The writings of Mgr Paul Cremona

The spirituality of the Archbishop-elect has been attested by several people who know him. Others have alluded to his capacity for humour and irony, particularly when confronted with pomposity. But is there anything more specific that his Dominican identity and 10 books over the last 18 years (some co-written) can tell us?

His being a Dominican friar says something about his particular experience of Church hierarchy. The secular clergy tends to experience it as a pyramid structure of control - something you climb, and having climbed, you might stop, but not go down. The most cursory look at Mgr Paul Cremona's curriculum vitae, however, indicates something else.

He was elected provincial of his order in his mid-30s and served for less than 10 years. Since then he has been Prior, off and on, of the convent in Rabat. He has been in charge of novices, and served as parish priest in two different parishes. It is an experience of going up and down, up again, but not so high, and moving sideways. He has exercised authority over his brethren and then served under some of them.

It is not an experience that can be understood in career terms. It is based on an understanding of hierarchy as more than just a pyramid, as one of variously calibrated functions. It is hierarchy experienced as subsidiarity - as the exercise of distributed authority, and not a centralised one.

His books treat of several subjects - from the concept of peace in John XXIII to ethics and the sacramental life of the Church. It is fruitless to comb them for daring opinions that skirt the boundaries of what is permitted and forbidden by orthodoxy. It is not just that his answers conform to the standard catechism. What is striking about the writings is that he refuses to think of moral theology as God's Dos and Don'ts.

For him, moral theology is concerned with the human response to God's invitations. Liberty is an important value for him: as a young friar working on his doctorate on the thought of John XXIII, the attention to liberty was what struck him. And why? Because liberty is essential if men and women are to take up God's invitation to work for peace and communion between peoples: The invitation often entails taking hold of one's life and resisting others, including the state.

It is this idea of responsiveness that leads him to call his book on the Commandments, I Live. The commandments, in his characteristically Dominican thought, do not constrain; they liberate one to live responsively - and, a favourite word, responsibly. In becoming responsible, his book on the virtues emphasises, one frees up one's capacities for spontaneous acts of justice, courage, good sense, as well as faith, hope and charity.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of his writings is their confidence in reason. His booklet on abortion has a shrill rhetorical title (Life Or Death?) but one has to suspect a meddling editor, since the text itself is remarkable for the unfazed way in which it faces up to the various considerations - medical, cultural and social - raised by the tormenting issue. Written over 20 years ago, it stands up well (whatever one makes of its conclusions) beside the public discussions carried on about bioethics and IVF last year.

He writes simply but treats his reader as an adult. What do other religions say about abortion, he asks. They all permit it to a greater or lesser extent. This he takes as an opportunity to look closer at the issue, and not to swipe at the other religions. And it goes on like this, from book to book.

He tends to be dry, taking pride in his capacity for simple but accurate exposition. But the dryness is very likely because some of the writings were meant for oral discussion in smaller groups, with the fine-grained experience of individuals to be sifted in dialogue and community. The idea of the Church as communion is what guides him: as a parish priest of Guardamangia he decided that his parishioners ought to explore their spirituality together; but since he thought this unlikely to happen except in a small group, he divided the parish up into zones of 150 people and got down to talking.

At this stage, it is not clear if this background has equipped Mgr Cremona for the specific challenges of the episcopate. His spirituality has been emphasised by those who know him well, but historically that has disabled some bishops when carrying out their duties, as much as it has enabled others. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of the most profound Christian theologians of the last 25 years, as astute when writing about worldly power as he is illuminating about the life of the spirit, and yet his period at the helm of the Anglican Church has been characterised by a number of miscalculations about the Churches he leads.

We have yet to see whether Mgr Cremona will be able to use his intellectual formation and pastoral experience to channel the considerable energies of the Maltese Church into the building of its sense of communion.

On the one hand, the workings of hierarchy in the Curia are not quite like those of the Dominican Order. His invitation to people to take more responsibility for themselves - as he understands it - may meet with resistance or misunderstanding from several sides. For his approach, largely free of the hang-ups of 19th century Church-state European politics and their aftermath in 20th century Malta, does not quite fit either of those two loosely used categories, "liberal" and "conservative".

On the other hand, his may be the right kind of preparation for the challenges faced by the 21st century Maltese Church: finding a proper institutionalised, ungrudging role for the laity, particularly women and addressing the de-territorialisation of Christian community, that is, the fact that parishes are increasingly not the most meaningful foci of community within the Church.

His Dominican experience of subsidiarity within the Church may make him ready to exploit all the resources of flexibility that this affords Church organisation - such as that of the permanent diaconate. And his Dominican regard for doctrine - as something that helps experience flow, rather than something that turns it into a coagulated lump of clichés - may possibly lead him to address those members of the laity who are energetically engaged in accompanying others through life crises (say, drug addiction or heart surgery) but without a theological preparation that would properly illuminate the journey.

We shall see. Let us remember, however, that in a religion with a crucified man at the centre of its attention, achievement is measured not by the rate of intended outcomes, but by how splendidly, how lovingly, one fails.