The Church has a difficult road ahead

The celebration of this year’s Solemnity of Christ the King finds the Church in Malta endeavouring to put together a renewed evangelisation and pastoral drive. This was felt necessary following the introduction of divorce and the need this new reality creates, among other things, to revisit the focus and, perhaps, the structure of the marriage preparation course and follow-up initiatives offered through the Cana Movement.

The transformation that has been emerging in the people’s vision of the institution of marriage, along with other serious pastoral challenges it is facing, have become of crucial concern for the Church. Such challenges include the teaching of religion to the young at school and parish level and the need to convincingly counter the credibility and other blows caused by cases of proven or alleged child sexual abuse within the Church, just to mention two.

Meanwhile, as the bishops themselves recognised in their pastoral letter last month, “the powerful and fast changes of society and culture around us” mean that many people in today’s Malta are either non-practising Catholics or Christians belonging to other denominations or profess a different religion or even no religion at all.

The primary concern of the religious leaders remains, of course, what to say and propose to those whom the bishops invited, in their pastoral letter, to take the important decision of living as Christians in all circumstances. This can be done if one’s faith in Christ and one’s commitment for Him and the Church are based on “the promise of Christ to remain with the Church till the end of time”.

Nonetheless, the religious leaders cannot and must not stop there. It is all very clear that, today more than ever before, while responding properly and adequately to the spiritual and pastoral needs of believers who want to remain in full union with the Church, they also have to communicate intelligently with those who are at a distance and to reach out to them as required.

In modern international culture, the sense of God appears passing through an ever increasing eclipse while practical materialism continues to raise its head, breeding individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism. Religious leaders, therefore, have the difficult task of driving home the fundamental message that the question of God must not be absent from the other great questions of our time.

Pope Benedict XVI stressed a very important and relevant point in a message to believers and non-believers gathered on March 25, 2011 in Paris, in what has been termed as the 'Courtyard of the Gentiles'. At this activity, held with the aim of giving a fresh impetus to respectful and friendly encounters between people of differing convictions, the Holy Father noted that non-believers challenge believers to live in a way consistent with the faith they profess and by their rejection of any distortion of religion that would make it unworthy of man.

Such a message calls to attention, first and foremost, priests. They are expected, by Church authorities and people alike, to generously and disinterestedly dedicate themselves not to their own project but to that of God, that is, to truly accept that God may dispose of them according to His will, even though this may not correspond to their own desire for self-fulfilment.

The Archbishop may decide to take the opportunity of his traditional message on the liturgical feast of Christ the King tomorrow to expound on the direction the Church in Malta intends to take on such key issues.