Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/199842
24 Opinion maltatoday, SUNDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2013 Why I like Pope Francis 'If it flies, it P ope Francis seems to be eager to bring about a culture change within the Catholic Church. His reply to a simple question "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" was equally simplistic; "I am a sinner", Pope Francis said. The first South American pope has made it clear that he wants a church for the poor, and it is obvious that he is trying to move the Church away from the secluded doctrinally pure Church that his predecessor advocated. Pope Francis' words portray the Church as the "home of all" and project an image of the Roman Catholic Church as one that must go out into the world and engage people. He wants a Church that can foster a "culture of encounter". He is in favour of reform; a more humble approach and a "listening" church that is not afraid of making mistakes, as part of his mission to become the "parish priest" of the world. The Pope sends a clear message to the church's ministers, that they must go out and meet the people wherever they are. He recommends that "small-minded rules" that keep ministers locked up and shielded from the world should be set aside. According to news reports on his La Civiltà Cattolica interview last August, Pope Francis is said to have claimed that the Church has concentrated on supervising sex –particularly abortion, conception and homosexuality – while Raphael Vassallo Evarist Bartolo neglecting other important teachings. The Pope has admitted his reluctance to speak of "absolute truth" not because he is a "relativist" but because for Christians, truth is mediated through a person, Christ. The Argentinean Pope may not be a Pope from the Vatican Council but he is a Pope of the Council. Pope Francis emphasises the Council's teaching by referring to the church as "missionary by her very nature". He says he wants a church "for the poor". He refers to the frontiers of Catholicism and wants people to understand that frontiers should not been seen in a geographical context, but as those boundaries that distinguish between Catholics and those that do not see much value in organised religion or who have been overlooked or neglected. He believes that the Church should find new Substance over style: Pope Francis CHECK OUT EVARIST BARTOLO'S LATEST COLUMNS ON http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/blogs roads and have dialogue with all, even its opponents. His defence of the poor and marginalised has helped him set liberation theology free from its ecclesiastical dungeon. Pope Francis says, "The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful". He has said that he sees the Church as a field hospital after battle. Pope Francis has been chosen to lead the Roman Catholic Church in difficult times. He has a very distinctive style that has drawn praise from one and all. He is not trying to change for change's sake, but is attempting a serious reform that will not be easily carried out. Vatican II offered a new way of thinking about doctrine. The Pope can insist that the dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent. This is why he doesn't think he is compromising on doctrine when he suggests that there may need to be a more compassionate pastoral response to the divorced and remarried. It is a question of style vs. substance. There are many who believe that Pope Francis will not rewrite controversial Church doctrines and it is unlikely that his reforms will pave the way for women to be ordained or that gays won't be viewed as intrinsically disordered. But if Pope Francis succeeds in creating a new generation of pastoral leaders who are willing to create this "culture of encounter", he would have created the style which could lead to meaningful and transformative doctrinal substance. Evarist Bartolo is Minister for Education RESEARCH ANALYST … to which I am sorely tempted to reply: "And if you hunt, you're a c***." Ah, bliss. I've been meaning to get that off my chest for ages. But before we all get lost in the female section of Gray's Anatomy: some of you might recognize the above headline (but not, sadly, the reply) as the motto of a car sticker that prompted a minor furore when somebody posted it on Facebook a few weeks ago. I kept quiet about it at the time because it seemed to me that the general reaction was scathing enough without any additional input on my part. And rightly so. For make no mistake: driving around with a sticker like that is a deliberate act of provocation. It is every bit as effective as a shotgun in getting its message across… and the message itself was aimed (much like a shotgun) at causing as much offence with as little effort as possible. As such, it is entirely symptomatic of the attitude of a great many (not all, I admit) among the wider hunting community: a cross between genuine sadism, in the sense that these people take visible pleasure in hurting others… and the mischievous impudence of someone who knows he can get away with any amount of illegality, because the country's entire political system is eating out of his hands anyway. In a nutshell: it is this sort of person – and not the otherwise respectable public face of such lobbies as the FKNK and St Hubert Hunters, etc. – who would shoot not one, but TEN (10) endangered Booted eagles in an afternoon in Buskett (not, mind you, that the species actually matters: if it flies it dies, remember?) And these people will not give a microscopic toss about such issues as conservation and general respect for wildlife and the natural weal… quite the contrary: the rarer and closer to extinction the more pleasure they will get out of the bird's destruction: and in particular out of the general outcry when their brutish deed gets reported in the press. This is an aspect of hunting that few people on the outside (as it were) truly understand. Killing birds represents only a small part of the thrill of hunting. The other part of the thrill is caused by simply pissing people off… rubbing our collective noses in the sheer helplessness of the ordinary lawabiding citizen when faced with this wanton disregard for the most basic norms of civility. And the more people complain, the more protected birds they will kill, and the more pleasure they will take in killing them, too. There is, however, a limit to how much destructive thuggery a country can actually put up with before it finally decides (like Tony Zarb, in a pre-election age when he occasionally remembered being a militant trade unionist) that 'enough is enough'. And when you also realise that all the things you once thought might actually help us evolve beyond this primitive stage turn out to be duds – for instance, EU membership, which came with, oh! So many promises of environmental improvements that never quite materialised…. Well, that's also the moment you finally realise that if this situation is going to improve at all, the improvement will have to be brought about by ourselves, on our own, without any input by an economic bloc that doesn't seem to have any responsibility or competence on any subject other than collecting taxes and telling us how to live our private lives. But back to the issue at hand. Hunting, in all its manifestations, is something I have been writing about for approximately 15 years. I admit I find myself writing about it a good deal less today than in the 1990s… partly because it made more sense to write about hunting at a time when nobody else in this country (outside of Birdlife Malta and some random nutters here and there) seemed to give a flying flamingo about birds. Now that everyone and his turtle-dove suddenly appears vitally anxious about the same issue, well, there is less immediate need to draw national attention to this bizarre and anomalous state of affairs. But – Malta being the unconscionably schizophrenic country it is – there is also an inevitable element of political twittery in all this. When I wrote about the hunting situation 15 years ago, I found myself on the receiving end of public criticism for my pains. This because the basic thrust of my articles at the time – i.e., that government was bending over backwards to placate an ever more unreasonable hunting lobby, while disregarding all environmental and conservation aspects to the issue – was perceived as 'critical of the PN', and therefore 'pro-Labour'. I have a distinct memory of being accosted at Saddles in Spinola once – which should give you an indication of how long ago this was – by someone who told me to stop 'helping Labour' by criticising the PN's hunting policies. 'People are more important than birds', was the sort of spiel I used to get back then. This was shortly before the 1996 election. You can work out the implications