Easter week brings with it a whole reawakening of Lenten traditions for the Maltese, or rather, for the Mediterranean. How do you remember the Easter of your childhood? Would you have retained any custom which has disappeared from today's nature of celebrations?

The liturgical reform in the wake of the Vatican council, which I greeted with as much enthusiasm as anybody, divested the Holy Week celebrations of certain Baroque elements that I still think of as beautiful. I agree with Cardinal Carlo Martini that beauty is the only open road to God left to most of postmodern humankind.

An element in the Easter liturgy which I most regret the disappearance of is the part related to baptismal renewal. The text used to have very explicit sexual symbolism which made it clear that baptism was a sort of rebirth.

As the priest thrust the Candle into the baptismal font, his words made it unmistakable that the Candle, described as the product of fertile bees, was a phallic symbol and it was said in as many words to be penetrating the womb of the font containing the water. All this language was removed, apparently, by some Puritanical censors who controlled some phases of the Liturgical Reform.

Maundy Thursday coincided with the first day of spring - both events call for a reflection upon the idea of revival. What about Holy Week preceding Easter night?

Many other so-called Baroque devices were removed. I regret most of all the Tenebrae celebrations. As an altar boy I loved the wooden clappers which we used instead of bells. These clappers created a bond of cultural unity with the monasteries of the Eastern Church where they are the regular means of summoning the assembly of worshippers and perhaps the greatest English composer of our times, John Tavener, has used these wooden clappers magnificently in many of his masterpieces of contemporary sacred music. At the Wignacourt Museum in Rabat, there still is to be seen, although unfortunately not to be heard, a huge wooden clapper that was used in Holy Week instead of the church bells from the steeple.

There are the triangular candle holders that were used, with a candle being put out with each sound at Vespers of Holy Week. I do not understand why this very eloquent light symbolism was suppressed. Last Tuesday, however, I was at Cospicua parish church for the brilliant sacred music concert by the Sheffield Wind Orchestra and the Chorus Urbanus and noted that the whole church was still draped in black.

I do not share at all Le Fevre's hostility to the restoration of a certain primitive purity to liturgical celebration but I regard it as a form of iconoclastic barbarism to reject such artistic inventions of late medieval to baroque times as the Dies Irae. The language of the liturgy is the language of the theatre, although it has to be understood that the language of the theatre is not just spectacle for a passive audience, but calls for its active participation.

During this Holy Week there was the death of Chiara Lubic, who was the founder of the Focolare Movement and was reputed to be a saint. She was known to you personally.

Ms Lubic impressed me deeply on the one occasion I had a deep conversation with her, when she was given an honorary degree by the University of Malta. She insisted that all her life work had emerged from her fascination with Christ's words on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" She did not explain these words like my scripture professor, who said that they were just the first line of a psalm, the whole of which was recited by Christ and which went on to express other trust in God. She maintained that Jesus had undergone the terrible suffering that loss of faith often meant to atheists.

The Jesus who identified himself with all those who suffered had wanted to share even the specific pain of unbelief. From this understanding, she had got the idea of extending Ecumenism and the desire for communion beyond the circle of Christians or even of believers in God of whatever religion, to that of agnostics and atheists.

For her, love was not at all a matter of soft emotional warmth as it sometimes risks appearing to be from the songs popularised by some of her followers. Her niceness, but not her anguish, had washed into many of her followers' skins. Love for her was the very life of the Holy Trinity.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Nicole Bugeja