St John's: Embarrassment all round

It will not add one euro cent to or subtract that much from the GDP were the members of the St John's Co-Cathedral Foundation to resign gracefully after their proposal to dig up inside the cathedral grounds was finally abandoned. It would, however, demonstrate a touch of humility by people who should be presumed to be endowed with a few kilograms of it.

The foundation members were asked by The Times whether they felt they should hang on as its members. To a man they could not see why they should leave.

The reason why they should do that is as obvious as a barn door painted in all the colours of the rainbow. They had come up with a proposal which attracted practically not a single voice to back it, outside their limited membership circle.

The controversy raged for several weeks. It drew into its folds three backbench Nationalist MPs, two of them former ministers. The trio stood up to be counted against the foundation's proposals.

They did do so, it must be said, not resting on the basis of disgruntlement. They put forward reasoned objections. Objections which leading notables usually on the Nationalist government's side adumbrated with ferocity hitherto undreamt of. A rare two-page advert in The Times reeled off a list of names from all walks of life against the St John's dug-out, describing it as nothing less than desecration.

Throughout all that flak the foundation members remained as silent as an ancient multi-tiered tomb. They spoke out only once, to try to rebut arguments put forward by the Labour opposition.

Then came the unexpected crunch. Somehow, Archbishop Paul Cremona, no less, was persuaded to sign a joint statement with the political supremo of the country, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi. He did so in the context that he and the Prime Minister felt that the issue had divided the country.

The Opposition Leader smartly retorted that it had done nothing of the sort - it had divided the Nationalist Party; otherwise everyone else seemed to be against the St John's foundation's proposal.

The joint intervention worked the necessary miracle where public opinion had failed. The proposal was scuppered. Foundation members, with amazing cheek, declared that was inevitable.

Thereby they raised a series of questions. The most basic of these are: Why did it take the Archbishop to be embroiled in a clear political move to sink the proposal?

Why did the foundation, on its own intellectual steam, not realise that so many sectors and notable individuals were against their proposal that there had to be something fundamentally flawed in it?

Why did the foundation, acting with due humility, not withdraw the proposal itself? It is for not doing so that the foundation members should resign and not because the Prime Minister and the Archbishop effectively killed the foundation's steadfastly held proposal.

In terms of the language used by the Church and state leaders, the foundation members were prepared to allow the country to continue to be deeply divided, while they pressed on with Mepa appraisal of their project.

The question resonates and reverberates: Why was the foundation so pig-headed?

Because it was that, Malta was regaled with the sight of joint Church-state blocking action just before the House of Representatives began debating an opposition motion urging withdrawal of the project.

The motion, had it been debated, could have proved embarrassing for the government. By joining hands with the Prime Minister, the Archbishop helped to avoid that political embarrassment.

Had the foundation reacted properly to the near-unanimous outcry against its proposal, the Archbishop, in turn, could have been saved the embarrassment he must surely feel in retrospect.

Mine is not a shout for the foundation members to go. They have shown they are determined to soldier on, their particular embarrassment notwithstanding. Let's hope they stick to the good work they had been doing rather than dreaming up some fresh embarrassment.