Inappropriate behaviour and attire at Ta’ Pinu

Whenever my wife and I go for a break to Gozo, we always pay a visit to the Ta’ Pinu Shrine to pray for our family’s needs and for those who ask us to pray for them. Both the drive to the shrine and the ambient put us in a recollection mood. But, unfortunately, on our last visit there, a few days ago, we were very disappointed and felt very uncomfortable.

Now that tourism is picking up at a faster pace, the place was crowded with tourists, many of them just visiting out of curiosity with no devotion or intention to pray whatsoever.

Ta' Pinu shrine. Photo: Shutterstock.com

To our surprise, though, even for a few locals, the place was not considered to be a place of prayer and recollection. Even though, very prominently, a notice is put up in different languages stating to pray in silence, people kept on talking in a loud voice as if they were in a public square. Such an atmosphere made us feel very uncomfortable and so we were unable to recollect ourselves and pray.

What shocked us most, though, was the fact that there were tourists visiting the shrine whose attire was unbecoming not even in public places. Guides with tourists should be obliged to advise tourists not to enter such ‘holy’ places unless decently dressed. Before the pandemic broke out, there used to be ushers at the entrance advising all those who enter the shrine to be decently dressed, being a place of prayer and worship. These ushers also used to provide shawls in order to keep one’s attire in order. On the day we visited the shrine, though, no ushers were present and no shawls were provided.

Seeing such inappropriate behaviour and tourists dressed indecently, the admonishment of Jesus, when He visited the temple, came to my mind. “My house shall be called the house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves!”

Like us, there were many, including tourists, who visited Ta’ Pinu to pray and recollect themselves. It is unbecoming for such a place of devotion to be turned into a meeting place or simply into a tourist attraction. We need to preserve such monuments not as tourist landmarks but as places of prayer and devotion.

If the merchants who turned the temple into a market place made Jesus angry as He exclaimed “the zeal for your house consumes me”, we, believers, feel hurt to see such lack of collection, respect and devotion in a place like Ta’ Pinu.

Let’s hope that the authorities concerned make it a point that such inappropriate behaviour stops and that the place remains a place of prayer, silence and devout concentration at all times.

Ray Azzopardi – Xemxija

A thriving faith

I feel that I owe an apology to readers for giving them wrong information in my letter ‘What’s the truth?’ (May 14).

The span of years from the invasion of Syria in 636 and subsequent raiding of Christian areas to the first crusade lasted over 450 years and not 200.

It was under the orders of Muhammad to fight all men until they say “There is no God but Allah”. That was entirely consistent with the Quran (9:5). Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them and take them captives and besiege them and prepare for them each ambush. In this spirit, Muslim armies launched four and a half centuries of successful conquests.

As if these belligerent incursions were not enough, they were so domineering that, by the end of the 14th century, only tiny remnants of Christianity remained here and there in the East and North Africa. It was so asphyxiant that Christianity was almost completely wiped out.

Eventually, Christianity became a European faith because it was the only continent where it was not destroyed. Evidently, the hand of God and assiduous work by missionaries must have worked wonders to transform Christianity into a thriving community of faith, perhaps as never before, to become the world’s largest religion.

John Azzopardi – Żabbar

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