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While I strongly protest that you have ignored my last letter wherein I showed my disdain for the title you chose to give to my reply to three gentlemen who had disagreed with my initial contribution, I feel that I cannot leave unanswered Franco Farrugia’s latest contribution to your paper. It seems that you love to see me under attack by the way you give importance to all personal rants against me. You print them in boxes and highlighted.
It seems that our learned Franco Farrugia does have a muddled idea about the so-called Middle Ages in the process of growth of our western civilisation. During those important centuries our civilisation was in its youth and its achievements were more than impressive. Under the aegis of the Catholic Church it not only crushed the Islamic armies at Tours but it also swallowed alive two other civilisations which at that time where pressing on her from the West and the North. It managed to halt and then to completely integrate into her own tissue the Irish far-western civilisation. Then it managed not only to tame and convert the Scandinavian onslaught but it captivated the Scandinavians so much that they became its foremost warriors in the struggles against the Islamic society in the Mediterranean and the Near East.
While today we watch helplessly as millions of Muslims settle and breed to the limit in a London and in an Amsterdam and in a Stuttgart in which the hardened troops of Abd al Rahman not only have never had set foot upon but never even knew that they existed, during the much maligned Middle Ages the Western frontiersmen of a Navarre, a Leon and an Aragon began a Reconquista which not only returned the whole Iberian peninsula to the Western fold but also conquered the mastery of the ocean by traversing the Atlantic and peopling the continents of America and by turning the Cape and bursting on the Pacific.
As we see the failure of our modern European fathers to build their house on the foundations of a constitution which not only leaves out God but brandishes its hostility to all moral strictures by legalising gay marriages and abortion, we have to admit that all their labour is in vain. All those learned men and women who met and discussed the new EU constitution were doing less justice to themselves when they omitted from their official creed that “Man shall not live by bread alone”; and at the same time they were dooming their cause to defeat; for to offer bread alone is almost as uninviting as to offer stones for bread.
This fatal mistake had not been made by Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great and Hildebrand and the other founders of Western Christendom from whom our religious and ethical inspirations are still derived. These men, who were whole-heartedly dedicated to a supra-mundane cause, had not consciously attempted to found a European order.
Their worldly aim had been limited to the more modest material ambition of keeping the survivors of a shipwrecked society alive; and in acquitting themselves of this burdensome and thankless task they were forced, against the grain, to undertake economic and political responsibilities. The economic edifice that was raised by Benedict and Gregory and their peers was avowedly extempore and makeshift; yet, in raising it, they took care to build upon a religious rock and not upon economic and political sands; and thanks to their labours, the structure of our western civilisation rested on solid religious foundations in the early days when it was still a tiny society in an out-of-the-way corner of the World.
On this religious soil our western civilisation has grown like the grain of the mustard seed until it has become a tree in whose branches all the other living societies have come to lodge. In less than fifteen centuries the narrow verged Western Christendom of Benedict’s and Gregory’s generation has grown into the ubiquitous Global Society of our day.
If a religious basis was required for Gregory’s unpretentious economic and political building, and if it is this basis that has enabled our civilisation to grow on the material plane until it overshadowed the earth, it seems unlikely, on this showing, that our vaster structure of a European order, which it is our task to build in our day, can ever be securely based upon the rabble foundations of gay rights, abortion and sordid economic and political interests.
Finally, my dear Mr Farrugia, let me tell you that I always ask for second and third and fourth opinions. I do this by reading history and by studying the story of Man in the process of civilisation.
Joseph Fava
Marsaskala
Editorial Note – Mr Fava’s original letter had been saturated with too many historical and biblical quotes which rendered his article too lengthy to publish in last Sunday’s edition. This newspaper reserves the right to edit its letter as it deems fit, irrespective of Mr Fava’s gratuitous remarks in his letters so far.
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