Sant and Friggieri's priests

Some time ago, in the context of the Year of the Priest and the Priesthood, you had promised to discuss the priest who is a character in Alfred Sant's latest novel, The Field of (Judas) the Iscariot, once you had finished reading the 400-page book. Have you done so?

Superficially, the novel reads like an Anton Grasso horror story, with detailed narrations of giant rats making a meal of human beings. Is it also a sort of political parable? The focus of interest is the figure of the Traitor although the prototype is not actually the biblical Judas, who only appears marginally. If the novel is indeed read allegorically, then betrayal in a religious dimension would be a secondary aspect of the more fundamental betrayal at a political level that is the main theme, the significance of which is explored in essence and consequence throughout the book.

Here I will consider none of the horrific aspects of the story but just the vignette of the priest, Fr Timmy. He is the former chairman of the Commission for Faith and Communications, who, as has happened more than once with priests who occupied more or less that position in the local Church, was deposed for complex and never fully clarified reasons.

He was then placed in spiritual charge of a once important village, but which now had only a handful of living parishioners. However, Fr Timmy, when approached by a gentleman and lady who are the presenter and his assistant of a television programme that is bound to strike local readers as resembling Xarabank, claims that he always has a numerous congregation. Although invisible, the souls of the many faithful departed crowd are in the Church when he celebrates Mass in Latin in the rite with which they were familiar.

Evidently, this phenomenon contributes to the general ghoulish atmosphere at the literal level of reading. In the parabolic interpretation the remarks that have been more than once addressed to Church authorities - to the effect that they ignore that Sunday Mass has fallen to just above 50 per cent and still talk as if Malta were still 99 per cent practising Catholic - would be relevant. The representative of the Church in the novel is seen not only as somebody living in the past and 'in denial' of present day realities but also as a nervous wreck with a very equivocal relationship with the media.

Even outside any allegorical interpretation, it is worth enquiring whether Fr Timmy is perceived by most Maltese to be the image either of some individual not run-of-the-mill priest or rather as an abstract emblem of the priesthood in the eyes of the post-modernist (or should I say, post-Mintoff) generation.

In previous novels, other priest characters have appeared, some of whom seem to be cameo-portraits of an identifiable, eccentric priest while others seem to be stereotypical images. What do you say about them?

Presumably, you are referring to Silg fuq Kemmuna, which claims to be a collective portrait of Maltese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It aims in particular to bring out the psychological transformation of a generation who had not so much become atheist or agnostic as to have ceased to worry about such matters as the existence of God and religion.

This nonchalance is naturally accompanied by a crisis of moral values. Some of the young protagonists of the novel just abandoned all ethical preoccupations. Some others still embrace some such principle as love simply because it seems to make for a better world. What all seem to have abandoned is the Church's view of sexual relations and marriage.

Two priests figure again somewhat peripherally in this novel. It would be self-flattering on my part if I recognised the deliberately caricatural image of Fr Gerolamo Micallef as inspired by me, and at any rate he only makes a brief appearance.

Canon Abela is depicted at slightly greater length, especially in the report of a talk that he is invited to give to a collection of teenagers at a school, when he dismally flops in his attempt to answer a question about divorce. He is counterpoised to the over-cerebral Fr Gerolamo as a personally attractive, conservative rogue.

In their different ways, both priests are on different wavelengths vis-à-vis the generation who were reaching adulthood some 30 years ago at the time when Dom Mintoff succeeded George Borg Olivier as leader of the country.

In retrospect, I am not altogether sure that Sant managed to capture the feel towards the clergy among youngsters in Malta in the immediate post Vatican Council years. However, it may serve effectively at present to warn against the neo-conservative tendencies that have come to the fore since then.

Do you think that other writers who are more sympathetic to the Church have given more provocative portraits of priests?

Undoubtedly, Oliver Friggieri has depicted priest characters in ways that can serve as infrastructure for meditation in the Year of the Priesthood.

The feature to which I think primary attention needs to be given in order to fulfil its deepest aim is precisely to the images of the priest that are impressed on the minds of ordinary men and women.

The image Friggieri propagates is that of the priest as wounded healer, rather than of the priest as servant-leader or as political-mystic or the other images that have become popular since the Council.

Of course, Friggieri does not present priests either as super human saints or as pompous cretins. His most distinctive contribution is that the Church in which the priest operates as wounded healer is not a community of the compassionate, usually presented as the corollary to this particular sacerdotal mode of operation. Fidelity is lacking even to the basic human solidarity that even Sant's 'indifferent' souls retain.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.