Malta - more Catholic
than the Vatican

BTM News 26

A few weeks ago my nursing unit had four deaths in 48 hours, on top of about a dozen in the previous two weeks. Folk started with a cough and came down with a pneumonia-like problem resulting in a quick death. The work was hectic and my wife and I had to do extra shifts, this was in addition to extras we had worked for several months and BTM work. So we decided, as our legs buckled, to go on holiday, to a place an Evangelical Times article referred to as being “more Catholic than the Vatican”…Malta, because it is a warm place.

On 1st April we set off from Bristol airport. I dropped Diane off at the doors of the departure area and drove the car to the long stay car park, and walked back to the terminal building, around the perimeter. It took me half an hour – and then I heard that there was a free bus service to the car park!

On the ‘plane, I stuck ear protective plugs in both ears and got the most peculiar looks, as folk tried to guess why on earth I had two blue bits sticking out of both ears! (I use them after an experience some years ago, when I became completely deaf on arrival in the UK).

The first few days in Malta – said to be the hottest part of the Med – saw variable weather, just like a UK Spring. After that, we got the sun and heat we both wanted and on went my shorts! Thus I walked out with tanned arms and face complemented by white legs.

First week we travelled everywhere by the famed old Malta buses – they rattle and groan and break your back but are great fun. The next week we had a hire car – or at least that’s what they called it!! It was a Maruti, which I had never heard of before, a kind of box half the size of a mini Metro that rattled and squeaked just like the buses.

We soon discovered why most tourists use the buses – there were maybe half a dozen proper roads. The rest, as we discovered in very rough and noisy rides, were simply millions of holes joined together by little bits of tarmac!! We were tossed up and down and sideways amidst terrific noise, as fourtrack jeeps, old farmers’ trucks and horses and traps hurtled towards us on our side of the road! But, it was most enjoyable.

Almost every home has an icon on its walls near the front door, ranging from a flat plaque to full size figures, many behind glass, with ‘burning’ electric candles. The figures ranged from Mary, to Christ on the cross, to tableaux. In main towns such as Valletta and Mdina there are full size figures raised on corners of buildings overlooking the streets.

In the Cathedral at Victoria, main city of sister-island, Gozo, the décor was amazing, and the building had about a dozen full-size tableaux of Christ, Mary, etc., complete with Roman soldiers, and so on. The colours were brilliant and it is easy to see why Roman Catholics are ‘hooked’ by all the splendour. One interesting figure of Mary had a silver dagger thrust into her chest, to depict the grief of a mother who has lost a child.

Even the buses have small figurines, many in glass cases, near the driver, who usually decorates his cab and bus with religious depictions and texts. Some carry slogans such as ‘Jesus loves me’ or ‘Jesus saves’. Sadly, all are born of the new RC concept of ‘evangelical’ religion and the reference to salvation is RC, not scriptural. At any rate, they did not stop drivers aiming their buses like missiles down roads designed to crush the bones of all with brittle bone disease! And driving around roundabouts was, well, life-threatening to say the least.

Usually I can at least attempt to try out a few words of a local language, but I couldn’t make head or tail of Maltese, which did not have a written form until the 1900’s. The language is Semitic and sounds more like Arabic than the usual Mediterranean languages. So, this time, I did not order a ton of nuts thinking I had asked for a quarter pound!!

For our entire holiday folk drove around every part of the island in long convoys in everything from trucks to cut-up cars with no insides except for a driver’s seat. Those in the vehicles waved huge flags and played music loud enough to wake the dead! It was coming up to major elections and one party would take Malta into the EU. Sadly the EU party won and the people were ecstatic about it.

We made a bit of an error the day after the election and decided to drive back into Valetta after our meal in the hotel, for an evening stroll around the massive fortified walls next to the magnificent harbour. Oh boy!! We discovered our mistake too late. As we turned a bend we joined up with traffic nose to tail with nothing moving.

Both inward and outward roads to the city were jammed with every conceivable type of vehicle, all hooting their horns, playing loud music and blasting hand-held gas-powered bull-horns. Flags were waved from every opening and people yelled jubilantly. Police just strolled between vehicles, having a smoke and waving back!

We sat and sat until it got dark as the whole island excitedly celebrated the outcome of the election. Slowly police siphoned vehicles the wrong way around a huge roundabout near the city’s main bus station but we were in the wrong lane and had to continue at a snail’s pace sandwiched between rumbling fourtracks ten times bigger. Eventually, remembering my youthful days driving in London, I forced my way across a stream of three lanes of traffic, aiming to get off the streets occupied by the most zany folk I had ever been deafened by. I didn’t know where we were until we rounded another bend. At last I saw we were near the wonderful war rooms set 300 feet under the absolutely awesome solid rock that are the foundations of the fortifications.

