Labour’s own grave diggers

This is a shortlist of the Labour Party gravediggers: Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Edward Scicluna, Chris Cardona.

There are more, of course, especially those who banged on their desks in the vote of confidence in Mizzi and those who voted against an inquiry into the scandalous Electrogas deal.

Mario Dingli – Sliema

Tell children what they are eating

Once I heard Gordon Ramsay recounting how his children eat up all the bacon in their plate because it came from their own pigs reared in the garden.

When people experience the time and care taken to grow a tomato or an orange themselves, their respect and adoration for food increases.

So I think that exposing our children, albeit gently, to what they are really eating, a hen or a pig or a bull, will infuse our way of looking at food with respect and cut waste.

It would also stop us from continuing to sponsor farming which is harming the environment or factory farming. It will also deliver the message of how nature works.

I would like to add some things that I think work against the environment: the fact that food is so cheap and that all food products, like pineapple, bananas, etc., are available in perfect condition all year round hides the toll this is taking on the natural environment from the clearing of tropical rain forests for plantations to intensive farming and farm factories.

I also have the impression that the catering and entertainment industry have not yet started separating waste.

Joe Portelli – Nadur

Clergy abuse

With reference to the letter ‘Homosexual clerics’, it would be interesting and enlightening for readers to see these two extracts and then form their own opinion.

Modern perceptions of clergy abuse need to be placed within the much longer historical context with regard to anti-Catholic and anticlerical imagery and rhetoric. There has been an extreme exaggeration of the number of priest paedophiles thrown around recklessly.

A reliable study of the authoritative St Luke’s Institute concluded that only 0.3 per cent were guilty of abuse of minors. Perhaps this was at the time of John Paul II’s papacy.

It is when the Church is vulnerable (when sex abuse by clerics paradoxically cause a festering wound in the mystic body of the Church – my words), stripped of its power and pomp, that people can more easily engage with it, belonging to a body that is suffering, crowned with thorns rather than jewels, feebly proclaiming not itself but God’s healing power through the wounded healer, Jesus Christ (Fr René Camilleri).

John Azzopardi – Żabbar

Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@timesofmalta.com. Please include your full name, address and ID card number. The editor may disclose personal information to any person or entity seeking legal action on the basis of a published letter.