The Mote in God’s Eye
Malta Today
I trust that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle will forgive me for stealing the title of their classic 1974 sci-fi masterpiece novel for this article. But there are some ingenious turns of phrase that are just too clever not to be used again. ‘The Mote in God’s Eye’ is one of them. I won’t bore you with the details, but in the book it refers only to an optical illusion caused by the conjunction of two stars – a red supergiant (‘the Eye’) and a much smaller, sun-sized yellow star (‘the mote’) – when viewed from a particular planet. But you needn’t have read the book to appreciate how well the same expression might work outside that context. Gozo bishop Mgr Mario Grech’s homily on the feast of Santa Marija last week was a classic case in point. The theme was ‘freedom’, with particular emphasis on ‘freedom of expression’. Here are some choice quotes lifted from a newspaper report… and which I have taken the liberty to categorise under three different headings. 1. Tradition “Many Christians are obsessed with tradition and this is hindering them from discovering spiritual freedom, according to Gozo Bishop Mario Grech.”… “Instead of thinking ahead with vision, they prefer to think backwards,” Mgr Grech said… 2. Political pressure “Mgr Grech also hit out at the lack of individual freedom as a result of the ‘subtle pressure’ created by partisan politics. Although political participation was a good thing, Mgr Grech said partisan considerations held back individuals from saying what they wanted: ‘Others choose to genuflect not to fall out of grace with those in power,’ he added.” 3. The Media “Mgr Grech also referred to pressure created by the media, which he described as an influential propaganda machine in the hands of those who had financial and political power.” Got that, folks? So freedom of expression is under threat from tradition, politics and the media. Now: do I detect the ghost of a teenie-weenie little sin of omission there? Speaking of ‘influential propaganda machines’ in the hands of those ‘with political power’… well, it seems that Mgr Grech somehow omitted from his list the single most politically influential propaganda machine this country has ever seen. How is this even possible, I wonder… when Mgr Grech was preaching from that same machine’s very own pulpit at the time? And yet, and yet: in a homily about threats to freedom caused by institutional pressures, there was not a word of self-criticism directed at the institution he himself represents… and which over the years has exerted more political pressure on people than I have had cups of coffee in my entire life. Let’s start with the ‘tradition’ part. I think we can all guess what Mgr Grech was driving at here: he is hardly the first prelate to complain about how the external ritual trappings of religion – the festa, the fireworks, the qubbajt, the annual blessing of the animals, etc – has supplanted a genuine spiritual dimension to the faith of many practising Catholics. I remember similar sermons from my own parish priest as a child (and I come from a parish that is not exactly very big on tradition). It’s one of those standard ‘tried-and-tested’ sermons… along with making a ‘false idol’ out of money, career, material goods, etc. Today, however, the same old motif has suddenly become acutely relevant. Last week the Curia ‘removed’ a parish priest (not sure if there is a technical word for it – ‘discharged’ sounds wrong) from Mgarr. At the risk of over simplifying matters, the priest in question had reportedly opposed the local overzealousness with which certain Church ‘traditions’ (e.g., the annual auction for rights to carry the statute of Our Lady) had taken over the entire business of religion. And what, exactly, happened to this priest’s ‘freedom’ to enact a reform that Mgr Grech so clearly favours? He was promptly relieved of his duties as Mgarr parish priest, following complaints by parishioners. In other words: he fought ‘tradition’… and ‘tradition’ won. Yet we now have the Gozo Bishop warning us against an ‘obsession with tradition’ at the expense of spiritual matters… while the same Church he represents effectively silences and ‘punishes’ one of its higher ranking priests, in order to appease those same Catholics who have made ‘tradition’ their ‘false god’. Sorry, but it doesn’t add up. If, as Mgr Grech decrees, the Catholic Church is genuinely concerned that ‘tradition’ hinders freedom… why did it not support the hapless Mgarr parish priest in his attempts to address the same threat? There are a few possible answers to this question. The Church no longer speaks with one voice, as it always used to in the past. During the divorce referendum we all heard it speaking with multiple voices: the Archbishop says one thing; the head of the Ecclesiastical Marriage Tribunal says the opposite, etc. So it is perfectly possible that Mgr Grech is merely speaking with his own voice here, while the rest of the institution speaks much louder with its actions… and these, of course, contradict the Gozo bishop utterly. Another possibility is that Mgr Grech simply doesn’t see the contradiction, just as Christ had complained about people who cannot see the beam in their own eyes. Not being able to look at the situation from the outside, he is only capable of ever seeing threats and dangers coming from other institutions… never from his own. This emerges most clearly from the other two aspects of his homily. Here I happen to agree with Mgr Grech. I can even confirm that politics in Malta does undeniably create a culture of restraint and self-censorship. I see it all the time, in my work as a journalist who interviews people. Invariably, the most interesting comments/observations made in the course of any interview will be the ‘off-the-record’ ones. In some cases there will be very clear and understandable reasons for this. Most of the time, however, there is nothing more than an underlying fear of ‘being controversial’… in a country where an inordinate number of professionals still owe their livelihood either directly to government, or indirectly via dependence on government contracts. As for the media: we have all seen cases where politicians who were too outspoken for their own good were ostracised or somehow ‘disciplined’ by their parties… and in nearly all cases, the root cause involved ‘comments to the media’. As someone whose job is to elicit comments to the media, I find it increasingly more frequent that people with things to say prefer to keep their traps shut, for fear of experiencing a similar political fall-out themselves. So yes, Mgr Grech is right. Partisan considerations do hold back people from ‘saying what they want’, and the media is (sometimes directly, more often indirectly) one of the tools that politics uses to exert this pressure. But it is very easy to see the mote in the eye of both politics and the media, while studiously ignoring the almighty beam in your own. Mgr Grech may have overlooked this fact, but in truth there is not an institution in this country – the political parties do not even come close – with quite the same history of silencing people as the Catholic Church. In recent years we have seen blanket orders of media silence imposed by the (former) Archbishop on ‘controversial’ priests such as Fr Mark Montebello, Fr Rene Camilleri and Fr Gorg Dalli… and before that there were excommunication edicts flying about like confetti: Manuel Dimech, Lord Strickland, Dom Mintoff, etc. There are still audio recordings of the latter trying to speak above the cacophony of church bells and whistles blown by nuns in the 1960s: all part of the Church’s hysterical, almost comical attempts to forcibly silence people with whom it disagreed. More recently the Church has routinely spoken out on political issues ranging from divorce to IVF to cohabitation to working women, and many more. It has every right to do so, of course… but it also tends to talk in terms of ‘sin’, in a country where a large majority still believes in such concepts as ‘hell’. What is that, if not political pressure built on tradition, and transmitted through the media (including at least one radio station owned by the Church… though Mgr Grech seems to have momentarily forgotten its existence)? And finally: just in case all this pressure to ‘shut up and genuflect’ were not enough, there’s also the small matter of the law. Speaking out critically of the Catholic Church is actually a crime in this country. It’s called ‘offending religious sentiment’, and the penalties are harsher for offending Catholic sentiment than the sentiments of any other religion. Strange, I would have thought, for Mgr Grech to omit this fact from a list of ‘threats to freedom of expression’. But then again: if even God occasionally forgets the mote in his own eye…
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