The spirit of festa, and its rightful owners

So there you have it. The Curia has decided to ignore all the petitions and popular feeling and to go ahead and cancel this year’s feast at Żejtun. Nothing to do with flying bottles or displays of paganism this time round; rather, the given reason was ‘respect’ for the memory of the parish priest Fr Eric Overend.

There are no fixed rules on how long and in what ways one should mourn

A rather distorted memory one might argue. If the swell of sadness and sympathy shown by Żwieten at his funeral are anything to go by, Fr Overend was a man who lived for and loved the people he worked with. I doubt he would have wanted them to celebrate his passing into eternal bliss by being collectively deprived of a few days of mundane fun.

That’s just a guess, but there are some more pressing arguments to be made. The first is that to persevere in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness. That the Curia got the timing and substance of mourning wrong, in other words.

Fr Overend died on April 28. The feast of St Catherine is celebrated in mid-June. Six-odd weeks of mourning are quite enough – not because I say so, but because that’s the popular feeling.

Mourning is one of the trickier areas of social convention, truth be told. There are no fixed rules on how long and in what ways one should mourn. Let’s just say that 4,000+ signatures, a stack of press releases, and a village pulse are pretty good indications.

How about substance? I swear there are no tattoos of St Catherine across my chest. The one Katerina in the family is to Żejtun what I am to the Solomon Islands. Still, I find it insensitive if not downright cruel to deprive locals of their festa.

Festa is not just another event in the calendar, it’s the day around which much else revolves. Just in case this sounds like a romanticised throwback to a time when people generally had very little and were stuck in their patch, it isn’t.

Quite the contrary, in fact; rising standards of living have seen more and more time and money pumped into festi. Nor has mobility meant detachment. Someone from Żejtun was telling me the other day about the scores of Żwieten living in Australia and Canada who make the trip every year, without fail. For many, it’s now too late to cancel their bookings.

Festa is so tightly woven into the local fabric that it is hard to know where to begin. It has to do with people’s bodies and how they shape them; we say qisu tal-festa to describe someone in their Sunday best.

It lends a rhythmic regularity to time, to the extent that people think in terms of before/after the festa. At say, a village ironmonger, one might hear things like “I’ll be needing lots of paint for my walls, la tgħaddi l-festa (when the feast is over)”.

Episodically, it changes the nature of village space. Festa is the age of the glazed antiporta, a few days during which it becomes possible to look into a hundred interiors, all fanatically cleaned and dusted for the occasion. One learns that behind the double doors and louvers lurks a gigantic latter-day rococo revival that makes Belter look minimalist.

Perhaps most importantly, festa is the repository of a huge range of emotions. It makes locals and outsiders experience the village in special ways. There is – and I’m not joking about this – something deeply spiritual about the colours, the smells, the sounds, the joie de vivre.

It is jaw dropping to think that all of that seems to mean zilch to the Church – or, to be more specific and fairer, to a handful of rank-pulling Curia-bound churchmen. I know there are very many priests who understand what festa is really about and who like nothing better than to be in the thick of it.

One in particular comes to mind. I’m embarrassed to say his name escapes me, but I know he’s from Mosta. He likes to talk about his own mother, an old woman who lives alone in a small house overlooking what’s left of the valley.

Once a year on August 15 she puts on her best clothes and makes her way to the square to shed a few tears at the sight of Santa Marija being carried out of and back into the rotunda. She then walks back home, her emotions at rest and her year complete.

There’s another thing. The decision on Żejtun assumes that festa is owned (and controlled) by the Curia, that it is the prerogative of the Curia to hold or cancel a festa as it deems fit.

I’m not so sure that’s a valid or legitimate assumption. It is on the one hand true that festa is rooted in Catholic rituals, meanings, and symbols. Catholicism being what it is, namely a centralised religion with formal structures of authority, one might therefore expect festa to be accountable to that core of authority.

By way of comparison, a Hindu mind would boggle at the thought of a cancelled feast. That’s because things like a Church, a Pope, bishops, or indeed parish priests are inconceivable in that context. If and when Hindus decide to throw a party, they will.

The good people of Żejtun are not Hindus but that doesn’t mean they don’t question the legitimacy of a unilateral Curia decision about their festa.

It seems to me that all the current talk of festa interna (= spiritual, = Christian) and festa esterna (= material, = pagan), of ‘paganism’ on the streets, of the need to place the Church at the centre of things, is actually a power struggle.

One might even argue that the (indefinitely shelved, apparently) Church document on the ‘restoration’ of feasts was one of many instalments in that direction. Little wonder the dilettanti were up in arms.

For many, the exponential growth of festi is a poke in the eye of secularisation arguments. A closer look at the direction of growth and at the power struggle over that direction, however, reveals precisely the opposite. Paradoxically, it seems that the decision as to how and for how long to mourn Fr Overend is a litmus of a secularising Żejtun.

mafalzon@hotmail.com