The Kingdom of Heaven and the turbulent priest

The Dominican Order has always fascinated me. The order's distinctive black and white flowing robes fill the canvasses of the Renaissance and Counter Reformation as it produced more and more great saints. They are called the Dogs of God; I am not quite sure why, however, in Christian iconography, St Dominic is represented along with a little black and white dog with a flaming torch in its mouth. I was told it is actually a play on the name Domini Cani. However, this Order of Preachers has been heavily associated with the more unpleasant side of Catholicism like the Inquisition. Ironically, the sweetness of the little dog seems to hide the ruthlessness of a wolf. Therefore, while the Dominican Order has, throughout its long history, thrown up great Doctors of the Church like Catherine of Siena, it has also produced the founder of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada. To add to the variety, it has also produced great rebels like Girolamo Savonarola and Mark Montebello.

The Archbishop has once again muzzled Fr Montebello after he wrote an article in Il-Gens which merely reflected what was being said in the international press about Benedict XVI. As there is a full scale PR campaign to reinvent the former very reactionary Head of Doctrine as a kindly and saintly old man who loves cats, which I am sure he is and he does, one cannot ever forget that he called homosexuals intrinsically evil and other religions deficient among other things. Therefore, because of what the former Cardinal Ratzinger was during the previous papacy, his elevation to the throne of St Peter was one which had a rather mixed reaction.

The article written in Il-Gens by Fr Montebello called the result of the conclave cajta goffa; a bad joke(?) and because, like most other journalists writing in all sorts of international papers and journals, he concluded that, because of Benedict XVI's advanced age, his would be a brief transitional papacy in rather blunt terms, this so offended the sensibilities of the readers of Il-Gens that the Dominican was summoned to the Curia and after some negotiation he gave his word to the Archbishop he would not write for six months; a period during which it is expected that, upon mature reflection, Fr Montebello is to conclude that Benedict XVI is the ideal Pope and that the Catholic Church with him at the helm will weather the storms of relativism, atheism, agnosticism, pantheism and, above all, apathy with which the Catholic Church in the West is assailed today.

The muzzling of this "dog of God" has taken us right back to the age of the crusades wherein heresy was punishable by being burnt at the stake and when so-called Christian knights left the discomfort of their draughty and unsanitary piles of rubble in France or Germany that they liked to call castles and "took up the cross" to regain the Holy Land from the infidel Saracens. In the 200 odd years of Outremer, as it was called, many of these knights carved out little principalities for themselves in the balmy and luxurious cities of Tyre and Sidon, Antioch, Edessa, Ibelin, Tripoli, Acre and, above all, Jerusalem.

The crusades were a very controversial historical phenomenon, the aftershocks of which still affect world politics to this very day. The Ridley Scott film The Kingdom Of Heaven while playing fast and loose with historical accuracy did give an unprecedented picture of both the splendour of the Kingdoms of Outremer and the deep division in mentality among the crusaders themselves.

Making a film that re-enacts the mediaeval drama of Cross against Crescent in this day and age is a very tricky enterprise indeed. If one thinks of the deep contrast in attitude between the pragmatic enlightenment of the Leper King Baldwin IV and Saladin on one side and the crass intolerance of the Grandmaster of the Templars, Reynald de Chatillon and Guy de Lusignan on the other, one can compare this strong blueprint to the politics of today; meaning, tragically, that neither side has learned very much through their very many mistakes in the last 1,000 years!

Bigotry, fuelled by greed and intolerance, has always blustered its way to ruin any sort of understanding between the Religions of the Book and that is precisely why we have the inflammable and unsolvable problems that we have in the Middle East today. There is also a degree of bigotry present in the matter of Fr Montebello. Had he written in a layman's paper I very much doubt whether there would have been any pressure to muzzle him. As he chose to be over-candid in Il-Gens, hell broke loose and a fundamental human right, that of expressing his opinion, was taken away from him; if temporarily.

Watching Bondiplus last Tuesday I was bemused by the fact that the Church refused to make the flimsiest of comments about the issue. Like the Queen, the local branch of the Catholic Church adopts a "never complain, never explain" policy. The voice of reason was represented by Joe Friggieri who maintained that, no matter what, a man is free to express his opinion and, consequently, one is also free to agree or disagree with that opinion. That is basic democracy. What Prof. Friggieri also added, which I thought was brilliant, was that were it not for firebrands like Fr Montebello controversial issues in Malta would never be talked about let alone discussed.

We hate rocking the boat and, when the majority is happy to live in oblivious complacency, anything remotely "uncomfortable", like ecumenism and contraception, is largely swept under the carpet at best and ignored at worst. Whether one agrees with them or not, they, and many other issues, are realities which must be addressed. Fr Montebello and people like him have brought issues like these out in the open and the more they are discussed and analysed the more we can call ourselves civilised and intellectually awake.

This certainly does not mean I agree with what Fr Montebello says or writes as much as I expect any of you, dear readers, to implicitly agree with what I write myself. It would be very boring indeed were everyone to agree with me or any other columnist for that matter and there would be no subject for discussion or friendly argument. This local trait is one of the greatest failings of our tiny little country wherein one either knows or is related to everyone else.

By silencing Fr Montebello the Maltese Church has placed itself light years back in time and has made an unwilling hero of the "turbulent priest". I wonder whether Thomas Becket would have actually been made a saint had those words not been uttered by Henry II in a fit of pique. The knights around the notoriously bad-tempered monarch took him seriously and proceeded to commit the greatest sacrilege of all, murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral. By creating a "martyr" of Fr Montebello, the Archbishop has made him a natural rallying point for all those who are irredeemably estranged from or disaffected by the Catholic Church, something which I am convinced that neither His Grace nor Fr Mark himself would want.

kzt@onvol.net