I drove to St Elmo’s Fort and parked the car. We decided to just stroll around in the dark until the parades died down. Hm!! We walked to the more central part of Valetta and were met in every street by thousands of jubilant, friendly people, flag-waving crowds with a deafening cacophony of sound!  So we walked back again, taking some wrong turnings until we finally found the car again.

With few lights or signs to guide us we drove to, well, no idea…but we eventually found ourselves driving suddenly alongside the most brightly lit and biggest hotel, one we had never seen on previous visits. As we drove past we looked up and realised it was an enormous ocean cruise ship!! So, at least we knew we were under the huge city fortifications and skirting the docks!

We continued on and took turnings away from the city centre to avoid the crowds. Trouble was, we also avoided any semblance of direction, as we went in circles, then zig-zags, and eventually ended up near the airport. Ah well…I turned around and headed for the coast road back north to Bugibba (we stayed on the edge of the town, in St Paul’s Bay, where Paul was reportedly shipwrecked).

The car was a boon, because we could go wherever we wished. We saw beautiful azure seas whose brilliant colours included deep to light blue, greens and blacks. Unlike most of the waters around the UK, we could gaze to the bottom, it was so clear.

Diane and I hiked around a short coastal headland to see a cave we had spotted. I struggled onward manfully and when I turned back I thought “How unusual, Diane’s paddling in the sea!” I asked her if she’d enjoyed it, and she grumbled and mumbled…one of those times a husband knows he has said something he shouldn’t have.

It turned out that she had slipped sideways down the rock and had cut her feet in the rocky pool! Coincidentally, I had watched another (male) tourist do the same thing by the cave, moments before. I made suitable sympathetic sounds and then kept my mouth shut!!

On we went…and throughout the holiday we were amazed by how many icons, mostly full-size, we found. Most of Malta is dusty and rocky, with roads that would make Tibetan mountain passes seem smooth. The country areas, though contained on a small island, are ‘remote’ in the sense that they are reached only by roads that were nothing more than tracks.

Yet, even in the most remote parts, you suddenly come across these large figures, all with burning candles, reminders of the overwhelming control levied on the people by Roman Catholicism.

They are at the sides of roads, attached to houses, in the middle of fields with nothing else around. There are cathedral-size churches in every town and every village, built and funded by the locals and dwarfing surrounding houses. Convents are dotted around the island, in ordinary streets and houses, and churches displayed huge crosses, lit by fairy lights, as it was coming up to Easter.

Apart from one or two larger towns, there are no shopping centres. Shops are found almost by accident, down alleyways, in rooms of houses. Lots of fruit and veg are sold from barrows at the roadside, even in towns. Most of the subsistence farmers will go out of business by voting to join the EU. They don’t realise it yet. All they could see were several grants to be given to them for joining. They know nothing of the rising taxes, lowering incomes, stifling laws and loss of sovereignty. I must admit to meddling, by writing a letter pointing this out, to a Malta newspaper. But they were jubilant.

It is likely that Malta will generally come out okay, because of its deep Catholic ties, which will probably become even firmer. I guarantee that holidays in Malta will become far more expensive once membership is confirmed and they start to use the ‘Euro’. Yet another nice place will come under the control of Catholic-founded Brussels.

Addendum: The day after we arrived back in the UK, I went to work. Just minutes after 7 am as I was getting handover reports from the night-nurse, a carer shouted out urgently and we ran upstairs to find a lady choking and blue. It took nearly an hour for three of us to clear her airways, but she had to go to hospital as a ‘blue light’ job, only to die a few hours later. Then, at lunch-time, another lady started to show signs of altered breathing and she, too, died by four o’clock. We had another death a few days later. Welcome back, Barry!

Do you know what I mean when I say that I’d like to have a job where I’m not surrounded by death? Perhaps that sounds awful, but since the year 2000 alone I have watched nearly 200 people die and I wonder just what purpose I serve. Yes, I comfort the relatives and assist to make the dying person more comfortable, but a nurse can become too familiar with death. The holiday, on the other hand, was great – no-one died!

Every so often the words of Christ enter my head, when He told His disciples that they had to leave the dead to the dead and get on with their ministries. In my own mind I have a vast amount of work to do in this ministry, yet I am bound to a job that is not just very hard physically and mentally, but is mainly to do with death. Why?

I may be able to counsel others, but in this matter I am left with unanswered questions. Yes, I will endure and continue until, and if, I am shown another path. But, the query remains.

Note: In Malta, as in any country, certain names are common. One of these is Borg. Avid Star Trek fans will recognise this as the name of one of the most feared enemies in a crowded mythical space population.

I mused, linking the Borg of Malta with the mythical but highly entertaining Borg of outer space, whose catchphrase was “We are Borg, we will assimilate you”. Space aliens are, of course, mythical, but read the Beacon for an illustration!!

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