Dun Gorg Preca was born ten years after the suspension of the First Vatican Council and died three months before the opening of Vatican Council II.

To all intents and purposes he may be regarded to be a pre-conciliar priest. He never said Mass or the Divine Office in a vernacular language; he celebrated his Mass with his back to the people; he probably never thought that the Canon of the Mass could ever be changed and... he never wore a clergyman suit. He was not even the type of priest who would push for or even dream of such changes. The impression he gave was that of a timid, average and, to the superficial observer, quite innocuous priest.

March 7 this year marks the first centenary of the embarking on an adventure whose magnitude Dun Gorg probably did not foresee. In the words of Eugenio Borg, the first Superior General of Fr Preca's association, "on the following Thursday, March 7, 1907, we (Fr Preca and the group) went into our place for the first time. There we held our first lesson. From that very first time, people got to know that it was there they would find us." Here Gegè (as Mr Borg was known) refers to the opening of the first MUSEUM centre.

The association was a complete novelty. The idea, although seemingly harmless, was original and rather daring. What it boiled down to was that the young men that Dun Gorg had gathered around him were to be asked to go and teach and preach. The idea was no less than revolutionary. Only priests taught in church or, at any rate, matters religious. Lay people had only to listen, pay and pray!

And here was this young priest entrusting the teaching of catechism to laymen, dockyard workers, some of whom were very scantily educated. A few years later Dun Gorg entrusted the teaching of the Gospel to women "preachers". Giannina Cutajar of Paola, who later became the first Superior General of the female section of the Society, was only 16 when she started giving public talks on religious subjects.

Fr Preca was, of course, a churchman but he was never churchy. It may be said of him that although he was a man of prayer and would spend long periods of time in prayer, he would never loiter in the sacristy and advised his followers not to follow the example of those who would frequent the sacristy, hear and spread the latest news and misuse a place which of its very name is meant to be sacred.

Dun Gorg had his school education at the Lyceum, a state-run secondary school, and so was not necessarily familiar with priests and religious men and women. He insisted with the MUSEUM members that priests should be kept in high esteem and reverence but the Society was to be run strictly by lay people. The priest assists but does not direct the Society.

Dun Gorg's men and women were to be fully-fledged Christians. This acknowledgement of the full status that lay people have in the Church had to wait until Vatican II emerged to the surface of life in the Church. It should not surprise anybody that the first years of the Society of Christian Doctrine were spent in troubled waters and for a short time the MUSEUM was banned. Its founder complied with his superiors' order. The Society was suppressed for a short while. It was some more enlightened parish priests who persuaded the bishop of Malta to allow the MUSEUM centres to reopen.

In 1915 the new bishop was a Benedictine monk coming from a Scottish abbey. He is said to have asserted that the Society would never be officially approved in his time. In 1932 it was the same Archbishop Caruana who, surprised by the number of priestly and religious vocations flourishing in an association run by lay people, officially approved the Society of Christian Doctrine, known as MUSEUM.

Dun Gorg never left Malta's shores but would have loved to see the Pope in Rome. His Society is characterised by absolute attachment to the Holy See. The original name given to its members was papidi, the Pope's followers, a name which understandably was soon abandoned.

The irony of history smiled on Dun Gorg, who never made it to meet the Holy Father, but was beatified on May 9, 2001, by Pope John Paul II who personally worshipped Dun Gorg's remains in the MUSEUM headquarters' chapel at Blata l-Bajda.

The timid, apparently innocuous priest who very unobtrusively gave rise to a lay organisation 100 years ago, prepared the ground for the challenges the Church is facing not only in these Islands but all over, and Preca's Society is spreading to faraway countries as Dun Gorg had dreamt "to the whole world".

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