The Catholic Church of Malta presents...

For decades, despite the towering figure of Pope John Paul II, the Roman Catholic Church seems to have been lost for answers as its ranks continued to dwindle, especially in the West.

The Jesuits' - and Opus Dei's - efforts to breed leaders from among the elite and the intellectually endowed, reap low dividends while Catholic Action holds nothing like the sway over ordinary young people it did in past years. As a result, the wheels seem to be coming off the Catholic Church's celebrity hub.

For Catholics in Malta, times have been no less depressing. As the onslaught on basic Catholic beliefs made inroads unto the breach, prelates stood either Sphinx-like passive or buried their mitred heads deeper in the ecclesiastical sand.

As the burdens of a fast changing world grow heavier, more and more people are losing interest in an institution no longer able to punch at par with, much less above, its weight. If ever a modern country needed the comfort of the Catholic Church's expert understanding of the human condition, Malta was it.

There always was a price to pay for this low level of spiritual rearmament.

Should we care?

Those concerned with this country's moral compass and its future certainly should.

Archbishop Paul Cremona and Bishop Mario Grech in Gozo face few options if they wish to turn back the tide - beyond, of course, carrying out a root-and-branch overhaul of what appears to be a ceremonial, hollow, aging Church. God only knows where to start. The glowworm transience of TV chat show appearances and newspaper interviews will hardly do the trick.

Being Catholic is a choice - one of many we face in maintaining our lives in proper balance. It takes leaders with flames of will and courage leaping into the air to compete for our hearts and minds when that balance is lost.

Not that Archbishop Cremona and Bishop Grech lack prospects: both are relatively young, both appear endowed with the common touch and are deft, it seems, at taking the battle to the enemy, so to speak - Archbishop Cremona with his disarming smile and Thomistic logic and Bishop Grech with his seductive common folk allure. It should not be difficult for both to get onto the pages of those who continue to complain and condemn for being left defenceless against people with power and fierce market forces.

The challenge ahead is not so much to revive values by which our parents lived: that would be almost futile in today's world. What should work better would be to provide us with a liturgy of convergence - one that helps us uphold fundamental Catholic tenets in a modern world.

None of my Catholic friends in Britain and elsewhere complain of being unable to live good Catholic lives as the world continues changing. Only in Malta are people almost encouraged to believe they can have it all - cars, money, divorce, travel, houses, loose easy lives - without paying a price.

One strategy that will create a totally new landscape would be to negotiate a clearer understanding of how Church-State relations must work in the future. We are all in the end defined by the instructions we get from Church and State. Put simply, the time has come for the Church to get back into the equation of how the national agenda is laid down. It's silly to go on believing politicians, here and elsewhere, know best.

The delineation between Church and state was originally etched into public policy by Dom Mintoff.

The truth is that that divide has failed the country to a woeful degree. Church silence in the face of countless transgressions, misgivings, misguided policies, and, often, crass inefficiencies - to which the state either turns a blind eye or gives nods - has not made this a better country or us a better nation. Politics, plagued as these remains by chicanery, covert deceit, overt relativism and clueless protagonists, still land the country into one almighty mess after the other.

Many are no longer convinced the island's political class - or at least an administration that has been in place for 20 years now (the one before it, which lasted 16 years, never lost a single opportunity to clumsily badger to death every single traditional value that came in the way of a good Socialist myth) - has the foggiest idea how to end any of the festering social ills that dog this country, including rapidly collapsing moral standards that end up creating huge social imbalances.

Enough signs confirm this - not least the continuous rise of an angered civil society and protesting non-government organisations. They can't all be Labour voters.

We shall all be fools to image there can be no halting to the alarming increase in marriage breakdowns; that the battle against drug and alcohol abuse is all but lost; that the yawning divide between those that have much too much and those that have far too little is unstoppable; that diminishing incomes and abusive taxation are here to stay; that unbridled property market forces are a natural outcome of economics.

The belief that corruption still runs high is more, not less, credible; patronage and privilege, in a country wishing to be modern and a democracy, are a matter of lingering shameful chronicle. It is not only politicians who stubbornly refuse to take a firm axe to these problems for fear of becoming unpopular. There's a whole list of institutions that are equally guilty.

Will Archbishop Cremona and Bishop Grech make a difference?

In the end, we shall know their mettle by the power of their convictions, their skills and by their resolve to stand up and speak out without fear of making enemies.

We shall know them by their commitment to refurbish the Church internally and its reputation outside. There is an almost universal belief - mistaken, one hopes - that the Church is run by a handful of acolytes swarming around the bishops, people too weak even to rein in rogue priests: many believe that, in the main, the Church is not self-critical enough, that it favours one political party over the other, that it feels more at home with conservatives than with liberals, more at ease with Europhiles than with Eurosceptics, more keen to ignore than solve problems - worse still, that it lives in the far distant horizon, out of touch with people's everyday problems.

For the moment, while the celebrations continue, it all looks a bit like standing in front of a fairground poster inviting us to roll up and watch the Catholic Church of Malta present its latest act.

This may be the dawn of a new beginning. But if it fails, people will go on turning their backs on a Catholic Church too old to help resolve the big issues that distort our lives - or provide effective moral leadership.

Wouldn't that be a great sin?