Showing posts with label Malta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Malta. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Save Malta!!




This is a blegging letter, but it's not for me. It's for Malta's only active pro-life and pro-family organisation, formed this summer, to start their work pushing back against the Culture of Death, the Culture of Nihilism and suicidal despair, that has turned its sights on their little Catholic island. We need help to fund a single person (not me) to go there and start running workshops training the Maltese Catholics to defend their home from the Ideology of the New Paradigm.

Read and then follow the link to their PayPal account. They need £250 to cover airfare for this person to fly down from England.

Again, this is not for me. It's for Malta.

~

So, y'all know I've been kind of in love with Malta in the last little while... well, there's problems down there in the little Catholic paradise.

I know we all know that Malta is the Last Man Standing. With the fall of Ireland, there is now not another single EU nation that entirely outlaws abortion for any reason. For many years, we enjoyed covering the news from Malta's interactions withe the gender ideologues, including the pro-abortion feminists at the UN. Time after time, they would dutifully show up at the annual CEDAW meetings and ever so politely tell the UN abortion-pushers where to put their ideology.

But a few years ago, that started to change:

Malta’s MEPs were among a small bloc at the EU who worked against the recent failed proposal by socialists and abortion activists that would have forced member states to consider direct abortion a “right”. But a December 12th op-ed in the Times of Malta warned that the Estrela Report is not going to be the last attempt to impose the rest of Europe’s abortion regime on their country.

“The daily sifting through pro-life articles makes me feel uneasy at the status quo of the pro-life work being done in Malta. Are we doing enough by way of educating our society as regards building a culture of life? Are we getting prepared for the next onslaught by some EU body on Malta,” Miriam Sciberras asked.

As we know, the reason we use the term "totalitarian" to describe it, is that the Ideologues of Death cannot leave a single corner of the world un-converted. There will be no exception made for any little corner, any little Shirefolk who want to just be left alone.

And brother, are they working on Malta! In 2005, the government, seeing the social catastrophe it precipitated everywhere else, said they would never legalise divorce. It was legalised in 2011. Since then the dominoes have been falling quickly. In incredibly rapid succession, (almost as if it had been planned) homosexual "civil unions" were legalised this year. This month, as the first civil unions were legally registered, Helena Dalli, the Socialist government's Minister for Social Dialogue (I'm not kidding) went to Budapest...

Dalli was head of the Maltese delegation to UN’s Universal Period Review, which took place in the fall of 2013. According to the report, Dalli’s delegation affirmed that Malta’s “new Government was fully committed to the protection of the rights of LGBTI persons.”

The document noted that only “a few weeks after being elected,” the Labour Party government, which came to power in March last year, amended the Maltese Civil Code “to allow persons who underwent a legally recognized gender change to be recognized in the new gender acquired, in those remaining areas where it was hitherto not acknowledged.”

Last month, we saw the passage of the "transgender anti-discrimination" bill. This was the fulfilment of a promise by Helena Dalli to a “transgender” congress in Hungary in May that while her government’s focus had been mainly on homosexuals, they would shortly be turning their attention to “trans” people.

“A month ago, we enacted a Civil Unions law with rights and duties on a par with marriage for same and different-gender couples,” she said.

“On the same day, we amended the Constitution in such a way as to provide protection on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. I am told that we are the first country in Europe to have included an express reference to gender identity in the Constitution.”

As one of the most useful barometers of the homosexualist ideology's advance, Wikipedia's LGBTQI pages, put it:
"Rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Malta have improved in recent years. Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is legal in Malta. A bill creating civil unions equal to marriage in all but name, with the same rights and obligations including joint adoption rights and recognition of foreign same sex marriage, was enacted in April 2014."

So rapid has been the advance of the New Paradigm in Malta that it received somewhat surprised praise from no less a source than ILGA Europe who named Malta, with Montenegro, one of Europe’s two “fastest climbers”.

