During his apostolic visit in 1575, Mgr Pietro Duzina went to 430 churches in Malta and Gozo. They were mostly small, bare and dirty. Forty-nine were on the verge of collapsing. Two hundred and twenty-two had no doors and animals entered regularly. Nevertheless, people used to organise merry feasts in them.
At the feast of St Agatha, in Rabat, according to the monsignor, people spent all night inside the church carousing. He put a stop to it all, decreeing that the gates of the churches should be closed not later than an hour after sunset and after making sure that everybody had left.
Duzina observed that Maltese nuns could neither read nor write. Many of the priests knew no Latin and could hardly read or write either. A person could automatically become a priest after serving in the sacristy for some years. Many of the local priests did not know the Roman rite and still practised the Gallican rite condemned by the Council of Trent 12 years earlier.
Duzina ordered the priests not to say Mass barefooted, unshaven and improperly dressed.
The priests told Duzina that their bishop based in Girgenti, Sicily extorted money from them. They had to pay him a fee in advance to be ordained. Some of them had to sell their clothes and belongings to pay him. He did not allow priests to make a private will to make sure that all they left would go to the bishop. The bishop terrified the priests by threatening that they would not be buried inside the church unless they handed all their belongings to him before they died.
All that was 448 years ago. If he were to carry out a health check of the Catholic Church today what would Duzina find? He would certainly be impressed by most of the church buildings and their artistic heritage. But he would also find that they have fewer priests than they need as more of them die without having younger ones replacing them. Not only have religious vocations dropped sharply but younger priests continue to leave the priesthood.
A Church study in 2017 showed that 92 per cent of Maltese were Catholic with 74 per cent going to Mass once a month and 40 per cent going every Sunday. Sunday Mass attendance is expected to decline to only 10 per cent of Malta’s Catholic population by 2040.
The first census taken in 1967 showed 81.9 per cent Mass attendance. The State of the Nation Survey for 2023 shows that 61 per cent of our people say religion plays a very important role in their life. Forty-nine per cent say that religion informs their sense of right and wrong.
This 2023 survey shows that Maltese people regard feasts as the most important expression of Maltese culture, followed by traditional Maltese food and the Good Friday procession. In 1994, Anthony M. Abela was already saying that “the request for a Church baptism, marriage or a funeral is more a matter of cultural conformity than of religious conviction”.
A person very active in parish life told me that religious organisations are failing to attract young people in his village. Most of their remaining members sitting on the parish council are over 70, making it more difficult for the parish priest to renew his parish. The most dynamic people in the village are those of all ages who organise the festa through the band clubs and the groups that make fireworks.
Sunday Mass attendance is expected to decline to only 10 per cent of Malta’s Catholic population by 2040- Evarist Bartolo
Local Catholic leaders have for a time been admitting that “We Maltese need to understand what it is to be Christian today”. They hoped that Pope Francis’s visit in March 2022 would help to reinvigorate Catholicism and revive spirituality in Malta.
As often happens with us, and not only in religion, we put our faith in a ‘deus ex machina’. Instead of solving our own problems and changing our ways we take the easy way out and expect to be saved miraculously by an outside force.
A meaningful role
Pope Francis believes that Catholics need to shake themselves out of their complacency and stop simply adhering to ritual and tradition: “‘I’m satisfied; I lack nothing. I have everything. I’m assured of my place and this life and the next, since I go to Mass every Sunday. I’m a good Christian.’ But walking down the street, I pass others, who lack shelter, food, proper clothing and I look the other way so that I will not need to see them.”
St Pope John Paul II had already said in 1987 how Catholics commit a social sin “through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world”.
For many years, the Catholic Church had restricted itself to teaching about morality in the private life of individuals and stayed away from promoting public morality. It would have meant criticising the British imperial set-up in Malta with which it had reached an accommodation. It only entered the political fray whenever it felt in danger of losing its privileged position.
Writing in ‘Oikonomia’ eight years ago, Joseph Ellul observed how the “issues (divorce, civil rights and marriage equality for LGBT and IVF) have brought to light a lack of preparedness on the part of both hierarchy and clergy for the onslaught that has taken place”.
Ellul believes that the Church can help construct a more humane Maltese society by listening “to the cries of anguish which betray a sense of the meaninglessness that lies at the heart of humanity today”.
In its document ‘One Church, One Journey’ (2020 – 2024), the Maltese Church charts a renewal process addressing “the way many people take for granted ‘collective’ practices like tax evasion, graft and ‘omertà’ or how often they instinctively knit their social fabric through ‘friends of friends’, amoral familism, ‘pjaċiri’… shows the gap between where we are and the Catholic ethos grounded in the common good, solidarity, the preferential option for the poor or even a basic civic sense…”
The Maltese Catholic Church seems to have finally found a meaningful role for itself which is also good for our society but is it in a position to deliver?
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.