Blame it on Jesus

But I must confess he does occasionally make a tiny bit of sense… even by ‘closet Nazi’ standards (his words, not mine).

For instance, he was absolutely spot on in his overall assessment of the movement ‘Kristu Iva, Divorzju Le’ (Yes to Christ, No to Divorce): particularly his argument that “the language, symbols and imagery they use is bound to be counterproductive.”

Interestingly enough, Fr Borg also points out that Archbishop Cremona himself once described such people as ‘a pastoral problem for the Church’: though he stopped short of specifying exactly where and when, and I have found no trace of this comment anywhere else.

But no matter: whether the Archbishop said it or not is beside the point. I myself (who am but dust and ashes, etc.) can attest that it is perfectly true. Initiatives like this do indeed pose a grave problem for the Church – arguably greater than even Fr Joe Borg may yet have realised, and for a great many more reasons than he himself supplied in his blog.

In fact if there is any significant difference between Fr Borg’s attitude and that of people like myself – i.e., anyone whose sympathies lie on the clean other side of that gaping, smouldering chasm we call the ‘divorce referendum campaign’ – it is merely the angle from which we approach the same issue. As an active member of ‘No’ lobby, Fr Borg is understandably (and I would say rightly) concerned that this movement’s fire-and-brimstone tactics may alienate and conceivably antagonise moderate Catholic voters: reinforcing the popular view of the anti-divorce brigade as ‘a bunch of loony fundamentalists’; contradicting the Archbishop’s earlier (now largely forgotten) promise that there will be ‘no crusades’; and generally playing right into the hands of the pro-divorce lobby.

Well, my tendency at the best of times is to look at things from an altogether more secular vantage point, and as you can imagine it’s a whole different panorama from way out here in the wilderness. In fact, I would advise people like Fr Joe Borg – and why not? Archbishop Cremona and the rest of the Curia, too – to pop over to where I’m standing every once in a while, and take a look for themselves. I somehow suspect they will be startled at the ugliness of what they see.

The truth is, the same tactics that irk Fr Joe Borg so much do not just harm the Church or the anti-divorce lobby. They also cause untold damage to Jesus Christ himself. Much as it pains me to have to say it on the anniversary of his death:  it’s the sort of thing that almost makes you want to hate him. Not because of anything he did or said when he was alive; but because now, 2,000 years after his death, the same Jesus Christ is being actively used as a weapon to deprive others of what they think (rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t matter at this stage) is theirs by right.

And yes, I know this sort of reaction is neither fair nor rational. In fact it’s a little like blaming Henry Ford for every single traffic accident to have occurred since he designed the Model T in 1905 (or whenever). But guess what? ‘Fair’ and ‘rational’ is precisely what a great many people in this world are not – and if they insist on casting Jesus Christ in the role of main antagonist in a hugely emotional and volatile political campaign… well, they can hardly claim to be surprised when others get all emotional and volatile about it, and start associating the same Jesus Christ with everything that stands in the way of their own personal happiness.

On another level, it is ironic that the same people who hide behind Jesus to justify their own private prejudices, also tent to take such mortified offence at labels like ‘fundamentalist’. And yet it is precisely this core principle that lies at the heart of fundamentalism. We’ve already approached this territory before, what with billboards informing us that ‘God hates divorce’, etc. Well, similar posters are routinely seen at gatherings of radical Evangelists in the USA… only as far as these particular fundamentalists are concerned, God usually tends to hate ‘faggots’, ‘Jews’, ‘whores’, ‘abortionists’, and so on. Sometimes He hates them so much that he even urges his followers to go forth and commit murder in his name: as in the case of Dr George Tiller, shot dead by a Christian fanatic outside his abortion clinic in Kansas, 2009.

I admit it’s unlikely that a similar scenario will ever unfold here in the name of divorce… but honestly, it takes a singular lack of intellectual prowess to somehow fail to realise that there is an inherent danger in transferring one’s own obsessive paranoia to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, etc. – and then behaving for all the world as though it came from that source in the first place.

Besides, you don’t have to be a devout Catholic (or even a Christian) to find the whole business rather distasteful. People like myself were brought up to believe that ‘Christ died for our sins’ – not to provide a troop of future anti-divorce campaigners with an instant celebrity face to slap onto a political campaign billboard. And yet this is precisely what happened. Evidently, it wasn’t enough that Jesus was scourged and humiliated, then nailed to a cross under a purely political slogan (‘IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM’, as I recall). No, two millennia later a group of self-proclaimed disciples of his had to go and repeat the same general indignity: this time stapling Christ’s image onto another piece of wood, accompanied by another, equally misplaced and irreverent political slogan: ‘IESVS ETIAM, NVLLVS DIMITERRE.’

With that less-than-subtle device, the ‘Kristu Iva Divorzju Le’ campaign has in fact done unto Jesus Christ what student socialism had previously done unto Che Guevara. They turned him into a poster-boy. Small wonder the Archbishop would be just slightly upset, and even consider these people to represent a ‘pastoral problem’ for the Church.

Still, he hasn’t done anything about them, has he? After all they’re Catholics – not secularists, atheists, humanists, etc. – and therefore cannot realistically be held up for public vilification as examples of all that is ‘unholy’, ‘sacrilegious’ and a ‘threat’ to Malta’s cultural identity. This in turn might explain why Cremona’s earlier misgivings – as quoted indirectly by Fr Joe Borg – have proved so hard to track down in practice. While the Archbishop feels no compunction in publicly demonising secularism – even comparing today’s secularists to the ‘biggest threat’ this country has faced since Nazism in World War II – it seems words of condemnation suddenly stick in his throat, when the threat emanates from none other than his Church’s most obedient and dutiful servants.