Paulo Côrte-Real, co-chair of ILGA-Europe’s executive board, said in a statement attached to the organization’s Annual Review, “It is very encouraging to see countries like Malta and Montenegro make such huge progress in the space of one year. It shows that so much is possible when there is political leadership, especially when it is coupled with meaningful engagement of civil society.”

The ideologues must be licking their chops, because Malta is ripe for the plucking, their people softened and their leaders distracted and divided. And we know what's coming. The country's slide from the Faith, its adoption of easygoing European hedonism, along with European subsidies, will, as it always does, be inseparably coupled with European materialism, European ant-Catholicism, European anti-natalism, European socialism and, finally, the logical conclusion: European auto-genocide.

Why is it important? Malta's tiny. There are just under 420,000 people in the whole place.

Why was it important to Suleiman the Magnificent to bring the island to heel? Why did the Axis bomb the place to pancakes? Why is it important to totalitarian ideologues to have no tiny little place left in the world willing to stand up to them? Why did ILGA Europe hold their annual general meeting in Valletta last year?

On the whole, the reason the country is under threat is simple: the Maltese have not bothered to do anything to stop it. Indeed, they seem barely to have noticed. They are a Catholic country, and as is common among cultural Catholics of our post-Conciliar times, they have simply assumed that this was enough. In a nation with 95-98% of the population calling itself Catholic, it seems not to have occurred to anyone that they need to defend themselves against the incursions of this foreign ideology. They are Catholics who do not care about being Catholic. Not the laity nor the clergy nor the episcopate. Malta has also adopted Novusordoism without a single twitch of a qualm.

And the results are, as we would imagine, depressingly predictable.

In the last ten years, Malta's rate of Mass attendance has fallen from about 80% to about 50. From my own observations, I can attest that while their churches may be full, it is the usual story of cotton-tops and their grand children, dragged reluctantly along.

And perhaps most tellingly of all, the total fertility rate is barely above the European standard, at 1.45 children born per woman. Contraceptive use is rampant, and, as everywhere else in what used to be called Christendom, has been met in the Church by a determined clerical silence.

At the moment, the Maltese news is full of dark implications that there is a "power struggle" going on within the Maltese Church. Who knows what that means. And, given the general tenor of life in the Catholic Church at the moment, who knows how it is going to affect the situation there.

But in the midst of this unprecedented rise of the Big Dark, there is one little ray of hope. I recently wrote a column in which I said that Malta's third Great Siege is coming. Indeed, is already inside the gates, which the new ideological invaders found standing open and largely unguarded. Well, it turns out someone there was paying attention.

My recent visits to Malta haven't all been about swimming and pastizzi. I met each time with members of the nation's newest, (and as far as I can tell, only) comprehensive pro-life, pro-family, anti-New Paradigm organisation, the Life Network.

I recently spoke on the phone with their leader, who told me that there had been a meeting with the Maltese president, who had "assured us that the government would never legislate for abortion."

Just like the government of equally Catholic Ireland would never legalise abortion?

Just like your own government would never legalise divorce?

I warned her not ever to believe anything a politician says about abortion.

As I said, we had meetings, and we had a few dinners, which were also meetings. And I told them that they are the last ones. That in all the western world, there is no other place who has said no to the Culture of Death, who has stopped them covering the world in their shadow.

I told them that as grim as it looked, there could be a chance in Malta of turning back the tide. They have three things in their favour. However corrupted their Church has become since the Council, the Maltese are still a deeply Catholic nation. They may have been lulled to sleep with promises of soft pillows and a quiet night, but that 98% rating is still meaningful there.

And it's a tiny country. If they wanted to, if they were determined enough, they really could actually go door-to-door and talk to nearly every person in the country.

And third, Malta has them. This little group of people have been woken up. They've heard the drums and have they are starting to understand the threat their ancient and beautiful country faces.

A few weeks ago, the leadership of this group held a small backyard barbeque for pro-life students at the University of Malta with a view to founding a pro-life and pro-family student group. It was in July, and Maltese university students often spend their summers away on work placements, and still 23 students showed up, with about the same number sending a message saying they would be ready to join such a group. There are plans to go ahead with a campus pro-life group in the new academic year, which starts in October.

