According to this report, on Monday of Holy Week, Malta ‘legalised’ same-sex ‘partnerships’, just two years after it ‘legalised’ divorce (one of the more minor consequences of the abandonment of natural law is a proliferation of apostrophes.)  The protest of the opposition leader is characteristically depressing: ‘Malta has not been prepared for such a step’, he objects, as if it were fine to step off a cliff provided one does so after due preparation.

Two years! It is not many. Motus in fine velocior, indeed. That island was specially protected, seemingly as a divine reward for the welcome once given to St Luke and St Paul:-

But the barbarians showed us no small courtesy. For kindling a fire, they refreshed us all, because of the present rain, and of the cold. And when Paul had gathered together a bundle of sticks, and had laid them on the fire, a viper coming out of the heat, fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the beast hanging on his hand, they said one to another, ‘Undoubtedly this man is a murderer, who though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance doth not suffer him to live.’ And he indeed shaking off the beast into the fire, suffered no harm. But they supposed that he would begin to swell up and and that the would suddenly fall down and die. But expecting long, and seeing that there came no harm to him, changing their minds, they said that he was a god (Acts 28).

For almost two thousand years that serpent’s venom was powerless against the apostle. But it seems that the head which received the mortal wound has been healed, and the poison is at last at work. 80% of the people are opposed to the new legislation, we read. But with what sort of an opposition? Not, alas, the kind that leads them to invade the parliament and keep the deputies under guard until they comes to their senses. If it is lawful for a man to fight off a criminal who has invaded his house and is threatening his family, is it unlawful for a people to fight off politicians who are threatening their country? Private citizens, perhaps, cannot depose their deputies until their term of office has run its course. But they can use the force necessary to restrain them from acts of violence against the commonwealth. Such an action would be worthy of the courage and Catholic spirit of the Maltese people down the ages. Has the venom paralysed them?