The Magical Mystery Tour

It seems like self-appointed mystical gurus have suddenly come back into fashion. First it was Frenc tal-Gharb’s unexpected resuscitation as a provider of medical marijuana; now it’s the turn of Angelik Caruana to dominate headlines for at least another week. Who’s next, I wonder? My money’s on the blessed St Gorg Preca, rising from the grave once more like a mummified zombie… or maybe a newspaper cutting of the venerable Adeodata Pisani, weeping tears of smudgy ink.

But alas, poor Angelik! Life can be so unfair at times. For where Frenc tal-Gharb has been allowed to retain his status as magical mystery guru of Gharb… to the extent that any attempt to question his ‘miraculous’ healing methods might land you in court… Angelik Caruana’s identical claims to spiritual stardom have just been shot to atoms by the Catholic Church.

Makes you wonder what would have happened 100 years ago, had the Catholic Church reacted in the same way to a visionary witch-doctor who healed people through a combination of herbal remedies and magic spells. I for one, see absolutely no difference at all between the two scenarios… except maybe that people were entitled to be slightly more gullible in those unenlightened times. Oh, and herbal remedies do sometimes work… which is more than can be said for Angelik’s ‘thoughts and prayers’.

But in any case: the Church spent 10 solid years investigating numerous ‘miracles’ attributed by Angelik Caruana from Birzebuggia. These included various apparitions of Our Lady in and around Borg in-Nadur – in which Our Lady always seemed uniquely interested in the prevailing political controversy of the moment, to the extent that she even campaigned against divorce in 2011.

Then there were the various statuettes, unremarkable in themselves, which would suddenly acquire miraculous properties the moment they were purchased by Angelik at the local market. Some would inexplicably weep tears of a dark substance that turned out to be burnt cooking oil. When this started to eat too deeply into the Caruana kitchen budget, others began shedding tears of real blood instead. 

Angelik’s blood, of course… which, through the Intercession of Our Lady, was magically transfused into the tear-ducts of a small sculpture made entirely out of plaster of Paris.

Elsewhere, we had Youtube clips showing the dramatic discovery of various botanical specimens growing directly out of Angelik’s tongue… or one of the thorns which Jesus Christ was crowned with before his execution, which inexplicably contrived to get itself lodged in Angelik’s throat 2,000 years later.

And after an entire decade sifting through these and other, equally idiotic claims… the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Malta branch) finally reached the same conclusion everyone else got to in around 10 minutes flat. There is nothing genuine about these ‘miracles’ at all. The man is either seriously deluded, or a fraud.

Well, that’s how a sceptic like myself would put it. The Church worded things a little differently. Angelik’s apparitions are ‘not divine’, it said. It’s a small but significant difference: unlike a sceptic, the Church is not automatically dismissive of the idea that a woman who has been dead for two millennia can actually appear today, and even impart ‘words of wisdom’. 

To exclude that possibility a priori would be to undermine a sizeable chunk of the Church’s own core belief system. After all, you cannot exactly urge devotion to Our Lady from the pulpit… while simultaneously acknowledging in public that she doesn’t actually exist. So no: all things considered, the Church had no option but to take Angelik Caruana’s preposterous claims seriously, at least on the surface.

And that, I suppose, is the price you pay for messing about with superstition in the first place. Having spent two millennia filling people’s minds with precisely this sort of thing – encouraging them, through a primordial hierarchy of saints and relics, to regard wild claims of divine communion to be entirely possible – the Catholic Church now struggles to distinguish between its own ‘valid’ fantasies, and the ‘invalid’ fantasies of charlatans and crooks.

This raises a few small problems. How are the rest of us mere mortals down here – the ones who do not have direct access to an instant database of God’s precise intentions, at any given moment – to know which is actually the more genuine? The Church’s official teachings, or the mindless ravings of a quack?

OK, it’s an easy question for a sceptic to answer. Neither, of course. But if one accepts the basic concept that a supernatural world does indeed exist, and that its agency can be felt in the natural world… well, from that vantage point, there is no clear distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ miracle at all.

For instance: Angelik Caruana claimed to have ‘healed’ two cancer patients… both of whom went on to die of their respective cancers within months. Meanwhile, in a small town called Lourdes, France, an entire industry revolves around the magical healing properties of the local river: a myth that began when a young girl likewise claimed to have experienced an apparition of Our Lady there some 175 years ago.

Borg in-Nadur, Lourdes. Angelik Caruana, Bernadette Soubirous. What’s the difference? Why does the Church take one seriously, but not the other?

