Red Lights in Amsterdam, Neon In Malta

Thomas Basil in Baltimore contrasts the two extermes of 'Christian Europe' in the 'New Oxford Review':

It is sunset in Bugibba. Small tourist hotels and shops crowd a Mediterranean boulevard teeming with holiday-minded Europeans. Most are surely unaware that their vacation spot ranks a full chapter in the New Testament, Acts 28. In A.D. 60 a shipwreck here changed this island forever. The Church of St. Paul's Bonfire now stands in the boulevard's median strip. Here a serpent tried to strike down the Apostle Paul after he was cast ashore on Malta.

Malta is a remnant speck of Christendom off the coast of a post-Christian western Europe. Malta is home to 365 Catholic churches, roughly one for every 1,000 residents. Of her 400,000 citizens, 98 percent profess Catholicism and, more significantly, 85 percent attend Sunday Mass. The national flag is the feudal eight-point Maltese cross. Malta's state university trains future doctors and engineers as well as future priests. Public schools teach Catholicism as a required subject. Political debate is not over a woman's "right" to abort, but over a couple's "right" to divorce. Malta quaintly outlaws both modern liberties.

Before arriving in Malta, my itinerary took me to Amsterdam, where liberties flourish. In her Red Light district, prostitutes in underwear pose in storefront windows in shops directly opposite an obsolete medieval cathedral. Paid by credit card, prostitutes ply their trade shielded from onlookers only by a curtain pulled across their street-level window. Their professional status is secured by a Dutch labor union for "sex workers." Other Amsterdam sights included its airport's "meditation center," which holds a Sunday "multi-religious" service in a "chapel" devoid of any cross, but with a large arrow on the floor showing the direction to pray toward Mecca; and the suburban Amsterdam parish near my hotel where an elderly nun tallied Mass attendance for me as "about 15 on Saturday night; on Sunday about 100."

Malta's equivalent to Amsterdam's Red Light district is an area known as Paceville. It too is jammed with passersby in search of a good time. But absent are store windows crammed with either prostitutes or obscene sex toys. Instead, its stores include souvenir statues of St. Padre Pio and ceramics of famous Maltese churches. Paceville's most provocative storefront has shelves filled with penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and other hedonistic potions. A neon sign blazes the shop's name: "Made in America."

Andrew Sorokowski in Rockville, Maryland responds:

Having spent two weeks in Malta with my wife last June, I heartily concur with Thomas Basil's characterization of this island nation as a bastion, perhaps the last, of European Catholicism ("Contrasts in Christendom," Oct. 2006). I recommend Malta to all NOR readers who can make the trip.

There is one tragic historical incident that deserves mention. Having taken Malta from the Knights Hospitallers of St. John in June 1798, the French proceeded to persecute the clergy, loot and desecrate churches, and disband monasteries. But when they tried to auction off the treasures of the Carmelite church of Mdina on a Sunday, the Maltese rose up and massacred the French garrison, throwing its hapless commander from a balcony to his death in the street below. Today, you can still see the place where it happened, the House of the Notary Bezzina, in Mdina's Triq Villegaignon. In Valletta, Canon Francesco Caruana led the Maltese in besieging the French until, with British help, they finally drove them out in 1800. You don't mess with the Maltese.

Like their Baroque architecture, Maltese piety is uninhibited, demonstrative, exuberant. One Friday evening, we paused outside a packed Carmelite church in Valletta's Old Theatre Street, entranced by the lavish panoply of candles and vestments, the spirited song and ceremony. It was probably the most exciting thing going on in the sleepy capital at that moment. A woman thrust a Rosary into my wife's hands, entreating her to recite a decade whenever she passed an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is apostolicity: spontaneous and sincere, with none of the self-conscious formalism of parish outreach programs and greeting committees.

As Basil notes, Maltese Catholicism is threatened from within and without. The hugely popular Dom Mintoff, Labour Party Prime Minister in the 1970s and early 1980s, was an ardent anti-clerical. As for abortion, a student told us that with money, it can all be arranged, anonymously, though intermediaries: Just a discreet weekend trip to that great Catholic nation of Italy, less than 60 miles away...

Guard Duty