder? Do I care? Does the election of an allegedly conservative European mean that the College of Cardinals is a hide-bound collection of old fogies or that it is simply progressing with the glacial speed that the Church has shown consistently for the last couple of millennia?

Probably the truth of the whole thing is that their Eminences have failed to grasp the realities of the world, preferring to live on in their own perception of reality.

On the other hand, they might think that theirs is the one true way forward, and anyone who does not agree with that will have to live with it.

If they are in this latter frame of mind, they are perfectly correct. The Catholic Church, like any other organisation of its type, now that it has eschewed the Inquisition, is a club that everyone is free to join as long as they stick to the rules. If you don't like the rules, then don't join and if you think that the people who run the club are ignoring reality, then you are free to propose the theory that, in that case, reality will proceed to ignore them, this being their loss and not reality's.

In other words, I don't quite see the point of all these arguments in the media about how Pope Benedict XVI's election signals this, that or the other. As always, in the real world, people, whether they are Catholics, good, bad or indifferent, or non-religious or other-religious, will blithely go on with their lives, and if it is convenient to ignore the law as laid down from within the corridors of the Vatican, then they will do so.

Just as the cardinals, one might say, blithely ignored certain aspects of the real world, then so will the real world blithely ignore them, as it always has done. I'm not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing: it's just the way such things play out.

A warm feeling

I have propounded the theory, of late, that political exponents of the ilk of Norman Lowell, who choose to promote themselves as the figureheads of movements that fail to tolerate anyone who does not fit into their own, sometimes peculiar, world-vision, and this with overtones of - it is fair to say - violence and threat, do not have the right to be given a platform from which to spread their theories.

The fuzzy logic employed by people who bleat about freedom of speech, thought and association does not stack up when measured against the way the intolerant seek to abuse these same rights at the expense of others. People like Mr Lowell cannot be allowed to abuse the rights that they seek to deny others, and that's all there is to it.

So you can imagine that I was pretty disgusted when I heard about a seminar being organised by Fr Mark Montebello about hate crime in Malta. What disgusted me, of course, was not the fact that such a seminar was being organised, or that it was being organised by Fr Montebello, who is an honest, if sometimes misguided, gentleman. No, what disgusted me was the fact that Mr Lowell had been invited to form part of the panel, along with a number of people who, truth be told, should never have allowed the idea to cross their minds that they should appear in public with someone who has expressed the views that Mr Lowell has expressed in the past and continues to express in the present.

The good news is that second thoughts have been expressed by a good number of people who, it seems, were not exactly au fait with the political theories espoused by Mr Lowell, with the upshot of this being that the seminar has been cancelled.

Apparently, I learnt from an e-mail that has been going the rounds, Fr Montebello was faced with a choice between asking Mr Lowell to give the thing a miss, or cancelling it. Fr Montebello, who holds that in a democratic society such as ours, everyone, including Mr Lowell, has the right to express him/herself freely, decided to stick to his guns (see what I mean about being a misguided lad?) and the seminar was cancelled.

The irony of the whole thing is that Mr Lowell's adherents don't hold Fr Montebello in the esteem that he deserves for sticking up - wrongly as it happens - for their hero. On a website where the Radical Right Rabble-Rousers chit-chat amongst themselves (all 15 or so of them) Fr Montebello's name is, generally speaking, mud, along with the names of anyone who tries to do some good.

That's the thanks you get for trying to be tolerant of others.

A spot of wine

I keep getting told that some people's favourite part of this column, apart from the bits where I get at Doctor Alfred Sant (isn't he having a spot of bother with Dr KMB at the moment?) is the bit where I tell you where to stuff your faces.

OK, so this weekend we had dinner at Peppino's in St Julians, where I am pleased to report standards have remained as high as they always were, which is pretty high. The service is excellent (the young lady who coped with our table on the top floor did it with a smile all the way through, which is saying something) and the food up to the standards of the service, so a good time was had by all, even if the waistline was negatively affected.

On Sunday night, we repaired to the Angolo del Vino, down a side-street in Birgu, for a plate of things and dips, apart from a glass of good wine. I couldn't actually tell you how to get there, but the streets of Birgu repay a stroll around with interest and once you eventually fetch up at the door, you will find a pleasant welcome and very good value for money.

Try it out.

Nous sommes les grands

By the time you read this, Chelsea will be poised to clinch the Premiership. Bow your heads, all you Arsenal and Man U supporters, and accept the fact that (chant) we are the Champions, we are the Champions, we are...

Well, you get the point.

Liverpool next and then the Treble (a minor Treble compared to Man U's but a Treble nonetheless): and if this isn't a demonstration of hubris to tease the gods of soccer, then nothing is.

Allez les bleus.