Sunrise, sunset

Centre stage of the Catholic Church in Malta has been allocated to Archbishop-designate, Fr Paul Cremona. Rightly so. The appointment was late in coming. It arrives three years after the incumbent, Archbishop Joseph Mercieca, had offered his resignation, on turning 75. The Vatican took its time. Our parish priest, at Attard, put an angle to it which was profound in its simplicity.

In arguably the best of his homilies since he took over from the hard-working Fr Dione Cutajar, Fr Noel Vassallo said he had been one of those puzzled by the dragging of Vatican feet. Yet - he continued - as with the preparation for the coming of Christ, it had a purpose, after all. Perhaps the time was not ripe for the right choice to be made. When the decision was taken, look at the result.

The selection of Patri Pawl Cremona made all those who showed their feeling respond to his disarming smile with their own genuine smiles of happiness. The charisma of the new Shepherd of the restless Maltese archdiocese was one reason why he was so gladly received.

But there is much more to him. A simple man as befits a member of a holy order, he has an intellect that was noted well before he was chosen. His peers described him as an intellectual. If not the major quality to be sought in a bishop, it does help for a spiritual leader to be able to argue his view, alongside the faith that has to be its essence.

Fr Cremona is also said to be a man who understands the importance of the media, and how the media work. That will definitely be an added advantage, as he strives to make people more aware of the true meaning of faith. Of spirituality. Of the awesomeness of believing without understanding completely, or much at all.

In a world now dependent on communications, the media are truly the message. I spent an invigorating evening, recently, with a handful of clerical and lay thinkers. They were not above exchanging their views with a guest who is not quite an exemplary being in the fold, and with a past which others deemed to be anticlerical, though it was never quite that.

I was asked questions, to which I did not try to provide answers, for I cannot offer that which I do not have.

I attempted to provoke non-mainstream thought, and generally found I was outflanked in that area as well. There do remain considerable fossilised members of the clergy, evidenced, for instance, by public disdain towards Maltese Catholics who have embraced Islam. There is also a great deal of understanding of current spiritual, social and economic problems, and of the way society works.

Does the Church in Malta understand the media, I was asked. Are there things which could and should be communicated with benefit to the doers and recipients of the information alike, but are not? The answers were implicit in the questions, put to me more to make me aware, than to offer an opinion that was not already manifest.

The Church may have its own radio and a variety of newspapers. I do think it is a fact, however, that both absolutely and relatively there is little media interest in what the various components of the Church in Malta are doing. It is not a question of following the tenet of modesty, not to let the left hand know what the right is doing.

The human side of the institution that is the Church translates into activities that are at least as interesting as most of those carried out by lay institutions like political parties and their local centres. God forbid that pastoral work should seek attention similar to that craved by organisers of political activities. Or that the bishops' sermons should be remotely regarded like the competitive Sunday sermons given by the political leaders.

Nevertheless, where there are deeds of value, they should be brought to wider attention than is being done. Similarly regarding views expressed by the bishops, and other churchmen, outside their traditional forums.

The fact that Archbishop-designate Paul Cremona understands the media might bring about a reappraisal of how the Church could earn media attention that could reach considerably more than the word from the pulpit. There could be a more direct passage into the media as well, for someone with Patri Pawl's writing talent. Bishop Nikol Cauchi demonstrated that during the long years he tended to the flock in Gozo.

I encountered his strong and persuasive manner of putting his point across in a discussion we shared at the Catholic Institute, not so long after the Curia and the MLP at long last ended the bitter politico-religious dispute of the Sixties, in the blessed Easter of Peace of 1969. Bishop Cauchi ventured well beyond the limited space of the Catholic Institute.

He made worthy and skilful use of the columns of The Times, and continues to do so now. Who knows whether Archbishop Cremona, too, might not find the time to reach out through newspaper columns?

He has much to tend to, for Malta is well into the post-modern society, where spirituality has, at the very least, to be redefined if it is to be understood. He will not be taking crisis measures. Fr Cremona, when his selection was made public, straightaway wisely declined to accept that falling church attendance was a symptom of a Church in crisis.

Yet he will have to work hard and with speed on drawing up a plan to revitalise the Church in Malta as an institution, and to refurbish her image. Careful use of the media will be one of the many ways to approach that demanding task.

As that takes place, the reasons why he was chosen - for there would be quite a few of them - and his unconscious preparation for the role, should start becoming clearer.

It is natural that Fr Cremona should occupy centre stage, though it is already clear he accepts the limelight not for his ego, but as a means of beginning the essential process of communicating. While that takes place, the years of service rendered by Archbishop Mercieca should not be forgotten.

