Our ‘unusual kindness’
“Melite... is a colony planted by the Phoenicians, who, as they extended their trade to the western ocean, found in it a place of safe retreat...” Diodorus of Sicily wrote these words a century before St Luke marvelled at the “unusual kindness” of “the natives” (Acts 28:2). Chosen as the motto for the papal visit to Malta expected since 2020, the words are echoed every February 10 in our churches, and worth pondering on this World Day of Migrants and Refugees. An island of many harbours in the middle of tempestuous waters is not unlike an oasis in the desert: the difference between life and death; rest and exhaustion; hope and despair. Our ancestors from the Fertile Crescent – the Canaanites or “Phoenicians” as the Greeks called them – for almost a millennium before St Paul’s shipwreck, had forged a hub for hospitality and commerce. This was no trivial feat. In a world where drought and famine could quickly turn the farmer and craftsman into a migrant, and all travelling was hazardous, the obligation to tend to the stranger was as sacred as the Hippocratic oath. Indeed, the two were one, as “hospitality” and “hospital” remind us so glaringly. Hospitality is the mark of civic...