Actually, there are more grounds to discredit the Lourdes myth than Angelik’s claims. The mystic from Birzebbugia only failed to cure two people in his brief career as a faith healer. In the case of Lourdes, the Church has only validated three miracle cures attributable to the intercession of Our Lady. And yet, how many millions of people have actually dunked themselves in that river in the hope of a miracle cure?  

OK, Lourdes’s success rate still beats Angelik’s, who tried twice and failed both times. But its own record is not much better, standing somewhere in the region of 0.0000 something %. 

But who knows? If Angelik tried a million times, the placebo effect of his prayers might conceivably work in around three or more cases. The statistics are therefore skewed in Lourdes’ favour… compare on a like-with-like basis, and Angelik emerges every inch as credible as that magic river in France.

This brings us to the interesting part. If you close an eye at the eternity the Church took to state the obvious… ‘what the Church stated’ is nonetheless the exact same position any sceptic, atheist, or non-believer would adopt in the same circumstances. The approach used was likewise the same. 

For all the above reasons, and possibly others, the Church had every interest in dissecting these claims through a strictly scientific (as opposed to metaphysical) line of enquiry. It behaved exactly like any secular institution would. For this reason alone, its conclusions are sound: they are based on the testimony of experts, and the evaluation of facts.

It is worth pointing out that the same Church was always cautious – if not downright dismissive – of Angelik Caruana to begin with. His rise as a cultural phenomenon in 21st century Malta had nothing whatsoever to do with the Catholic Church... which, quite rightly, regarded him as an embarrassment.

There was another institution, pursuing a very different agenda, that had every interest in overinflating this self-proclaimed visionary and turning him into a national folk hero. The media. That is what gave Angelik the power to hoodwink hundreds of people with the sort of mountebank antics that would have been considered medieval even by19th century Gharb standards. 

And interestingly, while the Church helped to demystify all the nonsense surrounding this case, programmes like Xarabank went to great lengths to do the opposite.

Even now, the same media that created Angelik Caruana in the first place want to keep the illusion going. Peppi Azzopardi has even gone on record stating that there still may be some truth to the visions after all… the apparitions may not have been ‘divine’ in nature; but this doesn’t mean that Angelik Carauana saw nothing at all.

Another episode of Xarabank in the making, I guess. “He says he sees the Madonna. The Church says he’s lying. What do YOU think? Call in with your idiotic comments now, and win a free dinner voucher for two at Step On It Take Away, Triq l-Ghasfur Tal-Bejt, Bubaqra… Phone NOW!”)

Well, this is one of the rare occasions when I think the media were best advised to follow the example of the Church. If a millennial institution (rooted, by the way, in exactly the same sort of hocus pocus) can recognise a classic case of charlatanism when it sees one… why can’t Peppi Azzopardi, who represents an institution that has no corresponding spiritual vocation whatsoever?

More to the point: why did Xarabank not handle Angelik Caruana with the same sceptical, scientific approach favoured by the Church? They actually did the opposite. Not only were Angelik and co. given airtime to present their views unchallenged and uncontested… but what passed for the ‘voice of science’ turned out to be one of his own entourage.

I remember one edition distinctly. The Xarabank team followed Angelik to Dwejra, Gozo, where Our Lady was scheduled to appear near the Azure Window. (She seems to have a thing for major tourist attractions, by the way. Maybe she watches ‘Game Thrones’ …).

Xarabank had earlier advertised that it would be televising this ‘apparition’. Naturally, I was intrigued… it’s not often a local TV show features live footage of a 2,000 year-old woman. Yet all that was shown on the day was a close-up of Angelik’s face, as he simpered in childlike beatification while staring into the void. At no point was the camera ever pointed in the direction of his gaze; nobody else present claimed to see anything at all, other than the blackness of the night.

Yet we were all told that this was an ‘apparition of Our Lady’. And this way, Xarabank managed to both televise a live ‘miracle’, and invent a whole new definition of the word ‘apparition’ at the same time.

As for Azzopardi’s suggestion that Angelik may genuinely believe his own fantasies… yes, well that possibility certainly exists. It’s called ‘mental illness’; and last I looked it wasn’t the sort of thing that serious television productions should really be in the business of exploiting.

Watching that protected close-up of a clearly disturbed man, visibly in the grip of a psychotic delusion, reminded me of something out of ‘The Elephant Man’. Whichever interpretation you choose – charlatan or deluded – it is simply no matter to be paraded on TV, just to titillate the public’s appetite for the macabre. 

Even the Catholic Church, for all its global tradition of miracles and apparitions, has come round to accepting that scepticism is the best way to approach the bizarre. It is time for Malta’s broadcasting media to catch up.