Archbishop Emeritus Paul Cremona spoke briefly during a Christ the King Mass in Valletta, but he was succinct: “The Church needs creative people who will lead the country through evangelisation.”

His words echoed those of Pope Francis who, in his apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, urged pastors and the faithful to be bold and creative when rethinking the goals, structures, style and methods of evangelisation in their communities.

Since its inception, the Church’s primary mission has always been evangelisation, or, as Pope Paul VI aptly put it: “She exists in order to evangelise.” It is with evangelisation in mind that Mgr Cremona called for a creative Church.

There is no denying the social upheaval Malta has gone through over the last decades, during which time Church attendance has been dwindling. The working paper prepared for the bishops convening in Rome recently to discuss the family and evangelisation lists a number of challenges that include secularisation, cohabitation, broken families, teenage pregnancies, violence and abuse and same gender families. Clearly, Malta is not different from any other country in these areas.

A creative change of strategy is called for in order for the Church to reach out to these people and attract back its dwindling flock. Ecclesial renewal cannot be deferred, the Pope has warned. The Church needs to transform its customs, its way of doing things, its language and structures in order to evangelise today’s world, rather than for her self-preservation.

Change, however, cannot come in a vacuum. In his 1975 apostolic exhortation on very much the same theme, Paul VI said the first means of evangelisation is the witness of an authentically Christian life. Modern man, he said, listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers: “It is primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church evangelises the world.”

The conduct of its priests, above all else, is pivotal to the Church’s success in a new and creative evangelising effort. The sex scandals, be they real or alleged, undermine the Church’s credibility in the community it is seeking to evangelise. Here in Malta, as abroad, the scandals have done the Church great harm. Compounding that harm is the revelation that the recent allegations of sexual abuse by a priest had been under investigation by the Church’s response team for over eight years.

Apostolic Administrator Charles Scicluna is promising to bring an end to this inertia and said last weekend that lengthy investigations into allegations of clerical sex abuse are now a thing of the past. This is most welcome news. The Church is replacing its response team with a Safeguarding Commission that would appoint individual investigators to look into every report received. Mgr Scicluna has expressed hope that every investigation would be concluded within a week.

Also welcome is the fact that one of the reform objectives is to strengthen the ties between Church and State authorities to facilitate speedy investigations. The head of the new commission will be regularly meeting with police and social authorities.

Mgr Scicluna’s appeal to the faithful to come forward and report any abuse shows a shift towards more openness in the Church. The handling of past cases of clerical sexual abuse has often raised suspicions that the Church may have been more interested in avoiding a public scandal than anything else. Mgr Scicluna appears to have put paid to that.

In putting its house in order in this most sensitive of areas, the Church in Malta can look confidently ahead towards the kind of creative evangelisation that the Archbishop Emeritus has called for.

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