When a Pope dies

It's not my intention to blog about Wojtyla's death for the very simple reason that tv stations (in Malta that means RAI and Mediaset and their poor replicas broadcasting from Guardamangia and Marsa) have been broadcasting endless services since last Friday. Even the net is full of weblogs, pages and what have you focusing on the Polish Pope's death.

But I found it really interesting how certain VIPs took an ego-boost off the Pope. The President of Malta, Edward Fenech Adami, was one of the guests interviewed during a very boring tv programme on Maltese State tv on Sunday afternoon. During the interview the President spoke about the many photos he and his large family had taken with the Pontiff. He also told his interviewer that once Wojtyla told him that he was the lay person to pay him the most significant compliment in his whole life when the Presidet spoke to him about some encyclica he had written. President Fenech Adami took this opportunity to reveal that in one of his meetings with the Pontiff he had invited him to visit Malta because despite the Maltese two-thousand year history of Christianity (and that, Mr President, is a huge historical mistake) no Pope had ever visited the island of Paul. According to President Fenech Adami, the Pope had refrained from committing himself, but only an hour later, the Vatican Radio announced that the Pope was to visit Malta! Televiewers could not avoid noticing that during the interview the President of the Republic kept ignoring his interviewer and chose to face the camera directly while adopting a speaking tone reminiscent of his famous mass meetings on the Floriana Granaries. It was also interesting to see the President conducting a semiotic analysis of the personal photographs taken with the Pontiff, repeatedly saying how the Pope looked him in his eyes each time they talked.

A similar pomposity was adopted by President Emeritus Guido de Marco, who was also a special guest during the tv programme in question. De Marco recalled the "number of meetings" he had with the Pontiff as President of the Republic and as President of the United Nations. He was overjoyed to reveal a secret: once, thanks to him (to De Marco that is) a Catholic priest who had been imprisoned for over thirty years in Albania was freed. According to De Marco, this mission was entrusted to him by none other than Karol Wojtyla. Mission accomplished, good old Guido!

There were also the statements issued after the world learned of Wojtyla's death. The Nationalist Party, which has been ruling Malta for quite some time, spoke of the Pontiff's focus on social justice and in his insistence that Governments should work for justice and the just distribution of wealth. While the Nationalist statement referred to Wojtyla's anti-communism, it stopped short from even mentioning his stand against globalisation and consumerism.