This group, that meets in a small office every Saturday, told me that they felt they were ready for any fight that might come, but that they needed to be equipped to make the case in the public forum. So, I have put them in touch with a group in England who trains pro-life leaders. This group has arranged for one of their members to go over there. This person has just done a four month training internship in Calgary with the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform to learn to do exactly this work. Their work is to go to other countries to teach pro-life people how to make the case and fight in the public square.

The ticket has been purchased, and the workshop booked.

We just need some help paying for it. They need about £250.

If you want to be a part of the Great Pushback in the world's last pro-life country,

go to their page and donate.



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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Dreadful place. Really not worth it at all...


Yeah, but Malta really isn't anywhere near this boring and awful. Trust me.

I had a conversation with the nice ticket lady at the airport last time. She was Maltese-Australian, but had come back to the island to get married to a Maltese architect. They were only waiting to get married because he was building them a new home in Gozo. I congratulated her most warmly, and then started talking about how wonderful Malta is and she agreed, and added that people were catching on to it around the world. More and more every year.

"Oh dear. Well that's no good. We'll have to start telling people how awful it is. We'll have to say the food's terrible, and the weather is crummy and the people are mean and not friendly at all, and the swimming is really dreadful..."



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Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Calliope


Malta
This is the calliope that was playing in Republic street on our first morning in Malta last Wednesday.



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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Malta bucket list:



Eat fenek
check out War Museum (cried)
check out Palace Armouries (swooned at the manly coolness)
check out Ancient megalithic temples (felt wise and mysterious)
Blue Grotto/sea cave boat tour
get a hair cut (no longer look like basset hound - win!)
get confession heard in English (priest delayed the Mass for me!)
go to Mass in St. John's Co-Cathedral (glorious church, depressing liturgy)
go to my friend Madeleine's wedding
meet with Maltese pro-lifers
check out Birgu/Vittoriosa/Three Cities
get a ride across the Grand Harbour on an eye-boat/dghajsa/luzzu
(learn how to pronounce 'dghajsa' - "Dai-zah")
learn at least one full sentence in Malti ("Flixkun ta 'ilma bil-gass, jekk jogħġbok." Which seems a very laborious way of asking, "A bottle of sparkling water, please.")

I got it all done.

On the first three days, we marched smartly around getting things done and being very excited. Then my friend went home and I was left to my own devices so, naturally I slacked off. My left ankle was ballooning up every day from the heat and I was pretty tired, since we had spent three days marching smartly around being purposeful and organised in the blistering Maltese sun. So I spent a little time sleeping in a bit, wandering (or perhaps meandering) slowly around Valletta for Friday and Saturday. Went to the wedding on Friday evening and got tooken out to dinner on Sat. night.


That's the Saluting Battery. Those are the benches.

I gazed longingly across the harbour at the Three Cities, but really didn't have the energy to do much more than sit on the benches at the Saluting Battery, sipping my lemon Cisk and thinking, 'Save some for next time'.

Next morning, after elevating my foot and having a long sleep-in I felt on top of the world again and didn't want to just hang around Valletta again. The concierge at the British Hotel said I could get at least a taste of the harbour tour by taking the ferry across to Vittoriosa. So I cheerfully skipped off, only to discover that I'd missed the ferry by a minute. I was informed of this by two very wise-ened old chaps who were taking in the morning sunshine by the ferry slip and one of them said, "But don't worry, I can take you across in my boat. One-fifty." As if to reassure me, the other one said, "He can take you across. Only one-fifty." I agreed readily.

When I rounded the corner, my heart leaped. There was the most beautiful, old fashioned dghajsa one could possibly hope to see, equipped with tiny side benches and a suitably home-made sun shade. I sat down and held on. "You're used to boats..." the old guy said, since I had jumped in without waiting for a hand. "I grew up around them."

He cast off and we had possibly the best ten minutes of the whole trip.

"How old you think this boat?" he asked, patting the gunwales affectionately. Before I could guess, he said proudly, "A hundred, ten years. Survived bombing." All Maltese are in love with history.

