Roamer's column

We continue to hear mutterings, much of them uninformed, about granting unto Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's, a notion of separation that exists, it may be noted, only because the early Church recorded it. Uninformed because there is a tendency, which cannot be called intellectual so shallowly is the argument posited, or not posited, to divorce the Church from society on all matters that do not come under the banner of what is loosely termed religion. Uninformed because many of the mutterings give the impression they are motivated, sadly, by a quasi-personal hatred for the Church and all its works. This hatred is nothing new; nor are the untruths uttered, and muttered, to drive the cause against the Church along, for whatever reason.

In parallel there is an attack being made on what is called 'organised religion', as if religion, qua institution and like every institution in the world, can be anything but organised.

We are witnessing a new attempt to force the Church back to where, in different times, Mr Mintoff strove to force it - the sacristy. This, too, will fail, but it does not mean there will not be a wounding process; and drawing blood seems to be the current sport among some.

The Church should do this. The Church should do the opposite. The Church should do this and its opposite at the same time. The Church should do more for the poor, the same Church whose characteristic of charity goes back to Christ Himself and down the ages through its presence in the monastic movement, through so many of its saints, through so many of its charitable institutions in the modern world. The Church, we are further told, should mind its own business. And yet the Church should do something about property prices. The Church should keep its nose out of them. And lately, the Church should not try to 'manipulate' politics and politicians. Is there nothing the Church does that is remotely good, never mind unequivocally correct?

Perhaps Bondiplus, which finds time and space for programmes structured in a manner that is critical of this or that aspect of the Church, should find time and space to devote a programme about the massive contribution the Church, local and universal, has made to the poor and the infirm, to education, to health and care through its many institutions, to orphans, to abandoned children, to people who need shelter, to its commitment to preach the real Christ with an integrity that is lacking in so many of its critics.

And this!

Recently in The Times it was spread around that in his first encyclical Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict called on ecclesiastical marriage tribunals to provide speedier rulings. I must have missed this in my reading of it and wonder whether the writer had read the encyclical at all. I stand to be corrected on the ecclesiastical tribunals bit, but if correction there is none, I cannot understand how it could be concluded that the Pope wrote what he wrote, which he did not, as far as I could tell, to encourage more people to seek redress within the Church's aegis rather than the state's.

Left unsaid for certain was any reference to the speech given by Pope Benedict to the 20 judges of the Roman Rota last month, that is, after he wrote Deus caritas est, to stop granting annulments simply to help couples in difficult situations. He called on them to uphold the truth of marriage, which could not be understood in a culture of "relativism and juridical positivism".

He was reported in The Catholic Herald as having told his audience that the Church must defend its teaching even when the Western world had lost all understanding about the meaning of sexuality. Oops! I forgot... being celibate, the Pope does not have the competence to discuss sexuality - another recently expressed opinion, which is rather like saying that a professional carer cannot deal with the terminally ill, or train others to do so, because he or she has not had the experience of being terminally ill.

Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, the 10th National Marriage Week was launched and that most liberal of Anglican churchmen, Archbishop Rowan Williams, spoke of the investment that goes into marriage, an investment by one person in another and each in both. He spoke loftily about the institution and remarked that "the fluidity and changeability of relationships and the transience of marriage may look perfectly fine if you belong to the commentating classes of north London" (a dig at New Labour that can safely be made at some of our local commentators) "but you don't have to go very many miles to see what the cost is for people who can't take that sort of thing for granted".

As significant, in the context of what is being written in Malta by sons and daughters of parents who lived out their commitment to the full, was his comment: "And at the risk of sounding slightly sentimental, I think it's quite important to look back to an earlier generation, remember parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and think there were a lot of very ordinary human beings, not especially saintly, not especially holy, who did this, who 'got a life', who worked through all of this with that prosaic heroism that brings out the best in people, that trained a new generation, that shaped the world which had some trustworthy limits, which had some normal moral geography to it. Were they wasting their time? Were they living out an illusion? Well, if they were we are in a very strange position now, because we are trading on the achievements that they created for us." Our secularist friends will say yes and yes to both questions. Will their parents?

Well before his first 100 days are over, Archbishop Paul Cremona may be echoing some of this and preach in its entire spectrum the social wisdom of the universal Church to each and every one of us who is prepared to listen. That wisdom is forged in an experience of the human condition down the ages. There will be those who won't listen, of course. They are the same who savage her for not doing enough, not providing enough, not caring enough, for things she has done and, as likely, for things she has never done.

Hey, dude, we're sunk - or, Come back, Gordon

One likes to live in hope. One would have hoped that a political error of some magnitude committed eight years plus ago would not be repeated. One would assume that having gone through the comic nonsense of declaring a newly-elected government "illegitimate" and handing on this assertion to embassies and high commissions accredited to Malta, a political party would have learned not to repeat that farce. Alas, one lives, hopes and assumes in vain.

