Twelfth Night follies

The Yuletide spirit did not take much to be dissipated this time. “Pope Benedict was driven to resign by having private papers filched from his own desk and published on the media which drove him to conclude he could not control the Curia.”

In swift succession we have lost people we have loved and honoured – Sinisa Mihajlovic, Pele, Pope emeritus Benedict, Silvio Parnis, and now Gianluca Vialli. Our days have become a series of requiems, and that’s not counting people we know or relatives of people we know.

But the personages I listed were much loved and therefore much missed.

Sinisa was much loved as a player but even more as a coach and still more by the open and courageous manner with which he fought his final game.

About Pele books may be written not just regarding his sports exploits but even more on how he rose from poverty and yet remained humble and down to earth.

Rivers of ink have been spent on Pope Benedict but there have been other issues which came to the fore before his funeral so that the funeral became more like an airing of the right-wing sovranist approach in Europe as could be seen by the presence of Viktor Orban and the Polish president, apart from Meloni, at the funeral.

Matteo Salvini had donned a Tshirt which declared that ‘his’ Pope was Benedict and a rightwing paper spoke of the dead Pope as ‘our Pope ' obviously in contrast to Pope Francis.

Not mentioned but obviously still in many people’s minds were the anti-Muslim words in the pope’s Ratisbon oration.

People generally paid tribute to the dead Pope for his charming character and for his profound and beautifully crafted theological writings but few remembered his relentless hounding of theologians like Leonardo Boff and even his former colleague Hans Kung when as Cardinal Ratzinger he was head of the Holy Office.

The funeral itself and the days preceding it became a sort of dry run of the next Conclave with the sovranistas pulling out all the stops to avoid a next Pope in the Francis mould. For better or for worse that decision will be taken not by the crowds of mourners in St Peter’s Square but by a select number of cardinals.

Pope Benedict was driven to resign by having private papers filched from his own desk and published on the media which drove him to conclude he could not control the Curia. Pope Francis came along and soon showed the Curia who was the master, hence the horror and hatred in his regards that continue to surface.

Turning to the Malta scene the funeral was held of Silvio Parnis on Friday morning in a packed Paola church, such was the genuine respect and bereavement felt by people from all walks of life and from all political parties at the untimely death of this well-loved former mayor of the locality.

And then, just as the Silvio Parnis funeral was over, came the news of the death of Gianluca Vialli, the much loved player of the Azzurri. His death, like that of Pele, had been expected but was still a blow.

And now, perhaps to wean us off all these requiems and funerals, comes the news, thanks to a mistake by a Spanish paper, about the explosive contents of the book “Spare” by Britain’s Prince Harry about how he’s feeling ill done by his own family, how his own brother, the future king, threw him to the floor (and broke the dog’s pot in the process). And about how he shot and killed a number of Taliban during his time in the army in Afghanistan. The book was meant to be published this week. It also tells of the present King Charles taunting him by asking him who’s his father thus alluding to Princess Diana’s infidelity.

Oh well, with a family like that. Such revelations seem the order of the day. Pope Benedict’s devoted secretary Mgr Georg Ganswein, who never once left the body of the Pope as he lay in state right until it was buried, somehow found time to write his memoirs in which he accused the present Pope of having unfairly removed him from his official post.

And that, so far, brings this year’s Twelfth Night frolics to an end.