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Catholic_Press
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By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
Benedict may well be hoping the Maltese show him the same “rare humanity” with which the Acts of the Apostles say they received St. Paul almost two millennia ago.
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Rome
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Benedict XVI arrives in Malta tomorrow to celebrate the memory of a shipwreck, and at the moment the pope could be forgiven for feeling like he’s on the brink of another one. In recent weeks, the “Barque of Peter,” a traditional maritime image for the papacy, seems to be foundering on the choppy seas of the sex abuse crisis.
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The official motive for Benedict’s trip is to mark the 1,950th anniversary of Paul’s shipwreck on Malta, which led to the early Christianization of the archipelago and Malta’s emergence as one of the most homogenously Catholic cultures on earth. To this day, divorce is illegal, the EU has acknowledged Malta’s right to set its own policies on abortion, and the Catholic church is constitutionally recognized as the authoritative teacher of right and wrong in the country.