Photo: Jason Borg

I refer to the news in Times of Malta of September 25 concerning the results of a questionnaire on festas in Malta. According to Andrew Azzopardi, there is indication from the results of the questionnaire that unless young people are encouraged to get more involved, festas would in time die.

These results come as a surprise since the general impression is that festas are becoming more popular, but more noisy, materialistic and costly. The Church itself is extremely worried about this trend and has been doing its best in the last few years to regain control of the situation. This is proving difficult, almost impossible, to achieve.

We all remember how some years ago Mgr Anton Gouder, the Curia’s spokesman on the subject, was almost hounded out of the debate in the show Xarabank by the audience present in the hall when he tried bravely to present the case for a more decent organisation of festas with the focus being on the spiritual content of the event.

The latest news from the courts, unfortunately, confirm my negative impressions. It was reported that a young man is alleged to have seriously injured his partner’s baby by throwing her violently into the cot, because the baby’s crying was too much for him to bear. It then results that he and his partner had spent the whole day at the Żabbar festa and both were drunk and under the influence of drugs .

If this is the kind of festa that we intend to continue to celebrate in the future, then it is high time that the outside celebrations be brought to an end and the feast be wholly restricted to a spiritual experience inside the church and, maybe, a limited outside celebration with bands and so on, in the parvis and its neighbourhood.