When the Pope appointed Mgr Mercieca 30 years ago, the wounds of the Sixties, opened by the politico-religious dispute between the Curia and the MLP, had by no means healed completely. Where they had closed, the scars still burned. Archbishop Gonzi had given the Labour government a hand in its stand-off with the British government in the early Seventies. Acrimonious though their relationship had been in the past, former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff always gave credit to Mgr Gonzi for his intervention.

That is not to say that, a mere seven years later, the peace pact of April 1969 had wiped clean the consciousness of Labourites who experienced the Curia's wrath of the Sixties, or of clerics who viewed Labourites as anti-clericals. Mutual trust was not easy to establish. Looking back over my involvement in politics or close thereto in the first 22 of Mgr Mercieca's years at the helm, I believe trust did creep back. In part, it was due to his self-effacing manner.

He was a Gozitan, and the traits that mark his people were abundant in him - a way of thinking below the surface, projecting sideways rather than unerringly straight, a guile, if you like. But there was more. Mgr Mercieca was, perhaps, overly careful, and slow to take decisions.

I did not take kindly to his reluctance to speak out on fiscal immorality, which I urged him to do when I was appointed Finance Minister in 1996. And the innards of the parishes, the positions he filled in strategic areas, all produced rumbles which included considerable clerical and lay discontent from time to time. That tended to limit appreciation of how assiduously he worked to position the Church on a sound if overly uncontroversial basis.

The outgoing Archbishop's views on the role of working women in society were not the most avant-garde one could hope for, even in terms of careful Catholic positioning. To an extent, that was due to the style of expression, though the substance, too, ruffled feathers. There was nothing missing, though, in the way he expressed himself to the political class when he spoke to its members as a whole.

I listened to Archbishop Mercieca do that four times, in the homilies he gave during the Mass of the Holy Spirit on the opening of the Legislatures of 1981, '87, '92 and '96. Those were deeply-thought addresses. They were also proof of insufficient media projection by the Church in Malta. The homilies (which Archbishop Mercieca read out) were circulated to the media. They were not duly followed up by the Shepherd, or members of the clergy, for the strong strands of thought they wove together.

Mgr Mercieca, I feel, was also particularly impressive when he addressed media-persons, without speaking notes, in his annual meeting with them in Floriana, and when he spoke to children. On first listening, his words would seem simplistic. They never were that. Simple, yes, that was how he reached into the heart, and planted the right seeds into the mind.

When i would ask him, in recent years, what he would do when he finally was allowed to retire, Mgr Mercieca would indicate a desire to find a small place, somewhere in Malta, where he could be a simple priest. I understand that, after Fr Cremona's investiture, Mgr Mercieca will take up residence in a house that is not as small as he may have wished. He will be staying in Attard, where Pope John Paul II stayed during his first visit to Malta.

I suppose he will say Mass at the chapel in the St Catherine's rest-home, across the way, at other times at the Tal-Mirakli chapel nearby, or Attard parish church, down the road. He will be an unobtrusive priest, as he was a rather unobtrusive Archbishop. As a person, he will not be much different, really, than he has been over the past 30 years. He may have the occasional bad dream, but far fewer headaches.

Those will be for Mgr Paul Cremona to grapple with. Along their different paths, in their respective sunrise and sunset, they will both be looking to the same Higher Light to guide them. That never changes.

Pinochet darkness

It is not invariably possible to follow the ancient advice to speak only well of the dead. What good can anyone tell of Chile's cruel scourge, General Augusto Pinochet, the man who stained that proud country beyond recognition? During his regime, evil stalked decency, night and day. It struck at his own people. It structured a regime of terror that was not satisfied with the trembling of those who had to live in Chile.

It stretched out towards visitors, too. A Maltese friend of mine, whose work used to take him all over the globe, recalled to me his direct experience of the dark Pinochet days. He was in the airport departure lounge in Santiago, and was paged because there was a phone call for him.

He was taken to a bare room with only a chair, and a telephone sitting on it. The call was from his medical adviser to warn him that a certain Chilean professor, who was very antagonistic towards the company which my friend represented, had been appointed chairman of a forthcoming congress in London.

The Maltese visitor told the adviser that he did have some influence with the organising committee. He would have the chairman, Carrasco, changed. That was all, but from the moment he left that room, he was followed everywhere by two enormous men. And as he walked across the tarmac to his plane, one of them stepped out in front of the visitor, and took his picture.

The Maltese representative found out later that the professor was a luminary of Chilean high society. The Pinochet regime had become so paranoid that a mere phone call raised its hackles.

My friend was lucky. His was a very light taste of the bitterness that pervaded Chile during the Pinochet era. The general lived a long life. He died a month after his 91st birthday. His country, a vastly changed society, did not give him a state funeral. It still went so far as to accord him a military funeral, no matter how much he had dishonoured whatever may be good in the calling of a soldier.

There was no good to inter with the bones of Augusto Pinochet, but he escaped proper justice. On this earth, anyway.