There the Labour Party was again, dishing out its negative (let's be euphemistic) report on the revisions made by the National Statistics Office (NSO) in compliance with EU rules, to foreign embassies. I do not know how embassies deal with unsolicited reports. I suspect they are meant to digest and forward in some synoptic form or another the guts (ugh!) of what they receive to their respective capitals. If they did so, Dublin, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, The Hague, Berlin, Rome, Riga et 19 cetera must have been abuzz with excitement. No longer; read on.

It is more and more of a pity that Mr Cordina did not stay at his post. One sympathises with him, needless to say, but what a joy it would have been for him to have stuck it out and to have been at his post when Eurostat took his work, and that of his colleagues, on board. "These revisions", Eurostat sources were quoted as saying, "were carried out within the regular assessment process of compliance with Eurostat's statistical practices." Come back, Gordon.

The chairman of the Malta Statistics Authority, Reno Camilleri, should organise a posse of NSO officials, top brass and all, to stake Mr Cordina's house and not to leave the area until Mr Cordina relents and returns, like a hero of the Wild West, to the OK Lascaris Corral.

Apropos of which, I would like to quote from last Sunday's edition of this newspaper some remarks made by a person reported as a "retired top British statistician", namely Peter Bull. He expressed himself 'distressed' by the resignation. He had "formed a very high opinion of him both professionally and as a person... a very suitable chief statistician" who "impressed (him) as an excellent person to lead the NSO at a busy and difficult time when revisions had to be made because of new methodologies to bring Malta's statistics fully in line with those of the EU... His resignation causes a serious loss." Correct, Peter. Eurostat has confirmed this.

The absence of Dr Sant, when the prime minister made a statement to the House about the not entirely unimportant matter of Mr Cordina's resignation, is something else again. Had Dr Sant been - I won't mention names because it may be construed as if I were highlighting the relative lowliness of the person in the ranks of the parliamentary Labour Party and I do not want any such construction to be put on anybody - but had Dr Sant been a nonentity in the party, his absence would not have mattered one little bit, may well have gone unnoticed.

But Dr Sant led the assault on the NSO and his front- and back-benchers have for the most part hurrahed him on (witness, as I did not but which I read about, the fish-wives edition of Bondiplus last week). You would imagine the subject was of some interest to him. Why then, did he not attend the sitting until after the prime minister had completed his statement? Why did he choose to speak on the subject during the adjournment when, I was made to understand, the House was pretty well empty. Parliament is for debate, not for soliloquy.

Come back, Gordon. 'Pologise, Fred.

Remove those trees

The plan, or idea, to remove those absurd trees from Castille Square seems to have been placed on a back burner. I would like to think that this is because their removal is not a priority in Valletta's scheme of things and not because of the strangled outcries from a few tree-huggers.

I love trees and have argued that a programme of planting ten, twenty thousand trees a year is at best parsimonious. Let a hundred thousand trees flourish, but none of these on Castille Square. This enthusiasm for ridding the place of those trees in the centre and placing Mr Dimech elsewhere was revived recently while I was dipping into a nostalgic collection of photographs in a slightly larger-than-postcard-size publication that carries the title Valletta yesteryear/damals.

It is an unpretentious soft-back affair. In it you will find photographs of the Barracca Lift (ripped down by Mr Mintoff's socialist government in 1973); of the Eastern Telegraph Company Office at 7, Marsamxett Road from where the first and quaint telegraphic message was transmitted in 1875 - "At what o'clock is this received in London?" (apparently it took more than two hours for it to rumble through the wires); of a coffee-house on Piazza Tesoreria, from where a statue of Grand Master Manoel de Vilhena (1722-1736) had been unceremoniously removed to Floriana, outside the Mall, to give way to Queen Victoria (the hapless man was later decamped once more, with as little ceremony, to stare metallically across St Anne Street. In his place at the Mall there stands today a monument to the Independence lady); of Kingsway en fête for the coronation of King George V in 1911. And did you know that once upon a time, on the highest point of the city, a beautiful windmill sat on St Michael's Bastions? There it is, on page 58, facing an Auberge d'Aragon that had been given in a coat of red paint; and many more delightful pictures besides.

But what started me off on this visual track was, of course, a photograph in the book of an unashamedly naked Auberge de Castille. No tree obstructs it from view but there are two young trees planted, one supposes, by some zealous and intrusive British official. One on either side of the building, they are nearly inconspicuous and have not reached the first storey. They increased in number since then. Uproot and transplant elsewhere.

Tree-huggers and many more readers of this column should buy this book just for this picture. I am convinced they will be won over to the idea of restoring the piazza to its treeless but majestic condition. Published by Book Distributors in 2001 (text in English and German, text and photo research by Joseph Bonnici and Michael Cassar), this humble and delightful compendium of Valletta yesteryear/damals may or may not be in print; it should be. At Lm2.50 then, it is a bargain.

Quote...

In April 1963, the man who once raised his glass of hock and told an American guest, "Let us drink to your great President - and ours", received his last high honour: honorary citizenship of the United States. Too old to travel to the United States to receive it - he was nearly 90, his son Randolph received the honour from President Kennedy, who declared, "In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life - he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle". (Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert).