The recent editorial on the Church’s need to make ends meet made interesting reading. It seems that other dioceses in a worse situation than that obtaining in Gozo and Malta are striving on despite handicaps.

One such is The little Church of Turkey, at times ignored, which “had its famous moment of sadness with the brutal assassination of the president of the Turkish Episcopal Conference, Bishop Luigi Padovese... by those same obscure powers that (Bishop) Luigi had just a few months earlier pointed out as those responsible for the assassinations of Fr Andrea Santoro, of the Armenian journalist Dink and the four protesants of Malatya”. A “dark plot of complicity between ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics, experts in schemes of tension”, to quote Archbishop Ruggero Franceschini of Izmir, who succeeded the assassinated Bishop Padovese as president of the Bishops Conference of Turkey.

Archbishop Franceschini went on to specify in his intervention at the recently held synod of bishops of the Middle East that “the pastoral and administrative situation in the Vicariate of Anatoly is serious. The reasons are the divisions within the Christian community, the ‘careless’ management of the finances of the entire vicarate by the secretary of the deceased bishop, the very serious lack of missionary workers”.

Yet, while Church finance management is serious business I cannot delete from my mind an episode I witnessed a few months back while accompanying a Jesuit missionary back from India for a short rest, when I toured one of their houses with him.

The house’s “accountant” laid down his books, keyboard and all, and took a pause to recur to the chapel to join the small congregation at the evening Mass even though he himself had already celebrated Mass that same morning, probably in that same chapel. For “if the Lord does not build the house, in vain do the workers labour”.