He dropped me off at the very base of the Vittoriosa bastions where the sea had carved natural caves in the ancient yellow limestone. I gave him 2E and told him that he really ought to charge tourists more. He directed me to the church where there was a Mass starting in ten minutes.

I'm still kicking myself for not having bought new camera batteries for Sunday because you guys are going to love Birgu, where I met a nice young Scottish guy from Aberdeen who moved there and opened a wine bar with a cantina in the basement dating to the 8th century.

Next time.

(Pics coming.)



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Monday, July 14, 2014

Of herbs and stewed fenek

I am proud to announce that I have tripled my Maltese vocabulary. I now know three words of Malti: "Kappillan," "Bonju," and "fenek". Which, really, is pretty much all a good Catholic needs. Maybe I should learn to say, "What time are confessions at this parish?"

Fenek is the Maltese national dish.

Take:

1/2 fenek, cut up into pieces
3 bay leaves,
handful of chopped sage
1/2 a lemon
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 sticks celery chopped
2-3 cups white wine
tablespoon or so of honey
dash of Lea n' Perrin's
little whole mushrooms
olive oil

Peel, chop and place in the bottom of your cast iron-enamel Dutch oven all the veg, including the garlic. On top, place the pieces of fenek. Drizzle with olive oil and then sprinkle the sage over top, with a dash of salt n' pep. In a coffee cup, mix the white wine, lea-Perrins, juice of half the lemon and the honey. Mix vigorously, then pour over the fenek.

Pop the lid on and put in a medium oven for a long time. An hour at least.

Eat.

So good! So so soooo good!



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Saturday, July 05, 2014

The United Christian Confederation of the Mediterranean



So, the EU and the Euro are doomed, they say. But this doesn't necessarily mean that economic trade zones between similarly placed nation states was a hopeless or bad idea, does it? Whoever thought Germany and Greece were a heaven-made economic match must have been smoking something very interesting, but is there something wrong with the basic idea of economic trade zones?

I've been thinking lately about what is going to happen after the EU slides into the metaphorical sea. Maybe a single currency and the lumbering EU Leviathan-Superstate were a bad idea, but what about smaller more subsidiarity-minded countries in similar regions, with similar economic factors, getting together and hammering out smaller agreements to foster mutual support and similar interests while actually respecting (instead of paying sneering, patronising lip service to) national sovereignty?

And why does it have to be limited to state bodies? Why not regions? And why limit it to economic interests? Why not promote similar cultural interests?

Just thinking out loud here, but what about, for instance, a confederation of Christian Mediterranean states and regions like Malta, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Cyprus and Croatia? I'm reading an interesting book about the physical, anthropological, economic and political history of the Mediterranean, and it certainly wouldn't be the first time that the various places around this ancient basin have banded together for mutual help. (Of course, we've occasionally had to call this "banding-together" things like "the Roman Empire" ... but I'm sure we could manage something useful without all that palaver about elephants and triremes this time.)

And I'm pretty sure we're going to have to start thinking very hard and realistic thoughts about the defence of (what's left of) Christendom, quite soon. It is precisely these kinds of hard and realistic thoughts, thoughts that do not easily accommodate utopian nonsense, that the EU is famously good at not having.

The EU's thesis that a heavily regulated economic superstate will eliminate the ancient political and social tensions ("tensions" being their polite word for mutual, violent loathing and lust for conquest) and bring an endless, fluffy, pink-tinged peace and prosperity are going up in the noxious smoke of torched cars and tear gas canisters. We know that the sudden resurgence of what the papers like to call "extremist nationalist groups" has been due at least in part to the attempt by these (*cough*ex-soviet*cough*) Eurocrats to reboot their youthful utopian dreams. And it seems to be going the way of all utopian dreams.

But is anyone working on ideas for what to do when the inevitable comes?



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Thursday, July 03, 2014

The Keyhole of Europe

Malta's third Great Siege is coming.

