On September 16, 1864, Blessed Pope Pius IX established Gozo and Comino as an autonomous diocese following repeated petitions by Gozitan priests and people, who had striven for 66 years to achieve this goal.

On October 30, 1798, Saverio Cassar, archpriest of the Gozo Matrice in Victoria and successful leader of the Gozitan blockade against the French, formulated the first petition for the establishment of a bishopric on the island. On February 15, 1864, the last in a long list of petitions was addressed to Pope Pius IX by Michele-Francesco Buttigieg, a subsequent archpriest of the matrice. The Colonial Office in London also played its part to hasten the acceptance of the Gozitans’ request. The full story is told in the book Religion and Politics in a Crown Colony by Gozitan historian Joseph Bezzina.

The papal bull from Pope Pius IX, the document founding the diocese, opens with the words “Singulari Amore”. The bull erected Gozo and Comino into a separate diocese directly subject to the Holy See, and established the matrice of Santa Marija as the cathedral of the new diocese. On September 22, 1864, Buttigieg was elected the first bishop of Gozo.

The bull is one of the treasured documents at the Gozo Cathedral archives. It will take place of honour at the cathedral presbytery when Mario Grech, the eighth Bishop of Gozo, concelebrates a thanksgiving Mass with the priests of Gozo on Tuesday at 7pm. All priests are invited to participate and there will be no other Masses in Gozo that evening. The Mass will be transmitted live on TVM2.

In a recent homily at the cathedral, Grech said that he preferred to speak of the Gozo diocese as 150 years young. He added that the participation of the faithful in church liturgy and their endorsement of Christian values in everyday life would help the diocese to continue to achieve the main purpose of its existence: the evangelisation of people both on this island and beyond its shores.