The Church will be conducting a census this month to find out how many people go to Mass on Sunday and establish if attendances are still declining.
The past three censuses highlighted a dwindling congregation, possibly because the present fast-paced culture was robbing society of the time for reflection, a phenomenon that threatened peoples' faith.
"Reflection is lacking in everything we do. We hardly have the time to read a book or a long article - we are just too busy to think. There is no prayer without reflection," Discern director Fr Joe Inguanez said.
He was replying to questions over faith and young people during the launch of Discern's fourth Sunday Mass attendance census to be taken later this month.
The census will be carried out instead of the homily during a particular Saturday night Mass and during Sunday Mass. Fr Inguanez preferred not to make the dates public to ensure greater accuracy.
The census, on behalf of the pastoral secretariat of the Archdiocese of Malta and the Diocese of Gozo, is intended to gauge how many people attend Mass on Sundays.
It has 11 simple questions that will give the Church the idea of who exactly attended Sunday Mass - their sex, age, residence, occupation and education.
"However, it must be made clear that the census will not give any information about those who do not attend Mass. It should be considered as an initial and not a final study on attendance," Fr Inguanez said.
Despite this, the census will establish the trends of this religious practice between 1997 and 2005. The picture is not rosy and census after census has shown a disconcerting downward trend. The first census of Sunday Mass attendance was held in 1967, when 83 per cent of the "Catholic community" were present at Mass. Another study 15 years later showed a drop of 11 per cent in attendance.
A third census was carried out in 1995 when attendances continued dwindling slowly to 63.4 per cent, a drop of 8.6 percentage points in 13 years.
What was leading to this decline?
"We constantly hear that the homily is under attack but my fear is that people may not be grasping the liturgy. The biggest problem in our liturgy is that it's written in a way few can fully understand," he said.
"I am of the opinion that the liturgy should be in common day language, but others feel there should be an element of mystery."
But was this the reason for the dwindling number of young churchgoers?
"Mass is not a test of faith, merely one indicator. Young people may be straying because of personal bad experiences with individual clergy," Fr Inguanez said.
"Once the results of the census are out, we have to conduct an in-depth study to try and establish the sociological indicators of faith. There will be a plan of action, otherwise it will just be a masochistic exercise of seeing the figures of Sunday Mass go down," he said.
Fr Inguanez insisted that the success of the census depended on the participation of churchgoers, the accurate distribution and collection of the forms, and filling it in correctly.
Help in filling up the census and pens will be provided by the celebrant and by specially assigned people in every church.