"I’ve come to think of Malta as the 'keyhole' in the door of Christendom, as it once was of Europe. Malta’s position in the Mediterranean has made it one of the most important strategic bottlenecks. Its military significance has been acknowledged by every empire, from the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, to the Bonapartist French and the British who ruled it from 1800 to 1964. Who controls Malta controls the Mediterranean. And now, Europe’s keyhole has become a symbol, both to the Maltese themselves, and those who would see them again ruled by a foreign ideological power."



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Saturday, June 28, 2014

And now the bad news

Some Maltese stats from the CIA World Factbook

Median age:
female 42.1 years (2014 est.)

Total Fertility Rate:
1.54 children born/woman (2014 est.)

They've got the European Disease.



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Friday, June 27, 2014

Gold and azure

Here's some pics I stole from Buzzfeed that show that golden heavenly radiance thing I was mentioning.





We were taken out to dinner by some Maltese friends in Rabat, and then took a stroll through the gates of Mdina, the ancient capital of the medieval nobles.

Which really does look like this:


And this:


And we rounded a corner to see this:



Here it is in the not-so-dry spring, with the wild mustard in bloom all around.

(In case you're wondering why I'm not using my own photos, I actually... well... forgot my camera. Yep, that stupid.)



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Dwerja




More of Dwerja.


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Close to heaven

I wasn't sure I would like it. I grew up surrounded by this:


So I was anticipating not really liking this too much:



All the pics and videos I looked at made me wonder the same thing. Are there any trees at all in this place? I've never lived in an arid or semi-arid climate. My American friend who came with me said that of course, as a Canadian, I would find such a desert-y environment a bit of a shock, and it was. But the photos and videos don't do justice to the place. And yes, there are trees, but not as many as I'm used to, and with so little water they don't grow very tall. The umbrella pines I'm used to seeing here only grow about half the height of their Italian counterparts, but still taller than me and enough to create oases of shade. But it's true that Malta makes even dry Lazio look lush.

But one of the first things that hits you when you land is the colour. At first it strikes you as a bit monochromatic. The entire place, every single thing built by the hand of man, from palazzos to highway retaining walls to garden sheds is made of the local honey-coloured limestone that they quarry in several spots around the islands. It's very soft, coming off on your hands and clothes as a fine dust, that makes everything you expose to the air gritty within minutes.

The lady who gave us the tour of the Knights of Malta hospital told us that when you want to paint on it, either just housepaint or frescoes, you have to treat it with oil to seal it first. And I spent a lot of time wondering how you dealt with the dust at home, which must simply pervade life in Malta. If you wanted to set up a business in Malta, a good venture would probably be a vacuum cleaner repair shop, since I bet the stone dust clogs em up pretty good.

The few things that are painted really stand out because nearly everything is left its native, glowy honey colour. We travelled all over the islands by bus, and I think we saw one green house and one pink house. And the indication that the Maltese really love that stone is that in many cases, when things are painted, they're painted to match the original colour. It's obvious that things often get painted, apparently only with a really heavy, enamel style coating, just to seal it and keep it from coming off on your clothes.



When you first see photos of Malta it seems a bit dull, this single colour for everything. But when you get there, you find immediately that it just makes the whole place glow with a warm light, that it takes the harsh glare of the sun and turns it into a kind of heavenly radiance. Someone needs to do some kind of psychology study on the effect of the Maltese limestone colour on the brain. It can't help but have some kind of calming, cheering effect. There's no way that colour isn't good for you.



And you better get to like it because, especially in Valletta, you are entirely surrounded by it. They make the sidewalks, the buildings and the roads, out of it. All the churches, all the palaces, your hotel room... everything. Walking through the little narrow streets of Valletta, that often terminate in stairs, you are walking along in your glowy golden dream, and glance down the street and get a glimpse of the deep azure of the harbour...




It makes you understand suddenly why gold and azure are used in icons to depict heaven. And when the sun slowly sinks and the light calms, the colour warms your very soul.

...

Oh yeah, and we went swimming and snorkelling here:

Dwerja and the Azure Window, where the water, directly under that stone arch, is terrifyingly deep.

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