Unfeasting our festas?

The Archbishop has presented a document on the celebration of feasts in Malta. In it he asks everybody to convey to him and his collaborators their reflections upon it. Do you intend to do so?

Let me begin with an anecdote. Last year when I was in the sacristy at the conclusion of the feast of St Paul in Valletta, I was approached by an English lady who told me: " I lived most of my life completely without religion. Last year I was in Malta as a tourist in February and I called in out of curiosity at this church where the festa was being celebrated.

"You happened at the time to be preaching in English and I was intrigued enough by your homily to stay on for the procession. I was almost incredulous at the enthusiasm of so many young men and women for St Paul. I started conversing with some of them and was surprised at their erudition". (Actually I could identify the person she had been talking to as Robert Cassar, an art historian, who continues the tradition began by Maestro Paul Asciak of creative people on the St Paul's Festa Committee).

"When I went back to England I began to read St Paul and then asked for instruction in the Catholic faith. I was baptised and came back to Malta this year for the feast."

I could tell you several other anecdotes of happy spiritual experiences arising out of the feast.

So I do not share the rather negative tone with which the document is written, essentially proposing a plethora of minute regulations of which the Rabbis satirised by Christ would have been proud. In fact, the detailed prescriptions can hardly allow the spontaneity that is an essential characteristic of festivity for it to survive.

I do not like the very title of the report which speaks of 'restoration'. It suggests going backwards in a conservative spirit, rather than stimulating a creative spurt towards the future.

The adopted approach reminds me of the puritanical Kant who wanted to keep religion strictly within the bounds of reason and who was reputedly so regular in his habits that people are said to have set their watches by observing them. Yet even Kant records that on one occasion he got drunk when he substituted wine for beer, and then became a wine enthusiast thereafter.

Festivity of its very nature implies transgression of the normal, arising above everyday average mediocrity. Festivity is characteristic of Christianity not only because it expresses joy at being part of God's funny creation and at the victory of love over death in Christ's resurrection, but above all because it expresses belief in the ability of human beings to transcend the limitations of their nature through the gift of Grace.

There must be in the authentic celebration of a feast a touch of the ecstasy into which mystics go, a spark of the spirit that drives saints like Francis of Assisi or Francis of Salles to behave like "fools for Christ's sake", to use the phrase of St Paul that also happens to fit St Gorg Preca so well.

What do you actually think of the many concrete measures that are proposed in the document?

Most of them seem to me to be directed against abuses but with a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water. I fear that the attempt to implement them globally instead of providing ad hoc therapies for each individual case will be counterproductive, from the point of view of helping the recovery of the sense of the sacred in our disenchanted world.

For instance, there is the suggestion that the so-called morning band march be removed from the days of celebration of the feast of the patron saint, and organised by the local council in some other period.

My guess is that this would effectively kill the march since the collective identity of the people of the locality celebrated in the march is too inextricably linked up to the patron saint. It would at the same time break what in some cases might be a last surviving vital link of some people with religion and the Church. The envisaged measure would be a strangely paradoxical act of secularisation in the sense in which it has been deplored by traditionalists effected by the ecclesiastical authorities themselves.

The only effective way of preventing abuse in the manner exemplified in the Gospel and by Archbishop Paul Cremona himself in his typical handling of pastoral problems is that of good humoured persuasion. The police can be safely trusted to carry out their business of civil protection without enlisting parish priests and other fellow clergymen in their business.

What do you consider could positively help towards a more intelligent celebration of our feasts and more pleasing to God?

There are remarks in the document about more creative artistic approaches in the Liturgy. Festa organisers might have got a few useful tips even from observing the production of let us say two events that I attended at the University this week; the first was a very unusual form of performance called 'All in the Timing' presented by a newly set up student theatre group called Whats TheirNames directed by Philip Leone Ganado.

The second was a performance by percussionist Massimo Demajo and his wife Bianca Maria in the course of the Italian Language week. Both of them showed how creative stimulation could evoke public participation in the sort of identity-search that a Maltese festa essentially is.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.