When The Mediterranean Was A Christian Lake

There are other places where the culture is as profoundly Catholic as it is in Malta. But there is none where it is even more so. Maltese, written using our own Latin alphabet, is a Semitic language, especially closely related to the forms of Arabic, a very diverse thing in its spoken form, used conversationally in the North Africa to which Malta is nearest.

Look at the present attention on Cyprus, now even an EU member-state but by any reasonable reading of a map a part of the Middle East, and in fact integrally so for millennia, as Greeks were as surely as they were integral to Europe, and as surely as they were one people in both contexts. It is the Greeks, not the Turks, who form that bridge. And the Greeks, for this purpose, include all those whose liturgical language is Greek, one of the many important reasons for them to continue to celebrate the Liturgy wholly or partly in Greek as well as (not necessarily instead of) the local vernacular, just as there are many and similar important reasons to continue to celebrate the Mass wholly or partly in Latin as well as (not necessarily instead of) the local vernacular.

Like that attention, this Papal Visit to Catholic, Semitic Malta reminds us that the Mediterranean was once a Christian lake, back when Saint Augustine drew the shape of Western theology as a bishop in present-day Algeria while the Bible was being translated into Latin by Saint Jerome of Bethlehem. Attend the Latin Mass to this day and the readings will be from that translation.

I am as hostile as anyone to any Union of the Mediterranean as presently conceived, as much as anything else because, like European federalism, it is a Mosleyite notion. I regard with horror the prospect of an Islamised economy, society, culture and polity in Europe or the wider West, which I see as a most likely consequence of the secularisation and rootlessness of Europe and the wider West, even if migration from the Islamic world were far lower than it now is.

But the restoration of Christian Asia Minor, of the Christian Levant, of Christian Mesopotamia and of Christian North Africa? That would be an entirely different matter. The question is, would that be dependent upon, or might it be, especially in union with the rise of Christian Africa in general, the means to, the restoration of Christian Europe, of Christian Australasia and of the Christian Americas? Either way, the next Christian lakes would be the Atlantic and the Pacific. The South Pacific arguably already is one.