[WATCH] Church dissociates itself from priest who celebrates Nazi apologist and calls out ‘Judaic economy’

A Mosta cleric whose diatribes in the press often take to task ‘liberal Catholics’, joined the far-right Imperium Europa on 29 July, to celebrate Nazi apologist Norman Lowell’s birthday.

Fr David Muscat delivered a speech at a birthday celebration for Lowell, who polled 3% in the last European elections, praising the man who thinks the disabled should be euthanised for saying things others won’t, such as the “fact that Maltese people are now foreigners in their country”.

“On this day, Mosta takes the St Mary statute out of its niche, and for the first time in 20 years, I did not go… just to be here,” the self-satisfied Muscat told the Imperium gathering, in which Lowell raged against ‘mongoloids’ who celebrated the Labour victory and had to endure “an African summer”.

Muscat said he met Lowell at a mass for the repose of the soul of the fascist Carmelo Borg Pisani, who was sentenced to death during WWII for espionage on behalf of the Italian army.

“Today I feel that Norman, with all his good and bad points, has sown a seed in the hearts of people that will bear its fruit later… of those 10,00 votes, 6,000 were not inherited by other parties, which means these people believe so much in this ideal that they don’t want anything to do with other parties. And that annoys these parties,” Muscat told the birthday gathering.

“Who is speaking about the Maltese becoming foreigners in their own country? No-one. Because everyone wants the foreigner, for money,” Muscat said, stroking his fingers with the ‘pay me’ sign.

READ MORE | ‘Nazism? It was alright at the time…’ says holocaust-denier Lowell

Muscat even referred to the industries of gaming and financial services as “the Judaic economy”… saying these speculative industries were not really contributing to national wealth. But the reference to the stereotype of Jews and financial wealth was not lost the far-right gathering.

Muscat wished Lowell “live on for another 100 years”, and called on his supporters not to have any fear. “Be the future of a big party that works to make Malta of the Maltese… hail this new party.”

In a tweet, Archbishop Charles Scicluna said the Church dissociated itself from Muscat’s views. “Ideologies that sow hatred and discrimination on the basis of race or culture are contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church,” he said, tweeting the photo an interracial handshake.

Fr Muscat is an outspoken critic of ‘liberals’ inside the Catholic church. In 2014 he was transferred out of the Mgarr parish on orders of Archbishop Paul Cremona, for failing to support the new parish priest over Curia restrictions placed on a Holy Week procession.

Parishioners of Mġarr held an annual Holy Week Way of the Cross procession involving five statues and hundreds of actors. But a ruling handed down by the Curia decreed that the procession could only include the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Mġarr parishioners went ahead with the procession in the way they had always organised it, with all the statues and actors, and Muscat joined the procession, leading to his transfer for disobeying the Curia directive.

More recently, Muscat took issue with a priest who on TVM’s Xarabank said homosexuality was not a disorder because God made it. “Gay affirming clerics by preaching sugary coated slogans like ‘God loves you the way you are’, ‘all you need is love’ and ‘if it feels good, do it’ are initiating our young into homosexuality...  and perdition,” Muscat wrote.

As he celebrated Lowell and his party, Muscat seemed inure to his friend’s recent statements on an F Living channel interview which turned into an unhindered eulogy to Nazi Germany and the mercy killing of disabled human beings. 

The interview on the small cable television channel was carried out with little mediation from Lowell’s interviewer, who put up little or no challenge at all to the Nazi apologist’s statements. 

Lowell was bluntly asked whether he agreed with Adolf Hitler’s “administration” of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, to which he replied with a curt “yes” without being asked to justify himself by the presenter of the interview show Attwali.