Celebrating Mass at the Gozo Cathedral on Saturday morning on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bishop Mario Grech, the Apostolic Administrator of Gozo, spoke about how “our words have become meaningless.”

The Bishop said, “we are living in a turbulent time because we have lost the “word.” He stressed that “the Word of God has lost its meaning for us humans.”

He added, “the first sentence we find in the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Bishop Grech lamented that, “even the word strengthened by the oath has lost its power! The word seems to have been frozen, and when we take it in our hands, it dissolves and a drop of water remains in our hands!”

It is a fact that our words have become too cheap; the lowering of our words has led to an inflation of language,” said the Bishop. “Today, the market is so full of words that there are few serious words left that really matter.”

“Social media helps in this process of word degradation,” said the Bishop, “as it has allowed man to invent not only what is called fake news but also low and obscene words, insults, slander, aggressive and violent words.”

“Unfortunately, lying has become part of the agenda today,” said the Bishop. “There are those who use the lie to defend themselves. There are those who use lies as a tool of war – it has become part of a strategy when we want to break someone.”

“When I disagree with someone or a choice that has been made, then I try to lie to others. Man knows that deception is a powerful weapon that decays and destroys individuals, families, groups and society. Moreover, it is not so uncommon for the same liar to end up believing his own lies,” said Bishop Grech.

He went on to say that, “this sin also exists in the Church. No wonder today’s society has been described as a “post truth society,” which, he said, “in the words of the Oxford Dictionary is a society where public opinion does not rely on objective facts but on emotions and what man imagines it to be factual. In this culture, truth has become of secondary importance if not irrelevant!”

Bishop Grech warned about what he described as the so-called “negative lie,” when, he said, “in the face of a culture of lies, particularly in the face of the collective illusion that creates many illusions, one is silenced, because sincerity is not appreciated and is sometimes penalised. Thus one comes to deny the truth by not defending it.”

Photographs by Joe Grech

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