Roman Catholicism à la carte maltaise: Janice Bartolo, in black veil, meets the Pope with her married lover

I wonder what this photograph looks like to proper Roman Catholics, because even from my secular point of view it looks deeply wrong.

The Pope receiving the Justice Minister’s mistress – in a black veil, for heaven’s sake – the very woman with whom he cheated on his wife, going behind her back while she was hard at work nursing people at the state general hospital, the woman for whom he left his wife and young daughter?

It wouldn’t have mattered one jot if they didn’t profess themselves to be Roman Catholics – in that case, each to his own – but they do. What sort of outrageous hypocrisy is this?

And look at Holy Marie Louise smiling delightedly at the spectacle. Well, she would – because in Janice Bartolo, she sees herself. She, too, did what Janice Bartolo has done, only worse: when her biological clock began ticking loudly in her late 30s, she deliberately got pregnant by the married man with whom she was having a secret affair, shattering his wife and children. She ended up raising her daughter alone while chasing the father for maintenance, and then found God, religion and Edgar Preca. Now she appears to be a practising Catholic.

But the Super One reporter and the Justice Minister? Please don’t tell me they went there as Catholics. I have a real issue with the way Maltese people think Catholicism is some kind of label or badge of identity, rather than a set of beliefs, shaped by rules you’ve got to stick with or stop calling yourself a Catholic.

We are the specialists in hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. If you want to live that way, do the proper and decent thing and stop defining yourself as a Catholic. That black veil…what are these people? And look at all those other Maltese Catholics congratulating her and telling her she deserves it. Deserves it? What a parody of religion this is.

Despite my lack of religious sentiment, I am outraged at the level of basic decency and good manners. It would have been different had those two taken up with each other after his marriage had broken down, but the fact that they did not changes the context completely.

That the Department of Information should release a photograph of the Justice Minister’s mistress-turned-girlfriend, in a black veil, meeting the Pope is morally disordered at an entirely different, secular level. The message it communicates is that there are no standards required anywhere, for anything.

So fine, the Justice Minister took his girlfriend to meet the Pope, but the government’s Department of Information should be discreet about it.

And this is the government that tries to take the moral high ground on matters of whether the press should discuss the illness of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. It’s certainly got its moral knickers in a twist.