Archbishop Charles Scicluna warns malicious bloggers: ‘you’ll have God to answer to’

Charles Scicluna’s homily to parishioners celebrating hunters’ patron saint St Julian warns against continued destruction of countryside and urban landscape

Archbishop Charles Scicluna in a photo with Glenn Bedingfield, who runs his own personal blog against Labour critics from inside his OPM workplace
Archbishop Charles Scicluna in a photo with Glenn Bedingfield, who runs his own personal blog against Labour critics from inside his OPM workplace

Archbishop Charles Scicluna delivered a scathing criticism of the way Maltese society is beset by malicious internet gossip and environmental degradation.

In an homily for the feast of St Julian’s on Sunday, Scicluna used the tragic example of the hunters’ saint – he murdered his parents as they slept in his bed, under the false impression that they were his wife and a lover – as a victim of gossip and inflammatory comment.

“I warn those who use blogs and the internet to instigate the Maltese against each other, by muck-raking and insulting and humiliating each other,” Scicluna said, in an obvious reference to the unofficial partisan gossip employed by Daphne Caruana Galizia and Glenn Bedingfield in their blogs, to target critics of the Nationalist and Labour parties, respectively.

Even Scicluna tends to be a target of Bedingfield’s blog, which Joseph Muscat’s aide actually pens from his workplace at the Office of the Prime Minister, when the archbishop criticises government policy. In the past Muscat refused to condemn a gratuitous ‘clerical child abuse’ dig by Bedingfield against Scicluna.

“Whoever carries out this instigation will have God to answer to. It is creating an environment that does not beget either unity or peace, that does not give justice. When we use the media as a means of destruction, jealousy and hatred, even this is a sin.”

Scicluna was also unequivocal about the state of the environment having become “the biggest tragedy of our time, even in our country”.

“We don’t have deer in Malta,” Scicluna said again referring to the effigy of St Julian and his wounded quarry. “If we did, we would have shot them dead, because we want to kill anything that flies and moves,” the archbishop said.

Scicluna has been a vocal critic of high-rise development, which has been made possible by a Planning Authority policy designed to accommodate tower projects in areas such as Sliema and St Julian’s among others.

“If we’re unable to swim in our polluted waters, breathe in our countryside, and destroy our urban patrimony with our greed, the prophecy of St Julian’s wounded deer will be true for us as well: ‘you will kill your parents’.

“And our mother is Malta, the sweet land we sing to in our national anthem… would we kill our roots today?”