Nicholas Bonet : an inspirational Bishop of Malta

Abstract

Dignum et iustum est, when celebrating Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna’s tenth anniversary of his ordination to the episcopate, to see his presence and his input within some context of historical continuity. He is the latest in a long line of shepherds, some renowned, some forgotten, many dimmed by the mists of antiquity. This minor effort to revive the memory of a wholly outstanding but erased-from-memory predecessor of Archbishop Scicluna is my minor homage to a pastor, a mentor, an inspiration and a friend. Were I to ask a hundred persons who they would rank as the greatest historical bishop of Malta, I would be stupefied to find anyone opting for Nicholas Bonet. In fact, I doubt how many, outside highly specialized academic circles, have even heard of his name, let alone his fame. And yet Bonet’s outstanding intellect singled him out as a colossus of medieval cosmology, one of those who give the lie to the popular and wholly erroneous perception that nothing much happened in science between Ptolemy in the second century and Copernicus in the sixteenth. How wrong.